What 62,000 Chester Searches Say About Getting Found

Google showed our page for the phrase "happy hour chester" nineteen times in four weeks. Six of those people clicked.

That is a click-through rate of 32%. Our venue pages average 0.7%.

And the best-performing page on Out In Chester is not a venue page at all — it is a list of which Chester bars run a happy hour and when. 303 appearances in search, 25 clicks, 8.25%: more than ten times what a typical venue page manages, from a page about deals rather than about a place.

Now the other half of it. In the same four weeks Google showed us for "pub offers in chester" 55 times, "pub offers near me" 50 times, "pub deals" 29 times and "2 for 1 cocktails chester" 26 times. Clicks between them: zero. We rank about 35th for most of those, which is page four, so nobody was ever going to.

That gap is what this post is about, and it contains the one genuinely useful thing we can tell a venue: a deal is the only thing people reliably search for that isn't already somebody's name.

We run Out In Chester, so we can see what Chester actually types into Google when it's deciding where to eat and drink. Over the 28 days to 19 August our pages were shown 62,094 times in search results. We publish our own numbers because we ask venues to share theirs — so what follows is the whole picture, including the parts that don't flatter us.

Two things up front, since one of them is a conflict of interest. The figures are Google Search Console data for outinchester.com covering 23 July to 19 August 2026, quoted as they came. And Out In Chester is built by Porkenpence, a web development agency — same people, different hat. There's a pitch at the end. Everything before it is just the data.

The short version, if you're standing behind a bar and haven't got all day:

• If you run a deal, a happy hour or a bottomless brunch, say so somewhere Google can read it. It is the highest-converting thing anyone searches for locally and almost nobody publishes it.
• Nearly six in ten searches are somebody typing a specific venue's name. Almost nobody searches "pubs in Chester" — it came up nine times in four weeks.
• About a third of everything is a menu search. Having your menu as text on a web page — rather than a PDF, or a photo of a board — is the cheapest fix on this page.
• Your Google Business Profile hours answer more searches than your website does, because people never click through for them.

Deals are the one thing people search for blind

Almost every search that reaches us is somebody who already knows where they're going. Deal searches are the exception: nobody types "pub offers in chester" because they've picked a pub. They're asking to be persuaded.

Across the thousand most common searches that reached us, deals, offers, happy hours and bottomless brunches account for 452 appearances — about 1.6% of the total, and small in absolute terms. Two things make it worth more than its size:

It converts better than anything else. That bucket clicks at 1.99% while sitting at an average position of 31. Menu searches — twenty times the volume — click at 1.01% from position 8.5. People looking for a deal will go to page three to find one. Nobody goes to page three for a menu.

The number is a floor, not a ceiling. Search Console counts an appearance only when our result was actually on the page somebody loaded. At position 35, that's a fraction of the people who typed it. Real demand for "pub offers in chester" is higher than 55 — we just can't see the rest of it.

Here is what that demand looks like, and what it currently gets:

Somebody searched	We were shown	We ranked	They clicked
happy hour chester	19	6.8	6
pub offers in chester	55	35.2	0
pub offers near me	50	24.2	0
pub deals	29	47.8	0
2 for 1 cocktails chester	26	40.1	0
bottomless brunch chester	18	36.5	0

One of those six rows is on the front page, and it took every click. That is the whole finding.

Six clicks is a small number and we're not going to dress it up — at nineteen appearances it could move a lot on a quiet week. But it points the same way as the page-level data underneath it, which is built on hundreds of appearances rather than nineteen, and the same way as three consecutive months of our own numbers.

What it means for a venue: a deal is a piece of information only you have. Google can find your address, your phone number and usually your hours without you. It cannot find out that you do two-for-one cocktails on a Wednesday unless somebody writes it down. That is why the demand goes unanswered — not because it's hard to rank for, but because almost nobody in the city has published the answer.

If you run one, put it on your own site in text. And tell us and we'll put it on ours, free — that's what the deals page is for, and it's the one thing we'd genuinely rather have from you than anything else.

Nobody searches for "restaurants in Chester"

This is the finding that surprises every venue we've shown it to.

Across the thousand most common searches that reached us in those four weeks, the phrase "pubs in Chester" and its variants appeared nine times. Not nine thousand. Nine.

Here's where the volume actually is.

At least 58% of the searches that reach us name a specific venue. We measured that by matching search text against the names of the venues we list, so it's a floor rather than a total — a venue we don't list, or a name spelled differently, won't have counted. About a third of those add the word "menu"; the rest are the name on its own.

Everything else is a rounding error by comparison. Each figure below is a share of the thousand-query sample Google gives us, which is not the whole of our traffic — it's the biggest slice of it we can see. Two searches in that sample were a Google surfacing quirk rather than demand: they produced 6,531 appearances and not one click. We've excluded them, because including them would understate everything else by a fifth.

What people search	Share of sampled searches
A menu	34.0%
"near me" anything	2.1%
deals, offers, happy hour	1.6%
price or cost	1.5%
opening times	0.8%

So the overwhelming majority of Chester's going-out search traffic is somebody who has already chosen where they're going. They're not browsing. They know the name, they've typed it in, and they want one specific thing — usually the menu.

That reframes what a venue's website is actually for. It is not a brochure that persuades undecided people to visit. It is a menu, opening hours and a phone number, being looked up by somebody who has already decided.

Want to know what people type to find you?

We hold this for every venue on the list, one page at a time, and there's no reason it should only be ours.

We're not going to publish which venue is which. But it's your venue, and they're your numbers as much as ours: if you're on our list, email us and we'll send you yours — how many times your page was shown, the actual phrases people typed to find you, and how many of them clicked. The search terms are usually the interesting part, and they are not something you can see from your own side. No charge, and no obligation to do anything about it.

One condition, and it's the obvious one: we'll want to know you actually work there. An email from the venue's own address, or from one we already hold for you, does it — otherwise we'll ask, and we'd rather ask than get it wrong. These figures are a fair guide to how much interest there is in a particular place, and that makes them yours rather than everybody's.

The three things people search for and never click

Genuinely odd, and consistent across four months of data:

• Opening times — 218 appearances, zero clicks
• Price and cost — 424 appearances, 2 clicks
• "Near me" — 588 appearances, 3 clicks, and we rank 24th on average

Opening times and prices get answered on the results page itself, by the Google Business Profile panel, so nobody needs to click anything. That's not a failure — it's Google doing its job. But it means your Google Business Profile hours are doing more work than any page on your website, and if they're wrong, nothing downstream can fix it.

"Near me" is different: Google localises those results to wherever the searcher is standing, so a directory competes nationally on a search it can only ever serve people already in Chester. It's unwinnable for us and largely unwinnable for you.

What we found when we checked who has a website

This is the part that doesn't flatter us, and it's the most useful thing in the data.

We went looking for the website of every venue we list, and recorded what we found. We have that on record for 307 of them. Then we compared how often people click our page for that venue.

The venue has…	Click-through on our page
Its own website	0.50%
Nothing of its own	2.52%

Five times the difference. And before anyone assumes that's just about ranking, we checked: comparing only pages sitting at the same position in Google, the gap holds — 1.65% against 0.58% for results in positions eight to eleven.

When a venue has its own website, that website takes the click. Ours is showing on the same page, and people go past it, because a summary written by someone else is not what they came for.

We think that's the right outcome. It's also worth saying plainly what it means: a directory listing is a fallback, not a replacement.

One more detail worth knowing. We split the venues four ways, and having only a Facebook page performed the same as having a full website — 0.71% against 0.58%. The line isn't "good website versus bad website". It's whether anything you control ranks for your own name. If nothing does, the answer somebody gets is assembled from whatever Google can find, and that includes us.

What actually works, whoever hosts it

Four things, all free, all from what we can see in the data:

Publish your deals. Covered at the top, and it's first for a reason: it's the only search we can see where the person hasn't decided yet, and it's the only answer Google cannot get without you.

Put your menu on a web page as text. About a third of the searches that matter are somebody after a menu, so this is the highest-volume thing on this page.

To be accurate about why, because this gets overstated: Google can read a text-based PDF and has indexed them for twenty years. But it treats that PDF as a separate document from your website, it is a miserable read on a phone, and if the PDF is a scan — or the menu is a photograph of a chalkboard — then you are relying on Google recognising characters in an image rather than reading text. Text on the page is the only version nothing has to interpret, and it is the version that carries the rest of your page's signals with it.

That last paragraph is general practice rather than something our data measures. Everything else on this page is measured.

Check your Google Business Profile hours. They answer more searches than your website does, they're what people see without clicking anything, and they're wrong more often than owners expect — especially bank holidays and kitchen times that differ from bar times.

Say what you actually charge. Price searches are small in number but they convert when the answer is there, and almost nobody publishes prices. We hold price data for the venues that have shared it, and those pages perform noticeably better than the ones without.

Where we are

We're not going to pretend to be bigger than we are. Out In Chester is growing quickly and is still small: 62,094 search appearances and 467 clicks in the last four weeks, with 753 people on the site — up 120% on the four weeks before. We list more than 300 venues; about a sixth of those search appearances were for pages other than a venue's, like the guides and the blog. Our average position in Google went from 22nd to 12th over the same four weeks.

Search attention is spread very unevenly, and that is the part worth knowing. The busiest venue page we hold was shown in Google's results more than 1,600 times in those four weeks. Twenty-one were shown over 500 times. But half of them were shown fewer than 115 times, and seventy fewer than fifty.

If we hold something wrong about your venue — hours, prices, an offer that ended — tell us at hello@outinchester.com and we'll fix it. Listing is free and always has been.

If you don't have a website

Two things are true at once in the data above: our page works hardest for venues that have nothing of their own, and those venues would do better still with something of their own.

We're not going to pretend that's a neutral observation, and it's why we flagged the conflict at the top: Porkenpence builds websites for small businesses, and it's the same people who build this.

If you're one of the Chester venues with no website — and by our count there are 37 of you on our list alone — that's who we'd point you at. A menu people can read, hours that are right, your deals in text, and a phone number, on a site you own. That's most of what the search data says people actually want.

And if you'd rather not, the listing stays free either way. The data above is worth having regardless of who builds anything.