10 Sources of Free Customer Traffic for Your Food Truck

Arsen Carpenter

It's not an easy task to be a food truck proprietor in the year 2020. There are so many new challenges for self-employed food truck vendors, from the advent of Yelp and their scathing reviews to the expensive costs of starting a brick and mortar business. The traditional way – advertising, celebrity endorsements, et al – is rife with pitfalls. Most people will not be able to use the traditional methods of maximizing their business because:

  1. they don’t have enough money and
  2. traditional methods don’t work on the internet

Most people just starting out in business for the first time fall into two categories: those who are aware of online social media and marketing, but never do anything about it, or those who aren’t even aware that there is anything you can do to drive traffic to your food truck website from places like Google Maps and Yelp.

If you are unaware that you even have a web site, we need to talk. You need to know more about how useful your food truck Website can be for driving revenue for very little cost. If you have a food  truck website, a web site that people find when they are searching online, your site can be used to drive traffic from these vital sources: Google Maps, Apple Maps, Google searches for ‘taco truck near me’ or ‘best tacos in my town’ or ‘Best food truck near me’.

How Can I Drive Traffic to My Food Truck Website?

Knowing how to drive traffic to your food truck web site is very important if you want to maximize your business’s success on the internet. Here are a few tips that will get you started:

1. Google can do everything for you if you learn how to make it work for you. Google is THE premier search engine, and if you can figure out how to get higher ranking in the search results, you can put drivers in front of your windows easily and quickly. There are a number of things that affect your ranking on Google:

2. Quality of your website’s content: If you have great content, your food truck website will be ranked higher on Google because it will stand out among the dozens of other food  trucks who don’t know how to improve their ranking.

3. Your business must have a good social media presence, and the more followers you have, the higher your website rises in search rankings. When someone is searching for a taco truck, they see a variety of websites with tons of information about different locations and ratings. If yours does not have an active social media presence, readers will not interpret it as important information for their decision as to whether or not they should consider your taco truck as part of their travel itinerary.

4. If you have other social media accounts, be sure that all of your accounts are set up to show the right information for each service. For example, if you are running a Twitter account, make sure that the information that is displayed on your tacos is also on your Twitter account. If your Twitter account has more followers than you do on Instagram or Facebook, it will look better to search engines when they display your taco truck in their search results.

5. Yelp can work for you. People who want tacos will go to Yelp to find a good place to eat. This means that you need to make it easy for them to find your tacos on Yelp. If you have a great business, Yelp will be willing to promote it for free. They want their website users to find good businesses, so they’ll help you get found on Google Maps and Facebook for free if you have an active social media presence and if your taco truck website has great content.

6. Use your smartphone to capture pictures of your tacos and of you and your workers serving tacos. Mobilize your audience with fun pictures that give them information about your menu, location, hours of operation, and anything else that they need to know about your tacos. People can see these pictures on Apple Maps or Google Maps when they are searching for a taco place.

7. If you are unable to generate enough reviews for yourself from Yelp or other local search engines, then pay someone to write a good review for you. You don’t have to waste time writing the review yourself if you hire someone who knows how to write it well.

8. Keep your website fresh by adding new content with information about your menu or new locations. This will help you maximize the number of people who find your tacos online.

9. If you have a mobile app for your food truck, then advertise it on Google Maps and other local search engines that will help potential customers find your taco truck.

10. If you want to be able to track how many people are finding you online, use a tool like Google Analytics to track visitors to your taco truck website and find out what they’re searching for when they get there.

Create a Shoppable Menu for Your Food Truck

Now that you have the traffic sources, you need a web site. The best part is that, you no longer need to pay someone thousands to create you a shoppable online menu. Menustripe lets you create a shoppable online meny in minutes with no technical skills required.

Go to https://www.menustripe.com/. This is a great place to start if you want to create a site for the food truck industry. It has many options that will allow you to build a mobile website or even just a web page link that can be placed on Yelp or on Google Maps or Facebook. Start your free 14-day trial and enjoy free traffic.