 
Most people wouldn’t.  Your website is not a digital billboard or a blinky arrow sign, web users don’t treat them that way. They treat your website the same way they treat places to eat – they are picky, impatient, and they want variety. Since the web is increasingly the way the world gets its information, you need to know what kind of restaurant your website is like. Is it a popular 5-star restaurant … or is it a lemonade stand?
A good restaurant has to bring in customers. You can’t bring people in if they don’t know you are there. So how do you bring in those web patrons? Search Engine Optimization (SEO), industry keywords, and web marketing do the job of that lighted marquee or the guy in the hot dog suit. They make you visible and make people take notice of your site over your bland competitors. When your potential customers search for your industry, you want them to find you first.
Once you have successfully gotten your company to be first in search results with keywords and SEO, your website’s job has just started. People make a decision to eat at a restaurant or make a break for the door before they even get seated. So what do they see when they get in? It needs to match what you do and who you are. When you visit your favorite Chinese restaurant, they don’t have mariachi bands. Your layout and imagery set the ambiance for your visitors. Your web design and graphics should reinforce your branding, purpose and goals of your company and should help drive visitors to action. You only have a split second to catch the attention of your visitors. If they don’t like what they see, they won’t be interested in what you have to say.
That was a lot of work just to get your patron to the table, so you had better serve them some good food. What does that mean to your website? Content, content, content. The more content you have with quality ingredients (real information that people want to consume), the more people will want to come to your site and stay longer. The end result means more chances to call your visitor to action.
Even when you have a successful opening of your fine dining establishment (or very popular pizza joint), you can’t stand still. Those visitors you managed to make happy still have short attention spans. Your competitors can still get their own guy-in-a-hotdog-suit and grab the attention away from the fickle consumers you fought so hard to drive to your tables. Always keep yourself in view of the web-public with content updates and social marketing. That will bring in new and repeat patrons.
If you can do all that it takes to be successful in your web restaurant, you can define your genre and become the go-to website in your field. In a crowded marketplace, that is where you want to be.
