Texas Roadhouse has seen traffic to its website spike after working to optimize its restaurants’ listings on online search engines, said Tyler Durham, the brand’s online-marketing resources coordinator.
The casual-dining chain, which has 345 units in 46 states, does not advertise nationally, making local-store marketing a crucial means of attracting nearby customers, Durham said Wednesday. Because much of that advertising depends on local online searches, Texas Roadhouse sought to make its business listings stand out, he said.
“We struggled from a search-engine-optimization [SEO] standpoint, so last year we started looking at focusing on our listings and putting resources into it,” Durham said. “It’s not that we had been ignoring it, we just hadn’t taken steps necessary to make sure listings were consistent.”
Texas Roadhouse worked with a vendor that specializes in optimizing listings with search engines like Google and Yahoo, social networks like Facebook, and local directories like the Yellow Pages’ YP.com.
As a result, Durham said Texas Roadhouse has increased its online visibility with customers searching for local steaks and barbecue, resulting in a 40-percent increase in traffic to its corporate website compared with last year.
“That big an increase in traffic, you hope, is driving more people to your restaurant, both first-time guests and more and more repeat visitors,” he said. “It allows us to make sure, especially with new restaurants that open up, that the listing is out there and that people can find us.”
A crucial feature of the optimized listing is a geotag that includes a precise latitude and longitude to accurately place each restaurant location on search tools like Google Maps or location-based social networks like Foursquare, Durham said. That’s especially helpful since inaccurate or out-of-date listings could lead potential customers astray when a Texas Roadhouse isn’t visible from the road.
“We like to be in the suburbs and seen from the highway, and we always love to have a pole sign with a neon logo,” Durham said, “but there are locations of ours hidden behind hotels or that can’t have the neon sign because of city regulations. Having that geotag ensures us that consumers are going to find our listing and find our restaurant. GPS units in your car are often six months behind, so if we have a unit that just opened up, it won’t be on there. Nobody updates those [devices] either, anyway.”
In its most recent earnings conference call, Louisville, Ky.-based Texas Roadhouse said it plans to open around 20 corporate restaurants in 2011.
Contact Mark Brandau at [email protected].
