Why do restaurants use PDFs to display their menu on their website? It feels like a smart easy solution, right?
Maybe your prices or menus change often and you have to redesign frequently. Maybe you print them for in-store use or to stuff in a to go bag. It would make sense to save a little time and it’s easy to just upload that image to your website.
Please stop uploading PDF menus to your website.
Why?
Two very important reasons:
1. ITS A TERRIBLE EXPERIENCE
Most people who are searching for where to get their next meal or where to make a reservation are doing it on their phone. Mobile search dominates the restaurant industry.
Have you ever tried to look at a PDF menu on your mobile phone? You can’t select anything and zooming in is really hard, making it really hard to read. It’s just not a great experience.
Remember, this is the hospitality business and the word hospitality includes the idea of an experience. Make sure that your website experience matches the incredible service you offer in store. You wouldn’t hand a guest a tiny little menu that was hard to read at the table, so why do it on your website?
2. HUGE SEARCH MISTAKE
2/3rds of searches on Google for a local business are for restaurants.
2/3rds of searches for restaurants on Google are what Google calls "dish searches," which means people search for what they crave, like "pizza near me" or wings, Burgers, Sushi, sandwiches (if you're me, ristretto espresso) and so on. They aren't searching for the name of the restaurant when in discovery mode.
Which means that Google (and all the discovery sites) need to know what is on your menu to be able to include your restaurant on relevant search queries.
How do those sites know that you have Squid Ink Pasta, Fried Eggplant Sandwiches or Pulled Pork Benedict if its not on your website? They cant.
And here's the dinger ... Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines cannot read what is on a PDF. Web crawlers know its a file but they can't index the words on it.
PDFs lack some of the key search information that the search engines need to be able to know exactly what the content is about. You are far better off having a page on your website built in html that you can easily update the text with your menu. When the text is on the actual site, search engines are able to index it in the context of how it relates to the rest of your website / business.
You know what is even worse than a PDF menu? A png or jpeg of your menu! They are absolutely unreadable by a search engine!
Doesn't mean you can't upload a PDF of your menu to a website, it just means don't do it unless you also have an html version available as well.
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Do you need help with any of this? Send me an email rev@brandedstrategic.net
- Rev Ciancio
WHAT DOES REV DO?
*I help restaurants to build guest marketing programs.
*I help hospitality tech companies with lead generation and content marketing.