One of the most valuable aspects of a restaurant’s data, their menu, finally gets a bit of respect from the data side, and it'll benefit lots of users once it's broadly implemented.
We work with a lot of restaurants, providing assistance from initial naming and branding all the way through to print menu design, website design, and digital strategy / SEO. For many restaurant customers, the journey to that table of delicious food begins with a micro-moment, often via their mobile device, and the customer querying Google for a restaurant in their area, by cuisine, or the specific restaurant they want to visit. In our last survey among our restaurant clients, Google Local Search accounted for over 52% of all Google Search traffic to their website, or over 30% of their total website traffic. This led us to the conclusion that Google My Business needs to be a prominent piece of every local restaurant marketing strategy and search strategy.
And yet when you Google a restaurant's menu, it's highly likely that the menu that Google shows you is outdated, incomplete, or simply incorrect.
That doesn't make anyone happy.
Defining the Menu
example of an interactive menu in Google Search results
A restaurant’s menu is one of the most sought-after pieces of data that a restaurant can provide to potential customers (along with phone number, address, hours of operation, all handled in Google My Business). People want easy access to the menu (text not PDFs!), especially on mobile, so they can see what their options are before they choose to “buy” and reserve a table or make plans. Google, being focused on users’ needs, knows this and created a Knowledge Panel for the menu (graphic displayed here), and made it easily interactive for a wide variety of devices.
The only problem is that Google didn’t give restaurants a direct way of updating this data, instead relying on 3rd party providers to give them the requisite data feed. When Google provided this functionality back in March of 2014, I brought the issue up with Google Engineers and Community Managers, but nothing was ever done.
The restaurant could be updating their website’s menu daily to feature specials or changing seasonal menus, but their menu in Google Search might be showing dishes that were no longer on the menu from weeks or months ago, leading to irate patrons or missed opportunities. You could structure the data as clearly as you wanted in the website, but while Google would scrape other content from your site (contact info, hours, etc.), it didn't pull menu data the same way. It was even more disconcerting since Google was choosing, not to go with the original source of the data, but with 3rd party providers that were “aggregating” (screen scraping) the content from restaurant websites.
Perhaps that will now change
In August 2016 I joined the Schema working group’s repository, with the sole purpose of initiating the creation of a set of definitions to expand how restaurant menus are treated in schema data. A quick refresher: Microformatting, often using schema, is one way that you can provide greater structure and understanding to search engines about your content, and the more you can help them understand your content, often the greater value they place on your content.
I initiated a discussion, by submitting an Issue/Request, discussing the current limitations in how menus were treated within Schema for restaurants, the possibilities, and some of the problems that were occurring minus this definition. (You can read the discussion here). After lengthy discussion with some incredibly detail-oriented engineers, and a long period of silence, we have learned that Menu, MenuSection and MenuItem have been added to the forthcoming release (3.2) of schema! We believe we've made two of our clients, One Midtown Kitchen and TWO Urban Licks, the first restaurants to take advantage of the new schema.
What the Schema looks like
For those that know schema, or would like to understand what the structure looks like, below is essentially a before and after of what a restaurant's microformatting might look like.
Before (snippet):
"@context":"http://schema.org/",
"@type":"Restaurant",
"name":"TWO urban licks",
"description":"TWO serves wood-fired meats and fish served in a high-energy, open kitchen featuring fiery American Food",
"url":"http://www.twourbanlicks.com",
"menu":"http://www.twourbanlicks.com/p/menu.html",
"telephone":"404-522-4622"
After (snippet):
Click here.
Why is this important?
I’m sure this all sounds rather technical and extremely geeky to most people, but it’s also incredibly valuable for restaurants and consumers. For restaurants that want to provide the most accurate data possible to informed consumers, there is now (potentially) a structured means of keeping menus up to date, tying them to date ranges for availability, adding dietary information to menu items, accurate pricing information on an item basis, and much more. If Google chooses to use this data structure.
Some example uses might be:
Season menus displayed during date ranges
One-time menus displayed for just one day
Earlybird menu displayed during a time range on your device
Individual items marked gluten free, vegetarian, vegan, etc. for sorting
Allergy information
Calorie counts or other dietary information
Variable pricing based on date/time or add-on items
Currency calculations
Menu or MenuItem reviews
Special offers on specific menu items or menus
This could also be integrated into restaurant POS systems so that servers and customers can provide and make informed decisions about what they eat or drink, while having a structured language for interoperability.
There is now a language and structure defining the data that a menu and menu item should have…. Now we just need Google and other companies to start using it!
Based on past experiences, if Google is inclined to begin using the Menu schema, they'll do so by encouraging a limit test inclusion of restaurants to pull data from, or via an announcement along the lines of "Webmasters can gain control of their menu display in our search results by implementing the Menu / MenuItem schema". Based on the fact that Google's representative within the schema working group was involved in this addition, it seems far more likely that it will be implemented.
Empower your restaurant's digital marketing
Give us a call at 413-282-8742 or contact us to schedule a meeting