Q - Hi Mira, I am hoping that you can give me some ideas on how to improve my website and chances to be seen when surrounding businesses are searching for local sandwich deliveries ….Pret A Manger would be a perfect example.

The shop is open to the public, we have 16 tables, over 40 seatings. I have 2 very good accounts that cater for their meetings, which brings me a good income. My goal is to get another 5 solid accounts but everyone seems to stick with Pret A Manger, and it seems more and more difficult to speak face to face with the person organizing deliveries (probably too many people like
me bothering them).  My website is nowhere to be seen on the Google search which would help me great deal to promote without ‘wasting’ clients time.Thanks for your time, Maria

A – On a rudimentary level, you could run a special offer, like a free chocolate cake with every 50th platter ordered, or something like that. That would make businesses order from you, believe me, all offices are cake-obsessed (or maybe just the ones I’ve worked in). It wouldn’t be hard to publicise this with some media activity, or leaflets if you have budget for that.

Another thing you can do is deliver bacon sandwiches to offices near you. Do it at around 10 or 11 o’clock on a Friday (which maximises the chance of catching people when they have hangovers, and are therefore extremely appreciative of bacon-related things), give them some menus and leave them to it. I guarantee they’ll order from you. 

You mention that the people who order the sandwiches don’t like to bothered. Delivering little freebies of some sort, like cakes or sandwiches gets you in there. When you’re inside just make sure you say “If you like our cakes/sandwiches, please order from us in future” and leave them some menus.

Alternatively, do free bacon sandwiches served from the shop every Friday morning. Krispy Kreme do this with doughnuts and it’s very popular. You could put a sign outside the shop for free bacon butties (maybe from 8-9.30am each Friday), then, inside, put an enormous sign which says something like ‘If you like our free bacon butties, please order your sandwiches from here in future’.

As for the website, first of all, put in the text phrases which people would search for. For instance, ’sandwiches in London‘, ’sandwich delivery’, ‘business lunch’, or whatever you think. So have a think about the text on the site and reword to include some of your key phrases, the more the better. This will help a lot. I think that you can have some more text on the website and if you want me to put some together for you I’m happy to help.

Secondly, post your link everywhere. Yahoo Answers, any business pages, Gumtree, these all have top Google rankings so your postings on these will come up near the top when people search for keywords. Again, use as many keywords as possible.

Thirdly, ask your webmaster to put some meta tags into the website. These are basically your keywords, but hidden except to search engines.

These are all things you can do quite easily. Getting an SEO specialist to work on your site costs so much money, so often trying to think of other ways for people to become aware of it are better. Think of events, news stories, direct mailers, charity donations (Hold a MacMillan Coffee morning for cancer, or donate Xp from each sandwich to a charity, and publicise it well inside and outside the shop).

Hope this helps,

Mira

Please feel free to post any questions here or email missmirataylor@yahoo.com.