We’re serving fast food stats!

The past couple of years has been a turbulent time for the UK restaurant industry, with restaurateurs changing how they operate to remain afloat in the pandemic and reimagining their offering to cope with the cost-of-living crisis. We asked Khalid Said, our Search & Data Apprentice, to pull out some interesting current trends hidden in the data.

Keywords that have decreased and why

As punters return to restaurants keywords like ‘Takeout’ (and related phrases) have seen a huge decrease in popularity. This could also represent a large social and vernacular change as companies like Just Eat and Deliveroo have changed social behaviour. Why Google ‘Takeout’ when you have an app that can do it all for you?

More broadly there’s been a 39% reduction in search terms such as ‘takeaways’ and ‘eating out’, one reason for this could be down to people forgoing little luxuries amidst the cost-of-living crisis, instead, people are opting to swap takeaways for fake-aways.

Keywords with high popularity and little competition!

Something that can’t easily be faked is Sushi! Search shows year-on-year increases in ‘Sushi’ search volume. Establishing itself as one of the fastest-growing restaurant types in the UK. It also has a relatively low search term competition in comparison to the rest of the top 10. Good times if you’re a Sushi restaurant!

Carrying on our love affair with Asian cuisine, there’s been a steady rise in South-East Asian search terms. With perineal stalwarts ‘Healthy Eating’ and ‘Pizza’ in there the rest were filled with “New China buffet, Wasabi, Sake House, Grand China & Teppan”. If you’re a restaurant and you’re serving teppanyaki, Kung Pao Chicken, or Dim Sum you’d be mad not to increase your paid presence and make sure your SEO is optimized to catch this growth in demand.

How optimising keywords can help the bottom line!

Finally, a tip. It’s important to understand when your busiest times for bookings are and run campaigns accordingly. If your restaurant is closed on a Monday don’t run your campaigns then, similarly, don’t run them at 7pm on Friday as they won’t get much traction, instead look to drive interest when you’re quiet, perhaps a Wednesday lunchtime.

Why it pays to optimise

It pays to optimise your campaigns as much as possible. Don’t waste your spend on high-range keywords if they’re not driving tangible value. Instead, look to shift budget to low-range keywords that fit your needs.

The restaurant and take-out industry is no stranger to seasonal demand, it comes into all aspects of restaurant life, from planning menus and ingredients, to knowing when your busy periods are and when you might need more staff to accommodate – so why think any differently when it comes to your restaurant’s online presence? It’s worth looking at search volume and trends to see how you can best optimize your site to meet demand, try using these free tools like Google Keywords Planner to think about what areas of your offering to promote and when!