64% of Mobile Restaurant Searchers Convert "Immediately or Within an Hour"

Stumbled on this statistic that was recently released and figured I had to write a quick post about it for our food & beverage folks out there. “64 percent of mobile visitors convert immediately or within an hour!” Makes sense right? People typically search for somewhere to eat when they’re, well, ready to eat. Or maybe they’re in a town, state, or even country where they are unfamiliar with where to get good food. They do a quick search and pick from the list of restaurants that shows up on their phone. This is a big change from when searches had to be done from your home PC. At that time a conversion typically took up to a week!

A couple other statistics:

• 95% of smartphone users conduct restaurant searches.
• 90% of these users “convert within the day.”
• 3 out of 5 mobile restaurant seekers had no particular place in mind upon embarking on their research. 

Mobile users’ top reasons for their restaurant choices are location, followed by price, and finally good reviews. 

What an amazing industry to be in. That is, if you’re optimized for it. Restaurants are the top local and mobile search category. If your business isn’t setup to capitalize on this traffic than you could be currently losing a ton of business to the diner down the street. It’s time for you to create that same competitive advantage against somebody else. 

Here’s a few things to get you started:

• Sign up for Google Places so you can get a local presence. 
• Consider using Yelp as a review site. Very popular for restaurants.
• Make sure your site is optimized for search. Test this by using various keywords that you would hope to be found with. If the results are unsatisfying, perform some search engine optimization, or hire someone to do so.
• Sign up for some of the most popular apps that people use to find restaurants.
• Optimize for mobile. Really the main point of this article. Make sure your site can be used well on smart-phones. At the very least make sure you can be found.

I’m sure many of you have been on this path already. But if not, hopefully this serves as a wake up call to the revenue you are missing out on.