The Ease of Using Yext to Manage Your Restaurant’s Online Menus

68% of restaurant searches are unbranded, meaning in that moment of hunger, your customers are more likely to search by food item, rather than by the restaurant's name.* Consider then that 76% of people say they're more likely to choose a restaurant that gives them in-depth attribute information in search results.*

That means that both your restaurant and your menu need to be optimized to come up in searches relevant to your business, especially when you consider that 63% of those searches end up purchasing within a day.*

Managing your brand information (including your menu), everywhere it lives online, especially off of your website can be a formidable task. That's especially true for the places your information lives off of your website. Yext for Food puts you in control of the public facts about your restaurant brand — everywhere people are searching.

Managing your digital knowledge means giving brands an easy way to organize, control and update menus through a single source of truth without the need for an entire marketing team.

Taking on the task of integrating a new software tool to manage all those facts about your brand that people can search online for as well as all those various menu items can feel like a daunting task. The right Digital Knowledge Management solution can make this process easy and scalable. We asked some restaurant brands to share their thoughts.

Arooga's, a growing casual sports bar with 16 locations, was challenged with inconsistent information about their brand, duplicate listings, inaccurate hours and out of date menus for their locations all over the web.

Arooga's needed a software solution that was easy to use, and empowered the team with analytics that gave them strategic insights on how to optimize their locations for search. Ultimately, Arooga's needed a solution that would help its brands compete in search with the larger enterprise brands.

President/co-founder, Gary Huether shared,"The task of updating and managing our menus across the web was very difficult. We have a robust menu, and many are signature items that are very important to our brand. Having a central location to update our menu across multiple platforms makes it seamless for us to make changes."

Arooga's was using too many systems to manage their information, none of which talked to each other. The Arooga's team were forced to limit their marketing activities down to just a couple of sites due to a lack of bandwidth.

When the Digital Marketing Manager for Fazoli's took over managing the brand's website — as well as managing their digital knowledge — he had a huge problem with localized menu offerings.

The franchise operators at Fazoli's get to choose the limited-time offers they want to offer at their store. This means that each store has its own menu and a brand wide menu on their website was only causing complaints from customers. It also made it difficult for the brand to serve the individual needs of the franchise location.

Fazoli's prioritized a solution to build out a local page for each store with all the digital knowledge about the location. Now, not only does the location page actually reflect what's available at that store, Fazoli's can use the local page for ad targeting at the local level. And now when you search "Fazoli's menu," you get the local page for the store nearest you.

"When a franchisee decides they're going to change the price of a menu item, I can change it on my own. No web developers, no coding, no PDFs, and just a few minutes later I can respond back saying, 'This is now live!'"

Fazoli's runs a new limited-time offer (LTO) every three months, and each LTO includes about five items. Will had trouble updating Fazoli's information everywhere it appeared online — so he didn't. With Digital Knowledge Management, each Fazoli's franchisee has the ability to update their own page per location and have the confidence that they're in control of their menu information everywhere.

73% of high-intent traffic happens off your website, and therefore, being found in unbranded search is no longer a nice to have for a restaurant — it's a need to have.* When consumers are searching for some place to get lunch or "a restaurant good for kids with outdoor seating," they are hungry and ready to make a purchase. Managing your digital knowledge, especially your menu so that it can be easily found online, is an easy and important step in finding new customers, and keeping the existing ones who don't always have you on the top of their mind, coming back for more.

* Yext Local Search Behavior Study, July 2017