Restaurant for near me
The moniker of their brand-new Thai eatery looked absurd and careless, even to its proprietors. For fear of it coming across as too absurd, a few of them were too ashamed to mention it to friends at all.
However, one of the four proprietors, Teddy Jirapraphanan, recalled his own Google restaurant search experience.
He declares, “I’m craving Thai food everywhere I go.” “I always have to hunt for “Thai food around me.”
Jirapraphanan is precisely the type of client Thai Food Near Me is looking to attract. The restaurant, located in New York, chose its name based on a real Google search, staking its claim that SEO, or search engine optimization, can increase traffic and attract customers. The restaurant is not designed for the person strolling by on the street or receiving a referral from a friend; rather, it is tailored for the digital platforms that diners use to identify nearby places.
Thai Food Near Me is a modest but potent representation of the extent to which Google’s influence has impacted companies over the past 20 years and the extent to which their owners would go in order to maximize their business’s potential on the company’s platforms. The name is both noteworthy and clear; if you’ve done any web research, you’ll be able to recognize the allusion right away. The turn is that the name speaks loudly about the quiet portion, 25 years after Google Search originally debuted.
This year, The Verge is delving into how Google Search has transformed the internet into a robot’s playground and how Google itself is at risk from artificial intelligence.
“If your name is random, you will be at the bottom [of rankings] when there are a million restaurants nearby,” claims Jirapraphanan. “But people got to know us when we used Thai Food Near Me.” They told him that patrons like Jirapraphanan were looking for the identical term and happened across the restaurant.
Before the restaurant opened in March, a picture of it with the windows still covered in brown butcher paper went popular on Twitter. The absurd name of the restaurant was sufficient to attract attention from news outlets and bring in a large number of patrons during the vital first few months of its operation.
Every time a brand posted a viral tweet, it was met with an abundance of amiably bland, attention-seeking answers in all lowercase letters. The meme-y restaurant name is meant to outsmart Google Maps, the very entity the official account of Google Maps couldn’t resist.
“Extremely relatable,” the business retorted, utilizing a crown emoji. However, opinions on its inclusion in the thread varied.
“This is about how your products don’t even work anymore,” a customer retorted.
How to find restaurant for near me?
Thai Food Near Me is situated in Manhattan’s Murray Hill district on a bustling street.
The Google-first naming convention wasn’t invented by Thai Food Near Me alone. Everywhere in American cities, there are reminders of Google’s dominant position in online discoverability.
I managed to locate a number of businesses, including a chain of six Affordable Dentist Near Me locations in Texas, an Antiques Near Me store located two hours outside of New York City, seven Plumber Near Me locations, a Phone Repair Near Me location in Cape Cod, Massachusetts, a Psychic Near Me location in Chicago, and over 20 variations of “Notary Near Me” located throughout the United States.
Felix Silva explored around 20 names for his Coral Springs, Florida store in 2019 before settling on Barber Shop Near Me. Although Silva wholeheartedly embraced the Google joke, the name is supposed to be neutral and distinctive (there was another contender, “The Barber Shop”). The logo is a red location pin that resembles Google’s own, with a pattern of blue, white, and red barber poles in the center.
Silva had direct experience with how a company’s Google presence might either increase or decrease its chances of success.
“We only had a logo [on an Instagram account] before we opened.” “And then we had some clients tell us, ‘Oh, man, we thought Google was coming to town before you guys opened,” recalls Silva.
Similar to Jirapraphanan, Silva had direct experience with the positive or negative effects that a company’s Google presence could have on its prospects for success because he routinely looks for restaurants using keywords like “vegan.” Once, a customer review for a restaurant that wasn’t vegan but had the highlighted term in it appeared in Google search results.
“It was like a eureka moment—I realized that this is the right course of action.” Since Google will be the cornerstone of the firm, I really need to focus on building a strong web presence,” Silva explains.
Similar to Thai Food Near Me, attracting customers with SEO is the most effective thing a name can do. From then on, it is the responsibility of a business to provide them with an enjoyable experience, be it a delicious plate of pad see ew or an excellent haircut. After then, the cycle keeps going: content consumers write positive evaluations. Positive evaluations raise the company’s Google Maps profile ranking. Silva offers updates on the page in addition to posting excellent pictures and videos. That’s another SEO tactic—active profiles, according to some experts.
Nevertheless, Silva notes that the naming technique has taken off: one acquaintance who sold Christmas trees, for instance, changed the name of his company to Christmas Trees Near Me. (Google Maps indicates that Silva’s is not the only Barber Shop Near Me; there are more establishments using the same name in Muskogee, Oklahoma; Oak Park, Illinois; and Queens, New York.)
It was an affirmation. About the rebranding of the Christmas tree company, Silva remarks, “It was good to see that this inspires certain individuals in some way. But he’s constantly considering what comes next and what can offer his company the advantage it needs to keep expanding. He occasionally questions whether an increase in “near me” companies might lessen the effect.
However, Silva asserts that Google is Google and that a customer’s location is “near me.”
It remains to be seen if these businesses will benefit from this attempt at SEO; from my Brooklyn home, a Google Maps search for “Thai food near me” produced a number of results that were literally nearby, but not Jirapraphanan’s establishment, which is only a few miles away.
Co-owner Robert Sampson of Thai Food Near Me says he followed the online conversation on the name’s usefulness. Sampson also manages much of the back-end work for the business, including SEO.
“Those who suggested that [the name] isn’t a great idea… They seem to be reacting more to a national branding drive, in my opinion. It’s true that you won’t have much luck finding us if you search for “Thai food near me” while you’re in California, according to Sampson. However, I believe the name works incredibly well for local search.
Semrush, a provider of prominent SEO tools and keyword research, reports that the US searches for “Thai food near me” around a million times a month on average. Semrush rates the phrase as “difficult” to rank for, indicating that it’s competitive but not the hardest category and that you’ll need referring domains and optimized content to try to compete for it.
Google encourages and it is a taught behavior to include “near me” to a search term. The joke works because “___ near me” is a popular autocompleted search option on Maps and Search and has come to be associated with Google.
At least in theory, the SEO approach had the desired effect on the folks I chatted with that August evening at Thai Food Near Me. Travis, one of the customers, was looking for local restaurants after missing a reservation elsewhere and came across Thai Food Near Me on Yelp. When the restaurant went viral this spring, a number of the group members heard about it but were unaware that it was located in New York.
Though they were unsure of what to anticipate, the group decided that the cuisine was good. They informed me they would most certainly think about returning if they were ever in the region.
So did Thai Food Near Me’s ingenious SEO-trick of a name really help push it above its local competition in search results?
Danny Sullivan, Google’s public relations representative for Search, adds, “I doubt it.” Owners that take this approach might succeed, but Google uses a “hodgepodge of different things that we have that are out there” in addition to location, reviews, and ratings to provide results to users.
According to Google’s open documentation, relevance, prominence, and distance are the three factors it considers when ranking locally relevant search results. Google encourages businesses to include a wealth of information on their profile in order to enhance local ranking. In addition to providing the necessities, including up-to-date operating hours and precise location information, owners should reply to reviews, upload images, and even list specific items that are in stock on their Google page.
“It’s not like they’re very good marketing campaigns,”
Data from the web, such as news coverage, links to the company, and how well it ranks in conventional search, are included in Maps’ prominence assessment. This is how SEO affects a company’s listing in local search results; one method Google uses to assess a page’s relevancy is through links and news stories. (This explains why reporters frequently receive unsolicited offers from marketers to purchase “guest posts” on our websites.)
Strangely, the Manhattan eatery got the top recommendation when I searched for “Thai food near me” on Google Maps from Wisconsin. It was far simpler to locate the restaurant from the Midwest than from Brooklyn. According to Sullivan, this might be because Google has identified a company with a nearly exact match name that is somewhat well-known and that people are looking for in several places. It might inspire others to name their companies in this manner, but according to Sullivan, it’s not a problem that has to be fixed.
These are the kinds of things that I’ve seen throughout the years, and they always give me a little giggle. However, Sullivan told The Verge, “I don’t think they’re really great marketing campaigns.” According to him, Google has always advised companies to make decisions that benefit their clients, not the platform.
There are specialty meals on the restaurant’s “secret menu.”
Although Sullivan may argue that using a “near me” name won’t help you trick the search engine algorithm, inadvertently, Thai Food Near Me benefited from the moniker.
Although its original SEO “hack” was probably technically unsuccessful, it was amusing and memorable. The restaurant’s name became the subject of countless articles and forum posts as a result of the joke, which helped it in search engine optimization. The story you are currently reading and all of the other content here will contribute to Thai Food Near Me’s increased visibility on Google platforms. An SEO tactic has supplanted another.
It is evident that the name has drawn in clients even though it may not perform as well on Google as Sampson and Jirapraphanan had hoped. According to Sampson, during the first few months of the business’s existence, the majority of visitors arrived via Reddit and Twitter posts rather than Google searches. Some would pass by outside, glance twice at the sign, and then enter.
“You have people who enjoyed their dining experience here after you get that initial bunch,” he says. If they enjoyed it, “they’ll tell all their friends and family, and then those people come from word of mouth.”
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