Why you should ignore Yelp, Urban Spoon, Google et al.

However, I can understand the concern of business owners. This is serious stuff with serious consequences. Two lawyer friends of mine who share a practice back in my hometown of St Louis spent the better part of an evening explaining how much time, effort, and money they spent selecting and working with consultants in an effort to bump and maintain their website link to page one of Google for lawyers in St Louis. They used to just advertise in the Yellow Pages and that was that. Now it is a wild goose chase. It was a very informative, insightful, and even disturbing conversation.

This part is critical as well, and as I mentioned earlier one reason we are on Yelp at all is for SEO purposes. It helps increase our page ranking. The frustration of trying to show up in search results can be nearly as bad as dealing with these review sites. And as I'm sure your lawyer friends learned it doesn't matter how much you spend in time or money, you may not get any decent results.

However, with regards to search engine rankings, this can be overcome with PPC advertising. In the last two months our little business has shown up in search results over 5,000 times and we've had over 350 clicks.

The only reason I'm mentioning this is because some of you restaurant owners should seriously consider this method of advertising if you are not already. Google, for example, "mexican restaurants louisville ky" and noone else is even advertising on that keyword, which means it would be very cheap...an added bonus. Something to consider if you need to get your little restaurant out there.

However, I can understand the concern of business owners. This is serious stuff with serious consequences. Two lawyer friends of mine who share a practice back in my hometown of St Louis spent the better part of an evening explaining how much time, effort, and money they spent selecting and working with consultants in an effort to bump and maintain their website link to page one of Google for lawyers in St Louis. They used to just advertise in the Yellow Pages and that was that. Now it is a wild goose chase. It was a very informative, insightful, and even disturbing conversation.

This part is critical as well, and as I mentioned earlier one reason we are on Yelp at all is for SEO purposes. It helps increase our page ranking. The frustration of trying to show up in search results can be nearly as bad as dealing with these review sites. And as I'm sure your lawyer friends learned it doesn't matter how much you spend in time or money, you may not get any decent results.

However, with regards to search engine rankings, this can be overcome with PPC advertising. In the last two months our little business has shown up in search results over 5,000 times and we've had over 350 clicks.

The only reason I'm mentioning this is because some of you restaurant owners should seriously consider this method of advertising if you are not already. Google, for example, "mexican restaurants louisville ky" and noone else is even advertising on that keyword, which means it would be very cheap...an added bonus. Something to consider if you need to get your little restaurant out there.

Jason I am not selling advertising for Louisville Hot Bytes at this time but I will say you should consider some advertising here, on this site. I have seen much better results than 350 clicks in 2 months and people know you here. Just saying... it would be a gentle reminder to keep your restaurant in mind. Get Robyn or Mary to send you some up to date info, all mine is pretty dated.