I recently received a 50% off voucher for The Avalon, a restaurant in Clapham, which led me to think about how restaurants could use local content to market themselves online.

Many are using 2 for 1 offers and 50% discounts to encourage people to visit their restaurants, with the main advantage of such promotions being to capture data, primarily email addresses, for future communication.

It can also be an opportunity for restaurateurs to find out where their diners are coming from – just by asking customers for their home town they can find out how far people travel to get to their eatery. It all helps to build up a profile of the customer.

Restaurateurs may rely on regulars and people who happen to be passing, but that’s not true of other local attractions which people research before visiting.

That’s why it’s important for restaurant websites to include local content, particularly landmarks and attractions of interest, which people may search for in Google.

To get that local content seen and rated by the search engines, restaurants will need to attract links to their websites from websites and blogs.

One way to do this would be to invite bloggers to the restaurant to review it – they may have smaller audiences but they would be more likely to get an SEO friendly link from a blog than a larger website.