Thanks alot for this very detailed response. That's interesting about Google's war with aggregators but makes total sense now that you say it.
I do plan on integrating opentable, that'll be the next feature I add, if I stick with it. It's pretty much a labour of love at this stage, HN has convinced me I'm fighting a VERY uphill battle.
Restaurant management, along with freemium services on the site, was where I was hoping to make money eventually. Sadly, as you and others have pointed out, restaurants live on the breadline, so I think I picked a bad market!
In terms of SEO, think I posted the easy wins I did on another comment. "newtown" was just an example of a made up place for illustration purposes in the original post. That's cool that I'm in position 16 for Rathmines, I was down in the 50s last time I checked (Rathmines is a cool area with plenty of restaurants).
For something like "newtown restaurants" I hwas hoping the search results page for that would rank, something like menucosm.com /restaurants/newtown-123 . On that page I have good canonical URL, pagination, rich text, SEO text, links to similar pages, all the standard stuff.
The reason I said the Johnny's Diner page doesn't show the value is because t;s the area search that's most useful. I have added links to the area search from the Johnny's Diner page, and that might be why I'm slowly seeing this upturn in traffic from 350 to 500 (the dates tie in with when I released the code)
Hey, thanks for getting back to me and taking a look.
Newtown and Johnny's Diner were just sample names I came up with. If you go to the homepage, you'll see links to area searches and the 3 most recent;y added restaurants. I didn't want to put anything specific, I guess I probably should have!
Initially I was targeting users, eyeballs on the site. If I could get a few 1000 a month, my plan then was to approach investors, saying "I've got this many people using the site, this is how I plan to make money". So, I have 0 revenue and only 500 monthly visitors, they're the only figures I have right now!
Yeah, so freemium services to the restaurants was one of my ideas of making money. However, as you've pointed out, restaurants "just don't like to spend money where it isn't absolutely necessary", which is an interesting and valid point.
Yeah, it was bad restaurant websites, with PDF menus, that inspired me to build the site.
I still feel the same inspiration with restaurant sites, so many bad ones out there. Part of the problem is even if the restaurant doesn't have a website there are usually menu sites that at least show what they offer in the Google SERP. So they probably feel like they don't need to pay for one. Even though they could control their message, photos, update their menus, etc.
If you enjoy working on the project keep it going.
I feel like the one area restaurants might pay for or give you a revenue share is online ordering. Maybe you could become the go to online ordering app for restaurants in your area. Not trivial to build though but an area they might be willing to pay you for.
regarding revenue, if your site takes off then you may be able to sell space for restaurants to include additional information and photos on their page (such as interior, staff, or food). if you go this route then you'll want to exercise some quality control so that the photos are both accurate and appealing
Thanks for this. The main use case is "Hungry people looking for a place to eat" when they know where they want to go, or near their current location if on mobile. I guess the market's too saturated for something so generic now. As you say, I should really "pick a specific problem", specific being the key word.
Or you can tackle the problem better. One of the world's biggest problems is deciding what to have for dinner, especially for groups that eat different things.
One thing I wanted to try is Akinator for restaurants.
Do you want pasta? No.
Pizza? No.
Something classy? No.
Spicy? No.
Fast food? Maybe.
Burgers? No.
Tacos? Okay.
OMG, this is an amazing idea! Thank you so much. Something like this would get me the inbound links I need. It might involve some sort of a pivot, but definitely worth investigating.
I do have one unique feature in that the reviews are linked to proper professional critic's reviews in the natioanl newspapers, rather than anonymous commenters.
To be fair also, I have put in a signficiant amount of work, adding all that content for 500+ restaurants, their menus, reviews.
I also do have a monetization strategy but was trying to get eyeballs on the site first.
I wish you the best, the ultimate is that you succeed as that is what we all want to do. If there is anything I can do to help you I am happy to do so. Good luck!
Yeah it was when I noticed that TripAdvisor listings for a given restaurant were featuring higher than the restaurant's ACTUAL webpage, that I thought I might be too late.
However, individual restaurant listings aren't my priority for traffic, it's the area listings. However, I now feel aiming for terms like "blackrock restaurants" was alsways going to be tough, due to it being quite generic
TBH, I originally thought SEO would be enough to get some eyeballs, but as you point out, that's totally not the case! I tried contacting a few local food blogs, but none of them ever got back to me. Other than that, I've just told literally everyone I know and tried using Twitter, by tweeting restaurants as I add them, in the hope they would retweet to their followers. I've thought of putting it on Reddit/r/Dublin, as a sponsored ad. I never looked into backlink building, good suggestion. In short though, I guess I do need to try harder :-) Thanks.
I was curious to see if anyone thought the upswing could be promising!
Thanks for the reply. Personally I think the site looks pretty good, though I'm probably the furthest thing in the world from a web designer or anyone with any aesthetic tastes.
That said, I think the biggest issue right now may be the question of why this site is useful, given that so many other companies are doing the same thing. At a glance, it seems like it's competing with the likes of Yelp, TripAdvisor and Google Maps, all of which have significantly more data, large communities behind them and more features overall.
Unfortunately, the features it does lack here are generally some of the ones that these sites got popular for in the first place. Such as being able to create an account to upload pictures, rate restaurants and leave reviews, or (for a restaurant owner) to manage the listing and add extra information/respond to feedback.
By not having these, there's not really much of a reason to come back to the service time after time. It lacks the stickiness required for any real user retention.
I know for sure that I'd be unlikely to return after visiting, simply because the other options would have more to draw me in.
So yeah, focus on those features, get some more backlinks and try out a few paid ads and see what happens from there.
P.S. Don't worry, you're not the only person to struggle with this sort of site. It's a tough market to succeed in, and a company I previously worked for tried to do the same thing with much the same results.
In terms of functionality, yes, there's LOTS more I could build for sure, both from the regular user and the restaurant owner sides. I was trying to keep it quite minimal, but now that you point it out, it's obvious the site needs to be more engaging.
