Website Content + Chicken Wings?
“Where’s the nearest place for Wings tonight?” What does Wing Night have to do with website content ? Well everything - if your business is a restaurant and you feature a Wing Night. Potential customers are looking for your business. When you set out to write content for your small business website you need to consider the questions and the words that your potential customers might use to find you.
A few weeks ago I was sitting beside friends as we watched our sons play hockey. The game was at 6:30pm across town, which meant that most of us hadn’t had a chance to eat dinner. Halfway through the game my friend pulled out his Blackberry and tried to find the nearest place that had a special on chicken wings that night. Believe it or not he was able to come up with a choice of restaurants! Wow!
It turns out that the website ottawafood.com realized that there are customers in Ottawa who needed answers to that very same question. If you push a little further and visit the websites of the individual restaurants very few of them even mentioned a wing night. Hmmmmm.
So let’s recap what happened :
Well success as long as he doesn’t decide to search further and visit the website of the restaurant to help him decide if that’s the one he’d like to go to. What he finds there are pictures of the restaurant (great) and some text but nothing about Wing Night. Then the questions start to come - do they have a Wing Night or not? Why don’t they mention it? Off he goes to another restaurant web site - to see if they mention anything about Wing Night.
Answers. What questions could your potential customers be asking? Make a list of all the questions that your customers ask you now. Add any questions new and potential customers ask. Do you have answers to these questions on your website?
When you innovate, you've got to be prepared for everyone telling you you're nuts. Larry Ellison
