Shane Murphy (00:01)

Welcome back everybody. We are super excited to have with us today, Eric Schellenberger. He's the owner of the Bar and Restaurant Marketing Basics marketing agency. And for the last 20 years, Eric has been helping restaurants to increase their guest counts by making them easily found online and optimizing their search engine results while improving their online reputation. Eric, I am so excited to have you with us today. We're going to be talking about some fun new topics that...

We haven't discussed on the podcast before, so thank you for joining us and sharing your story along the way.

Erik Shellenberger (00:37)

Thank you so much. appreciate you reaching out.

Shane Murphy (00:40)

Awesome. Now, maybe Eric, to kick things off before we dive into the juicy strategies here, can you tell us a little bit more about your background and your marketing agency as well?

Erik Shellenberger (00:51)

Yeah, so I've been in the bar restaurant industry basically my whole life. I started as my mother owned the food and beverage department at a ski resort in Park City that she threw me into child labor at 13 years old. And I worked for her and got a lot of experience doing that. And then when you're a snowboard bum in Park City, if you want a free season's pass, you have to work for the resort, but you make nothing. So then you have to work at restaurants at night. So I worked at restaurants on Main Street every day that I could.

Got a lot of experience, everything from dishwasher all the way up to, you know, manager, bartender, then marketing director. Ended up in Scottsdale, Arizona, and I was the marketing director for two out of the three nightclub companies that run the entire entertainment district in Old Town Scottsdale, which is a really fiercely competitive market. I learned a lot there. I learned a lot of what to do, but I really learned what not to do. That was one of the biggest learning experiences I've probably ever had because it was that fierce.

and we were doing things so wrong. And so we'll get into the, to the, what we were doing wrong. But anyway, I, I decided to, that I saw the, what wasn't effective and I saw the flaws and everybody that I worked with, they were, let's be honest, they were children. And they said, well, our job isn't to, they didn't, they didn't understand that marketing job is not to post on social media four times a month and walk away and go have a drink. Our job is to get more people in the club. And so.

Nothing was measured. Nothing was measureable that we're doing. It was just straight chaos. And so I said, you know what? Lots of luck to you guys later. I started my own business and I started SEO and reputation management, which are the two factors that bring new customers in the door. So that was the, instead of hitting the same guy over the head with social media posts five times a week, really like I get it. My God. I, yeah, we got unfollows all the time and it was our numbers were going down as much as we were trying to promote social media. So

When I started reaching out to new customers on behalf of my clients through Google and through all the search engines, all the review sites, Yelp, TripAdvisor, especially Google reviews, and we started tackling that angle, that's when you can actually measure it. You can see new people walking in the door, and it's a direct reflection of what we were doing. We could tweak the SEO, and then we can see the numbers on our Google Business Profile numbers rising of how many people saw us.

versus how many people hit the get directions button. All those clicks started going up in unison, so it doesn't really take a genius to figure out that that was working. So anyway, I've been doing this, I've been in this business, I've had my business about seven or eight years, and because of the books I wrote on Amazon, the series is called the Restaurant and Bar Marketing Series. It's a very boring title on purpose, because it's a keyword. Everybody searches that word and they end up seeing my book. So I take my own advice.

I put keywords into my books online. Because of those books, I've got nationwide clients now and from the US and Canada. And I'm in the top 1 % of Amazon book sales, which to me, doesn't sound, my book sales aren't that impressive. I sell about one book a day. But as far as Amazon numbers go, one book a day for seven years is astronomically good. there it's, I've won awards for the book series. It's best seller on Amazon. They're doing amazing. So that.

Shane Murphy (04:06)

Certainly.

Erik Shellenberger (04:14)

I think I got everything in the question there.

Shane Murphy (04:17)

love that. That's fantastic. so I'm like I saw your Amazon book series and I've seen a lot of comments and reviews on on that. When you started doing this, I guess maybe beforehand, you mentioned how you do a lot with SEO and a lot of restaurant owners might not be familiar with SEO is. Can you explain a little bit of what SEO is and and

the different types of SEO that are important to restaurant owners.

Erik Shellenberger (04:50)

Yeah, so SEO is search engine optimization. It's basically just getting you to the top of the Google search results for whatever that customer is typing in. So the back end of it is incredibly nerdy. It's incredibly complicated. I'm never going to bore your audience with the process of what you do to do this. That's on me. Nobody has to know anything that goes into how it's done. There's two different kinds, off page and on page. And what the difference is is off page is everything

outside of your website content, anything that has to do with a different directory, whether it's Yelp or TripAdvisor or Bing, which I'll get into this. Bing is actually a player because of ChatGPT. We'll get into that. And anything that is, every restaurant owner has gone through the same thing where someone will call them or someone will walk in the door and say, hey, did you, do you know that Google or Apple Maps especially is showing we're closed today? And they freak out and my God, And they didn't change it. It just changed.

So that's the kind of thing that happens when your off page presence isn't locked down, isn't synced, isn't done correctly, that it's the Wild West. And all those computers share information with everybody, all the rest of them, and they're all terrible at it. So if for some reason, also, customers can make edits to our Google business page. I don't think the average person knows that, but a customer can actually make a suggested edit on our Google business page, and if we don't contest it, we don't even have to approve it.

Seven days later, if the conditions are right, it's live.

Shane Murphy (06:21)

We've

had competitors suggesting edits on other restaurants in the area, Google, Google My Business pages, and that causes a lot of confusion.

Erik Shellenberger (06:32)

Yep, it happens all the time. And every restaurant owner probably knows exactly what I'm talking about. so that is, prevents stuff like that. It also makes sure if it's done through a service like mine or any off-page service, we sync all those directories together. So we make a change once that change happens across the board on about 200 different directories. So your information is correct. It's all exactly the same. It matches. Google loves to see consistent information. They like to see thoroughness.

Every single field filled out, every single photo uploaded, the photos tagged correctly with the right words. Once you do all that stuff in a very structured, complete way, your Google ranking is going to be very much positively affected by it. Okay, the second type on page is everything that's internal to your website code. So all your content, all your formatting, all your code inside your website. And again, this is really, really nerdy. So the problem that most restaurant websites have

99 % of them is a lack of content. So they don't have a lot of copy. There's not a lot of words. So Google can't figure out what it is. It knows you're pretty much a restaurant, but it doesn't know that if you're an Italian restaurant, a lot of people welcome to blah, blah, blah, Italian restaurant, the best Italian restaurant in this city. And that's it, that on the homepage. That's whole intro. But it doesn't know that your ingredients are imported from Italy to make your pasta and your pizza.

Your pasta's handmade, on-site, same day. Everything, you have authentic recipes that go back 100 years. And all this kind of feeds into all these other keywords people are typing in. So it's so important to have a decent amount of content and have it optimized. Have it in a format that Google wants to see. And the format that Google wants to see is very, very complicated and it takes a lot of work to do it and it takes a lot of time to do it. But it's drastically important for having an online presence.

And I think that nobody really thinks about this front of mind is that the only job a website has to do, one job, bring customers in the door, that's it. So everybody gets a website and they scrutinize the details of what it looks like. no, I don't like that color, let's change it with this color. I don't like that picture, change that picture over this one. Put this picture over here. Let's make it three columns, not two. All of their focus goes, so they're so stressed about what it looks like.

They don't have any copy to it. Cause let's be honest, words are ugly. So they say, I don't like the look of that. Get rid of it. Now they can't be found on Google or they're 20th on the list in a, in you know, a map search. You've got to zoom in all the way on their location before they pop up. That's why. Cause Google's like, I don't even know what these guys have. It's, it's such a message all to the board. It's incomplete. Forget it. Let's list everybody who did it the right way first. So I think that,

pretty much answers the whole two thing without getting too deep. don't want to lose anybody.

Shane Murphy (09:27)

No, that's great. you know, a lot of these, a lot of people, like they think, what is the job of my, a lot of people don't even ask the question, what is the job of my website? But when they do, sometimes they think, well, my website is what is going to deeply connect my existing customers to me. But really, if it's an existing customer, they're going there to click an order button or to maybe look at the menu right before going. But,

the purpose of that website, largely you're gonna get new traffic coming through all these digital storefronts. And there are, like we ran, we run a lot of data in our company about web traffic to restaurants and a typical, like independently owned SMB restaurant is gonna have thousands of visitors coming to their website every single month. They might only see, you know,

100 to 150 online orders from thousands of people who come. And little changes like this mean you're going to have more people actually seeing your site and actually coming in and ordering. But it is hard to do. It's hard for a restaurant owner to understand all the complicated things. And so that's very true. When SU has changed dramatically over the last six to 12 months,

And so there may also be people who have invested in SEO years ago, paid a company to help them jumpstart their website and then stopped. How have things changed and why is it important to keep optimizing it in today's world?

Erik Shellenberger (11:09)

So Google changes its algorithm and what it wants to see all the time. It wouldn't be Google and it wouldn't be the best without that. So they're always evolving. They're always putting what's important to them into different categories. I had to change my approach as a business owner drastically over the last six months. And so I used to focus mainly on off page, which is still important, don't get me wrong. But on page is now, it's more effective because of two things. Number one, most restaurants,

Don't even try. most of your competition isn't even gonna put an effort forth in SEO. They have a web guy design it. For whatever reason, web guys don't know SEO and SEO guys don't know how to make a website. I don't know why, but that's usually the deal. So, they'll give you a website that looks good. It's exactly what you asked for. Here you go. Here's the tabs. Here's what you wanted. There you go. Thanks, perfect. And then their website doesn't rank. So if you do the bare minimum,

You're going to beat most of your competitors out there. It's not that hard. we're, we're not, you know, lawyers, lawyers and the trades have the most fiercely competitive SEO competitions head to head all the time. Cause they all put tens of thousands of dollars per month into them. We don't have to do that because our competition is nothing. So the, the, the huge game changer was about six, eight months ago when AI programs started coming out that were, that were AI SEO programs that were.

really easy for a restaurant for me to implement to a restaurant website and more importantly easy for the restaurant owner to understand the results. So before if I had to go in there and manually SEO a site every single day or every single week, it would be thousands of dollars a month. That's in zero restaurants budget. So that's not realistic. So a lot of restaurants got pitched by these SEO firms, these giant companies. They give them this big glossy

presentation with 20 pages in it with all these cool pictures and graphs and all that stuff. I've seen dozens and dozens of these over the years and I've got pitched on when I was on the other end of that and it looks and I'm looking at it this is going to be expensive and the more I look at it like okay it's only like $4,000 a month and then we need a 24 month contract. It's like are you guys out of your mind? So that used to be kind of the where we were with SEO. Now we can get it done with AI for a fraction of the price.

So it's way below a thousand dollars, way below $500 a month. So that's what we're able to do. And the results are the same. The results are really impressive. Not only that, when I can show a restaurant owner, when they can look at a report and understand it in 10 seconds, I don't even have to explain it. That's where you win. Because now they don't have to, most restaurant owners are not checking, I don't blame them, they don't expect them to be. So when they look at this,

five page report of analytics and demographics and all these charts, which is what I used to do to be honest with you, that they would just be like, look, I don't even know what this means. And I'll explain it to them and it goes over their head. And so I got rid of that. I have a really basic keyword list with AI. Again, I can research my keywords. I can say, here's the top 20 or 30 keywords people are actually typing in to find us online. We're not guessing. We're asking.

Google and AI and ChatGPT, I use DeepSeek a lot too. Gemini's a really good one because it's Google's actual tool. So if you can say, hey Gemini, what 20 top keywords do people type into Google to find this restaurant? And then how about my competitors? What are they typing to find them? So we can take that list and I can optimize their website around that list. So now when I'm sending a report, I can say, here's your 30 keywords. Here's where our rank was. We ranked number 40 on that word when we started.

Then the week later, now we're at 30. Then a month later, now we're at 15. Now we're at five. Now we're at two. Now we're at, hopefully, if everything goes right, number one. And that's all you have to understand. Where we were for the word, where we are for the word. That's it. So it's come a long way in restaurant owners really getting behind it, because now they know where their money's going. It's not just like this innocuous report. They have no idea what they're even looking at. So that's been a huge help.

Shane Murphy (15:26)

amazing and for a restaurant that's trying to measure the effectiveness, they know, my rank has gone up. What are the other metrics that they're looking at to measure the success of like an on-page SEO experience?

Erik Shellenberger (15:44)

You know what most of them do is, and this is just straight human nature stuff, most restaurant owners will sit in their favorite table on their laptop and they'll Google words and they don't know if there's any traffic to those words. They'll just Google around, restaurants near me. And if they're in their own restaurant, they better be number one. But they'll Google things like, my barbecue clients are the biggest fans of this. They'll sit there and they'll best ribs near me, best ribs in my city name. And they'll...

for the most part, if we optimize the same words, then great. And they'll always, they'll see they're number one. That's all they care about. they're up there, but I also tell them that's kind of an unfair advantage because if you're sitting in your own restaurant, geographical location's number one. So if, and obviously any near me search, but even if it's not near me search, Google's gonna take geographical location first. So you're gonna be inherently number one. That doesn't mean you're gonna be number one for me sitting in Los Angeles.

or for anybody else planning a trip to your city or in the outskirts of your city or 10 miles away from you or depending on what device they're on, that's different results as well. So an iPhone, different devices, different results than a Samsung, different results than a PC or a Mac, it's all over the board. So it's really tough to say this is what it's gonna be across the board no matter what, it's not. And they're called organic search results for a reason. They're organic, they're up, they're down, they're all over the place.

Instead of going through all those crazy criteria and all of the... Everybody gets a Google business page report every month and it shows your monthly trend, but it's not a very good long timeline. So it'll show you the next, the last 30 days, 60 days, whatever it is. But if you're coming from your on-season to off-season, of course it's going to go down, but it makes it look like, we're losing traction. Why are we not getting as many Google hits? Well, it's just, that's just a market. So...

There's a ton of ways to measure it, but for our purposes, I would stick to the keywords, ranking, and be done with it.

Shane Murphy (17:48)

But I think you said one thing that's really important to just keep emphasizing. If you just do the bare minimum, you're going to beat out a majority of the competition because very few people actually do this. this used to have this massive cost barrier where still if you are a barbecue restaurant and you go and talk to a traditional SEO marketing agency,

you're looking at, you know, four to $10,000 a month on a multi, you know, like either a 12 plus month contract, because that's what they're going to say is this is a long-term strategy. We invest, we invest a lot, and this is going to, going to take 12 months to see results. And the world has changed in the last six months. 2025 is very different than 2024. And

I love the approach that you're taking because everything you're saying is real. Where a restaurant can go and implement these strategies for a fraction of the cost and get faster results and see it very, very quickly compared to what you had to do in years gone by. But if you do the bare minimum, you're going to win. winning in these Google searches and social

and search engine searches is what is going to get people who are searching for categories and or even your restaurant to see you and actually come in. The guest count comes up as a result of this practice. Now you also have focus on reputation management for restaurants. Talk to us about why that is so important and what can owners do today to improve their online reading.

Erik Shellenberger (19:44)

Okay, so great question. again, going back to as this is opposed to social media, social media, remember is the old customer. It's the customer you already have. We're not concerned about that guy. What are the new customers do? If they're researching your area, Google reviews, that's it. So they're going on Google. They may go to Yelp and read reviews, although they can just stick to Google, go to those reviews. And then here's the tricky part. A lot of times they'll go to Instagram and look at your Instagram.

presence, they'll look at more photos on Instagram, because I think it's easier to digest on a phone. So they'll go over there, check those out. But what happens a lot is for the very few restaurants that actually train their staff to say, welcome in, where'd you hear about us? I wish they would all do that, because there's your marketing measurement right there. Rarely do they do that. But they say that. A lot of these people say, I saw you on Instagram. So now they're like, social media is the best. But it's not without Google being the catalyst, they never would have seen that social media page.

So the catalyst is always Google. Now it's getting into some AI searches, but for the most part, that's where they start. So that type of thing is, you're right, it's getting more and more important as we go. And I had a point here.

Okay, the, okay, it's back to the review stuff. So here's an article that I saw recently that is pretty interesting. Google, some of this is old, but some of this is worth repeating. When it comes to reviews, Google only really cares about the last 90 days of reviews. So if you have a bunch of reviews in your history that are years old, Google doesn't care. But review volume really, really does help your SEO ranking. It helps everything. So the,

The review volume is more important than the review rating. if you've got a, the magic number is a 4.7. Anything above that, assume the reviews are fake. So if you keep that 4 point whatever, 4.57, whatever, those are amazing, but keep the review volume up, keep them coming in and keep those reviews. would, if you're going to, if you're going to ask your, have your staff ask the customer's reviews, I wouldn't go to Yelp to be honest with you. Yelp are the complainers and just the cry babies and Yelp is universally hated, I think.

steer them into Google and get that review volume up as much as you can and keep it as fresh as you can. Because Google sees that as, well, this place has a lot of reviews, meaning it's probably got a lot of people in the door, meaning it's probably pretty popular. If people like it, I'm going to put it in front of more eyeballs so people can go to someplace that apparently everybody likes. And the, okay, so keywords in reviews has been a big topic recently, maybe over the last year or so.

The myth is that when people are, first off, if you're a restaurant owner, respond to all your reviews, respond to every single one of them, do it in a tiny manner. The algorithm wants you to see, wants to see those responded to within 24 hours. So that's something I do if you don't have time, I get it. But when you respond to these reviews, you're responding to all of them. Don't just put out the fires and walk away, respond to the positives, thank them, invite them back in the door. When they're, you're the one, they write 10 reviews that month.

that whatever time period, you were the one that said, hey, thanks so much. We appreciate you. We hope to see you back again. Everybody else ignored their five star review. Now guess what? You're the good guy by a long shot. And yeah, yeah, it is. And even when now go back to the new customer search, they're searching through Google and they're looking at different things and they're reading reviews from all these different places. They're about to go walk in the door of, and it's like, okay, here's, there's a response from the owner. There's his cell number. There's his email address. That guy cares.

Shane Murphy (23:07)

You build brand equity at that point.

Erik Shellenberger (23:25)

It's drastically different from here's a bunch of 10 star reviews. The restaurant doesn't care. It appears that they don't care. There's not one thank you. There's not one nothing. okay, going back to my point was the keywords in reviews do mean a lot. So Google will word cloud your keywords, meaning it'll kind of put preference over the certain keywords your reviewers use. for example, if you had...

Let's go back to a barbecue joint. If you're a barbecue joint, you have the best pulled pork sandwich that they've ever had. It'll see in the review, this is the best or some positive word next to the word pulled pork sandwich. Now that really, really helps your search engine ranking. If someone types in pulled pork sandwiches near me, then you're going to be likely, there's a million different factors of course, but it's going to really help you being on top of that search. The inverse is true as well.

Worst pulled pork sandwich I've ever had in my life. That's gonna hurt you. So these keywords mean a lot in reviews, but the myth was that we need to put our keywords in our responses when we're responding to these, which that doesn't matter. Google doesn't care. Because we could just keyword stuff all day long in response and it doesn't make any, it doesn't, not only does it not matter, but it sounds ridiculous. So keep the responses like you would talk. them a natural language.

Thanks so much. appreciate the awesome review. We hope to see you back again soon. Thank you. Here's my name, title, email address, blah, blah. Leave it at that. But yeah, the reviews are being weighed on from Google and from all these search engines and from AI. The AI engines really, really do read a lot of reviews and they determine if they're gonna, and if they'll say, you see, okay, Gemini, tell me what the best barbecue places within five miles of my location right now.

that have a 4.0 or better rating on Google. They'll break the whole thing down. not like links. It's just here's a paragraph. Here's the ones I'd recommend. And one guy on Google said this was the best pull-up port sandwich he's ever had, blah, blah, blah. So it's going through all that stuff. And AI searches is probably a whole other conversation, but it's becoming to be a real big deal right

Shane Murphy (25:39)

Yeah, it, you know, a few months ago, I was in a room and we were talking about this very thing and somebody, I guess we weren't talking about this. We were talking about, where are we going to go to lunch? And everyone pulled out their phones and started looking. And one guy who had his like computer screen up sharing, he literally just opened chat GPT, typed it in. And that's how we picked.

And that was my first exposure to consumers in the real world using AI programs to search for food and to search for the things that they're looking for. And it's becoming more more commonplace. And these are all the things that the AI algorithms are going to be looking at. In addition to just if someone types into Google, it's looking at these same things.

Erik Shellenberger (26:33)

Yeah. One of my big,

real quick, one of my big, big examples is create an FAQ page on your website and ask Gemini, what are the top 20 FAQ questions for a website, for a restaurant in my area, people are gonna ask, take that whole list, fill it out, make it accurate, upload it to your FAQs. Now, AI is crawling that list. So real quick, anyway.

Shane Murphy (26:55)

That's a great strategy and that's something that you don't need an agency to do. You could do that today. Now granted there's a lot of additional things under the hood to make SEO really impactful that are complicated and you know agencies can obviously help there just like yours but someone could go create an FAQ tomorrow and that's a very tactical strategy. The other thing that you mentioned was

the recency of reviews and how important that is. We have had so many people in my company where they're talking to us and they pull up on their Google listing and we always have them open it up in incognito browser so that they're not using like their local cash or their previous search history of searching their own restaurant to impact the results. They get a view of what the consumer sees.

Erik Shellenberger (27:38)

Mm-hmm.

I guess this is life.

Yep.

Shane Murphy (27:52)

Often they're asking, hey, I have 800 reviews, but I'm number five on the list and the people right above me have 200 reviews and I have a 4.9, but they have a 4.2 and less reviews. What gives? Why am I below? And a lot of it comes down to the recency of those reviews and how engaged you are in responding to those reviews. Google's algorithm is looking...

for recency because a restaurant may have changed management. You may have gotten feedback and acted on the feedback and made your operations better. And Google is learning that over time. so you nailed it that it is so important to have recent reviews and to keep getting new reviews. Some people, hit a magic number and they just stop asking. You need to consistently get it and it pays real dollars because

Erik Shellenberger (28:46)

Yeah.

Shane Murphy (28:51)

Like the largest digital storefront today is your Google business page. And if you can influence traffic to that online storefront, you're going to get more people calling, more people ordering online, more people walking in. And like you said in very beginning, you can see the traffic on your Google listing. And you will notice a difference if you implement these strategies that Eric is talking about.

Erik Shellenberger (28:57)

sure.

Shane Murphy (29:21)

And so I would just highly recommend this is a topic that many, many restaurant owners know reviews are important and that they need to be doing that. But how it plays into SEO and how to impact your SEO is something that can't be understated, especially in today's world where dynamics are changing. And so, you know, before we wrap up, how, what's the best way for people to follow you and your content and to learn?

about your marketing agency as well.

Erik Shellenberger (29:53)

So I'm on, I'm on Facebook, I'm on Instagram as Eric Schellenberger and it's, it's so it's Eric Schellenberger, no C's, all E's. If that makes sense. E-E-E-E-R-I-K, no C in the last name. Anyway, I, I'm on my YouTube channel is just search either Bar Marketing Basics or Eric Schellenberger. I'm most active on my YouTube channel. I have a podcast as well and it's on all the podcast platforms. So whichever one you like, it's again, it's called the Restaurant and Bar Marketing Podcast.

really, really basic on purpose. Here's something I want to make sure all your listeners know, and it's a really, really cool free tool that if you go to barmarketingbasics.com, I have a website scanning tool. So it's right on the homepage, or you can click the button, scan your restaurant, put your own URL in there, scan your restaurant, and it'll tell you how well off you are from an SEO perspective. It's an A through F grade that it'll say, you're really good with, your links are great.

Your speed is terrible. Your social media presence is not good. Your on-page SEO could use some help. It'll give you all those grades. So you know exactly where to start. If you want to do it yourself, by all means, you can. A lot of it's more complicated than most people want to get into, but the scan tool, it kicks it back to you in 30 seconds and there's no, know, you have to talk to me about this before I'll give you the scan. Just you type it in, there it is. It's really simple. And it's very eye-opening to know either how good or how bad Google sees your...

web presence. that's where I would go either my YouTube or barmarketingbasics.com.

Shane Murphy (31:27)

Awesome. Yeah, I'd recommend everyone check out barmarketingbasics.com. Check out that free scan. See what the universe tells you needs to be fixed. You might be doing great. You might have some room for work. So it's good to know where you stand. I imagine you could look up the people around you to validate what Eric is talking about. Most people...

Erik Shellenberger (31:52)

100%. Yeah, test your competition

also see what they're doing.

Shane Murphy (31:56)

Most people don't do anything. So if you do the bare minimum, you can win. Eric, thank you for coming on today. This was fantastic. We'll send everybody your way and appreciate you coming on.

Erik Shellenberger (32:00)

That's right.

Thank you.

Cool, thanks a lot.