Locu helps restaurants organize, design, and sync their menus across multiple platforms, including a restaurant’s website. It did a better job with this than SinglePlatform, a similar service, and has kept its promise by having the web application work seamlessly and without problems. The most important part is that their user interface is great and extremely user friendly. It is hard not to love Locu. Here is an introduction video by Locu:
In addition, you can send your menu to Locu, and they will update it for you in 48 hours.
If you like, you can even add pictures for each menu item. However, for restaurants that care about their branding & marketing, using Locu’s menus might be a bad idea. We’ll talk about that later.
HTML menu pages are essential, because they show that you are a restaurant to Google and serve a particular cuisine. With an HTML menu, the restaurant has a better chance of showing up in different keyword combinations. We believe HTML menus are the one of most important parts of restaurant SEO. If you use Locu on your website, you lose that power. Locu gives you JavaScript code to put on your website. It works very well from a customer perspective but in the eyes of a search engine it is just a JavaScript code, not a menu. So you lose that content. Also, a small minority of people block Javascript for security reasons and will not be able to see a Locu menu.
After consulting with Locu and independent SEO experts, we know Google can crawl Locu’s content. However, since Locu menus are in Javascript from an external file on a 3rd party website, we are not sure how effective it is on improving a website’s performance in search engines. But Locu cannot be as good as basic HTML.
Moreover, when you have multiple menus, Locu shows it in one page. This means that if you have brunch, dinner, lunch, and wine list menus they’ll all show up in one page. If you use Locu, you’ll lose all those separate pages. HTML menus do the best in Google and substantially help a restaurant’s website.
We’ll use our client Agozar Cuban Bistro as an example to illustrate this point. When you Google “best mojitos nyc,” their mojito menu page shows up on the first page in 4th spot of the organic search results. This gets even better if you Google “cuban lunch” as Agozar is right now the #1 spot in the search results with their HTML lunch menu. If you Google “chocolate martinis nyc”, you’ll see another one of our clients, Ayza Wine & Chocolate Bar, show up in 3rd place on Google with their martinis HTML page. One last example is if you Google “brunch williamsburg brooklyn”, Lokal Bistro’s Brunch HTML menu shows up on the first page.
The above examples are targeted, minimally optimized html menu pages. They are why these restaurants show up in many search results, more than just for their name, more than just for a few keywords. Even you don’t optimize your pages, they still have a chance to show up in the search results, or support your home page to get higher rankings.
When a customer is on a 3rd party website checking out reviews, you should want them to come to your website to see what kind of feeling your restaurant is offering. By visiting a website, the customers commit somewhat to giving your restaurant their full attention. Unlike websites such as OpenTable, Citysearch and Tripadvisor that offer the same profile to every restaurant, your websites encourages customers to check your gallery, virtual tour, menus, and promotions to give them a reason to visit the restaurant. A restaurant’s website differentiates it from its competitors.
If a restaurant keeps Locu on OpenTable or other platforms, it kills the reason a customer would have to visit that restaurant’s website to look at the menu. Instead, the customer will probably stay in the profile page and won’t even check the restaurant website. The restaurant website is where you convince people to try your restaurant. Your website is your restaurant’s home base. Restaurant websites are like a customer peeking their head into the restaurant to make a decision rather than making their choice from the street where they can see all the different competitors and their menus, reviews, etc.
Let’s not forget social media. We have to encourage customers to visit the website, because in addition to showing them a reason to visit us, they might share our information on Facebook, Google and Twitter. Check out the Ayza Wine & Chocolate Bar website, we have put social share buttons on every page. If you look at their special offers page, you’ll see the power of social shares. Google has also mentioned that every share now counts for SEO and thus, for higher rankings on Google. To be able get more shares, we need traffic to our website.
If you use menu templates in your website, you might actually be using the same design as your competitor. If branding is important to you, you will want to have a custom design for your menu.
Locu is helpful to some restaurants while it may be a liability for other restaurants. It will make things easier, but the question is if it makes things better.
We don’t recommend you use Locu if your online marketing and branding is important to your restaurant, you get a good amount of traffic to your website, and your menus are already in HTML.
If you have a small restaurant, and you don’t focus on online marketing and you didn’t invest in your website, Locu is great tool for you. You’ll save time and money. But you have to decide how much investment you have put into your online marketing strategy (such as your website) to see if you should sign up for Locu.
If you are using .pdf files, doc. files (Microsoft Office) or Flash for your menus, Locu is a big improvement.