Article last updated on August 2019
BRIEF OVERVIEW OF THE INDUSTRY
With almost 1000 restaurants listed on Trip Advisor, Siem Reap is becoming a popular food destination in South East Asia with a broad range of cuisine for all budgets. You can find Khmer, Thai, Indian,Chinese, Korean,Japanese but also French, Mexican, Italian,Turkish and Greek restaurants.
With so many restaurants, visitors have a hard time making a selection especially as most do not stay very long (3 nights in average). To make the search even more difficult, businesses are often relocating due to soaring renting prices and from time to time , some are closing down their operation.
GOOGLE OR TRIP ADVISOR ?
Instinctively, many visitors are turning to Google Search and Google Map to find the best places to eat in Siem Reap. Trip advisor listing and local web directories are dominating the top search results like “restaurant siem reap” or “best restaurant siem reap”.
The online marketing strategy of the food businesses in Siem Reap is quite different than the one of the luxury spas : restaurant owners especially at their early stage of operation, are relying heavily on Trip Advisor to bring customers, either by using a free or a paid listing. As far as free listing concerned, being on the first page 1 is clearly an competitive advantage, but the most difficult is to keep your ranking as competitors will not have any problem writing negative reviews to put you down. Although not all restaurants have a website, they do not take advantage of what SEO can bring to the table (no pun intended)…
We found out that few restaurants (3) used Google Ads pay-per-click campaigns to drive traffic to their website which is much lower in percentage than luxury spas. Consequently the Cost-per-click (CPC) for many keywords is under USD 0.5.
A SEO audit conducted on several websites showed that many websites are not SEO friendly and unless they pay for ads they are not visible on a search done with search engines.
If the restaurant is famous, some traffic will come to the website because potential customers are typing the restaurant’s name on Google but if the site is not optimized organic traffic will be non existant.
Many opportunities exist for restaurants in Siem Reap to improve their website traffic. With a good SEO work, it is possible to outrank competitors and even Trip Advisor. It is also a more sustainable approach that paid ads on Google . Because they work in different ways, SEO can be complimentary to a free or paid listing on Trip advisor.
Changkran Khmer restaurant, enjoy fine dining Khmer cuisine in a traditional wooden house away from the crowded city center
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