Search engines and SEO: how do they work? Are they really helpful to the restaurant industry?

 

Dear restaurateur,

 

Today I won't talk about food products or restaurant services.

I'll talk about search engines and how they are contributing to creating monopolies in the restaurant market. 

To be precise, it's happening in all markets, not just in the restaurant industry.

First of all, you should know that on the web, 90% of searches are done through Google's search engine. 

However, it must be admitted that no user is obliged to use this search engine; there are at least a dozen on the market, but Google's is definitely the most common.

 

What exactly is a search engine?

A search engine is a platform that uses a program to scan, process, organize, and catalog the information it finds on the World Wide Web (WWW).

I used the word "platform," just like for Facebook.

 

On Facebook, you find profiles of people or companies, whose information is uploaded to pages already ready to use, pages that belong to the platform.

 

On search engines, you find web pages, which must be created beforehand by a programmer, external pages, which do not belong to the platform.

 

The idea is the same: an immense container full of information, only organized in different ways.

 

How does a search engine work?

Now let's imagine the World Wide Web as a large library and the search engine as a librarian.

The librarian, first of all, reads the books kept in the library, catalogs them, and arranges them on the shelves according to literary style, subject, and so on.

 

Subsequently, when a user requests a book on a specific topic, the librarian searches for it in the catalog and returns the book that he believes best meets the user's needs.

 

Now let's get back to you, or rather to you who almost certainly use Google every day to search for something.

 

 

What happens when you type a word or a set of words in the search bar?

 

Google searches among the web pages cataloged and organized IN ITS SERVERS, ACCORDING TO ITS VERY OWN AND VERY SECRET CRITERION, the pages that contain that specific word or set of words and shows them to you.

 

Keep in mind that it is estimated that there are over 1.5 billion websites globally and the number is constantly growing.

 

This needs to be clarified because here lies the problem.

If there are so many websites, which ones are better to show among the millions of possible results? The ones it considers the best! Therefore, a result completely ARBITRARY.

 

If a website wants to be found by the search engine, it MUST scrupulously respect Google's algorithm, which you may not know, updates three times a day.

 

And the criteria, secret, by which Google considers a website interesting or not, are more than 200.

 

Now let's ask ourselves a question: why so many criteria? Why change the algorithm so many times?

 

The answers are mainly two, one you'll like (spoiler: it's just smoke in your eyes) and the other should scare you.

 

The answer Google would give you is: we improve the algorithm to give you a result that is increasingly precise and satisfying for your search.

 

The other is that search engines LIVE ON ADVERTISING, they earn BILLIONS with advertising, a lot of money that instead of staying in YOUR country goes abroad.

 

And moreover, they don't pay a euro in taxes in your country because most of these companies do not reside there, but abroad.

 

This obviously impoverishes the commercial and social fabric in which you find yourself.

 

Returning to the first answer, but why do I say smoke in your eyes?

 

I'll explain it to you with an example:

let's imagine you are a restaurateur and you are looking for a superior quality mozzarella on any search engine, a handmade product, made by the skilled hands of a master cheese maker, made exclusively of fresh milk from a small local producer, you know those small dairies lost in the countryside, those all-Italian excellences that produce small quantities of mozzarella daily...

 

What could you write? How could you search for that product?

 

BEST FIOR DI LATTE MOZZARELLA, or BEST ARTISAN MOZZARELLA, or BEST HANDMADE MOZZARELLA, or BEST CAMPANIA MOZZARELLA, or CAMPANIA ARTISAN MOZZARELLA, and so on.

 

Now, honestly, can you imagine a cheese producer, who for years has only been involved in the artisan production of FANTASTIC food, understanding how a search engine works and how to position his website?

 

Can you imagine him sitting in front of the computer after 10 hours of hard work working on the SEO of his website?

Now, if you're wondering what this SEO I'm talking about is, the cheese producer I just mentioned would probably wonder too.

 

What is SEO and what is it for?

SEO is all those activities carried out on a website, aimed at positioning it at the top of search rankings.

 

Now I don't want to go into specifics, just know that these activities are multiple and range from technical to semantic aspects (the semantics being the one most directly related to your searches).

 

It is essential that you understand what SEO is because that's exactly where the problem lies.

SEO is complicated, expensive, and must be done by those who understand technology and marketing!

Yes, because it's not just about making sure that the technical aspects of the website work perfectly (there are hundreds, very complicated and also constantly evolving), but you also have to make sure that the content of the text is well done, that the message is clear, persuasive, selling, and that it knows how to position the website at the top of search engines.

 

Simple, right?

 

For these texts, professional copywriters are needed.

 

Not simple copywriters, but copywriters specialized in the web; they must know where to write persuasive text, a storytelling that presents your company well, and increasingly product sheets. All in SEO key, of course.

 

In short, a website is not child's play!

 

A website that can really increase sales of a product must be managed by professionals, who, it must be said, are not cheap at all.

 

The other fastest way to position a website is indeed to advertise on search engines and magically the website will appear at the top of the rankings 🙂

 

Recapping;

 

doing SEO is complex and steals a lot of time;

doing SEO is expensive;

advertising on search engines is expensive and complicated (yes, you also need an expert there, for SEM or to simplify, paid advertising campaigns)

 

What does this tell you?

That at the top of the search rankings you will NEVER find who makes the best mozzarella, but who has a LOT OF MONEY TO GET to the top of search results.

 

Yes, because it's not enough to position yourself with ONE SEARCH INTENT, but in every possible way!

 

Returning to our practical case, let's imagine you are looking for the BEST CAMPANIA MOZZARELLA and our good artisan mozzarella producer managed with his own forces to position himself in the top 10 search results with the intent (or keyword) FIOR DI LATTE MOZZARELLA...

 

YOU TWO WILL NEVER MEET. NEVER EVER

 

Do you understand where I'm coming from? Search engines don't connect demand and supply, but they secretly separate them.

These search engines open doors to those who have money to spend and inexorably close them to small businesses that do not have large funds to spend on advertising. Those small businesses on the web are INVISIBLE.

 

I forgot, like you, I'm a restaurateur, I had my OWN restaurant in Vienna and I wanted to offer my customers a superior quality mozzarella, a mozzarella that the competition didn't have.

 

I just didn't know how to find that small mozzarella producer, I knew where he was, but I didn't know how to get there.

 

For this reason, I created Eggify.

 

Eggify is a platform created to bring together producers, distributors, and restaurateurs. Uniting them where search engines divide them.

 

The suppliers registered on Eggify are always clearly visible, and their positioning or appearance order is decided by user ratings.

 

In other words, whoever does their job well and satisfies the needs of their customers will receive positive ratings, and this will help them to position themselves higher.

 

In other words, here it doesn't matter the budget available for advertising but how good the mozzarella produced by the dairy is.

 

If all this seemed interesting to you, sign up now on Eggify!

 

You, restaurateur, represent the demand, if you register, the supply will also come.

 

We will welcome those small local producers who can give your restaurant that special product, that extra touch that your customers will surely appreciate, thus remembering you and your establishment!

 

Offer them the best, in the long run, it works; a satisfied customer will speak well of your establishment, and word of mouth will do the rest. Believe me.

 

If you found this article interesting, I will soon delve deeper into the topic of search engines, explaining how they are creating illiteracy, they are insurmountable barriers between people who do not speak foreign languages well and are looking for a product abroad, and how the search engine algorithm is creating "parallel universes"

 

See you soon

Alessandro