Restaurant SEO: Attract More Customers with Better Search Visibility

How often have you visited a restaurant without checking the reviews first?

Given that the food industry is so saturated, you can’t expect enough people to show up to your restaurant if you’re not adequately visible online.

There are many ways to enhance your restaurant’s discoverability, from having a responsive and appealing website to reviews and social proof. However, the best way to get started is with search engine optimization (SEO).

Restaurant SEO

Restaurant SEO helps to optimize your website and social media profiles for the search engine. This is achieved through the creation of targeted content based on your audience’s search intent.

This type of SEO includes elements such as on-page, off-page, and technical SEO—all of which collectively help your restaurant rank higher in the search results. 

So, if you’re interested in learning more about making your restaurant SEO-friendly, this article is for you. But first, let’s understand why exactly restaurant SEO is so important and how it makes your restaurant more visible to the search engines.

Why is SEO important for restaurants?

Fact: 68% of online experiences begin with a search engine.

Now, imagine if somebody searches for a good restaurant in your local area and your business doesn’t show up. Consistently losing out on such opportunities can hurt your business drastically in the long run.

Enter SEO marketing for restaurants.

SEO can boost your website up the search engine results pages (SERPS) and subsequently bring in a flux of new customers.

Search engines use certain parameters to assess web pages and rank them for the relevant keywords. So, when you optimize your restaurant’s online presence with unique recipes, blogs, and photos, your restaurant will show up more often whenever somebody searches for the right keywords.

Still wondering how you can benefit from this? By incorporating SEO into your marketing strategy, you can:

• drive better traffic by optimizing your website for certain keywords and specific questions;
• increase your rank in the SERPs and reach a qualified audience to generate more targeted leads;
• create brand awareness; and
• get an edge over your competition.

While SEO has the potential to seriously enhance your online presence, it’s better to learn the basics before you start scaling your strategy.

How to Strategize Restaurant SEO

Instead of shooting arrows in the dark, start by undertaking ample research. Luckily for you, we’ve done the legwork to guide you through the process of building your restaurant local SEO strategy from scratch.

Define Your Target Audience

Do you know who your ideal customer is? If not, then now’s the perfect time to consider this. Think of the customer base you’ve served so far and then use a survey to get more accurate results.

Look at the Olive Garden, for instance. The restaurant’s target audience includes:

• Fans of Italian cuisine
• Families and large groups
• People looking to grab a bite at the drive-through

So, study your customers and create a buyer persona. Ask questions like:

• Which age groups do you cater to?
• What kind of cuisines does your audience like?
• What are their top preferences for each course and beverage?

As you answer these questions, you’ll get familiar with your target audience and understand their needs and pain points.

Find Suitable Keywords

Once you know who your audience is, the next step is to prepare a list of keywords relevant to your business—both locally and globally.

A keyword like ‘eateries near me’ is pretty common and beneficial for a restaurant to rank for. Adding more details to this keyword can be a game-changer. So, try targeting your cuisine as well to increase your chances of ranking higher, for example, ‘Mexican eateries near me’.

Spy on Your Competition

You can see that a restaurant near you has gained a lot of traction lately. It shows up top in the SERPs for a range of different keywords—and naturally, the place is buzzing with customers. That’s the power of SEO. Checking out what these competitors are doing can be advantageous to your own strategy.

For example, look at the Local Pack results below for the search term ‘best pizza place in New York’. All three restaurants have a few things in common—they’ve optimized their Google Business Profile listings to include opening hours, address, cost per person, reviews, and ratings.

How can you get your restaurant to the top of the search results?

Ranking on Google’s first page is nothing short of a dream come true.

But getting to the top is a long-drawn-out process. You’ll need to create a targeted roadmap to ace the restaurant SEO game, and your website should be at the core of this.

Here are four key actions to consider as you work to build a successful website.

1. Do Your Homework

Scratching the surface and only taking basic SEO actions won’t get you great results. If you want your website to rank on top, assess your marketing and SEO goals first.

These goals can be to:

• Boost website traffic
• Get more leads
• Reduce bounce rate
• Expand your mailing list

Once you’ve determined your goals, evaluate your website and find the scope of improvement to make your website SEO-friendly.

Let’s look at the restaurant SEO success of Venue Restaurant and Lounge for inspiration.

The restaurant wanted to increase brand awareness by riding on the premium quality of its food. To rank for high-conversion keywords related to its food, the brand worked on content and technical elements to enhance SEO performance, leading to phenomenal results.

Note: This example predates the Google My Business rebrand to Google Business Profile.

An all-inclusive SEO marketing for restaurants approach combines building backlinks, mobile optimization, use of targeted keywords, use of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) keywords, and the creation of quality content.

This approach will eventually help you rank higher, drive more quality leads to your website, and increase footfall to your restaurant.

2. Deliver a Great User Experience

The user experience of a website is a vital aspect of SEO marketing for restaurants. Creating a tremendous navigational experience should therefore be a priority.

This includes considering:

• Visual aesthetics
• Clarity of navigation
• Snippets of the latest news

Bresca presents the perfect design for a user-friendly website. This DC-based restaurant flaunts its beautiful ambiance and offers key details about reservations on the homepage. Users can easily learn more about the restaurant through the navigation bar at the top.

Besides improving your website’s user experience (UX), focus on the following three aspects of Google’s Core Web Vitals to enhance your website’s impact. 

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)

This is the time that the largest element on your website or URL takes to load. Web content usually loads as soon as a visitor enters a page—so people have come to expect this. If your website pages take too long to load, it can avert a reader from your pages.

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)

This measures the sudden changes in text structure or visuals on a page without prior warning. This shift can often be annoying and ruin user experience by moving them to another part of the page without notice. Hence, CLS helps provide an excellent experience to your visitors.

First Input Delay (FID)

This measures the time taken for an action to complete. For example, if the user clicks on a button on your page or link.

Here’s how you can determine the score for these three metrics:

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