TOP 10 RESTAURANT SEO TIPS

Have a wonderful experience of a successful SEO with these 10 essential tips designed to improve the visibility of your restaurant in local Google and organic searches.

As restaurant owners, you will find lots of factors affecting the increasing amount of pressure to improve your online presence.

Well, a strong online presence is no more optional and customers need to find your restaurant quickly and easily across several platforms. The best way to boost your online presence is restaurant search engine optimization.

Your online profile is very much essential as online ordering and food delivery interrupt the traditional restaurant models.

Whether it is the pandemic, or the changes in the importance of having a strong online presence, or increased competition, the first and most important thing is to improve online visibility for both in-person and carry-out options.

You will find various options like paid ads, partner services, and referral options for gaining traffic. Moreover, ranking high on the top of the google search engine is an effective and cost-effective way of getting direct and relevant traffic to turn into customers.

Before we jump into the main topic, let’s know :

  • What is Restaurant SEO
  • Why do you need SEO for Restaurants?

What Is Restaurant SEO?

Search Engine Optimization(SEO) is one of the best online strategies for restaurants in 2021 besides all other online or mobile ordering systems. Restaurant SEO is a method of optimizing your Restaurant’s website, social media, and overall digital presence.

An online presence can be optimized by adding relevant content to your websites like blog posts, recipes, connecting with your customers on social media platforms.

Make sure your restaurant information like an address, contact number, is consistent so that Google knows that you are relevant. You just need to know the basics to kick-start your Restaurant marketing.

In this article, you’ll find the top 10 restaurant SEO tips to help you improve online visibility, traffic, and customers.

So, let’s get started:

1. Define your Content & SEO Strategies

You need to define your SEO strategy before moving on a large number of platforms, tools, and engagement channels. This will definitely help you to create a path for generating quality traffic to your website and narrowing your competition as well. 

Begin with defining the geographic area that you wish especially the area where most of your customers come from. As most of the people either belong to this place or visit these places more often.

The next step is to do proper research of your keywords, terms, and phrases that your audiences are using with the help of trusted keyword research tools like SEMrush, Moz Pro, or others.

Apart from this, there are some well-defined groupings of terms that you can properly classify which have different levels of competition.

High-level restaurant terms

Well, there are terms like “ LA city Restaurants” and “Restaurants” that people might use normally, which are some of the most generic variations. 

You can set your geographic focus to the particular area you found and make use of both the generic term by itself (“Restaurants”) and geographic modifier (“LA City restaurants”).

In addition to this, you can even use other general variations related to your restaurants.

Niche-specific terms

The next comes to the specific categories that your restaurant can cover. Let’s say for example, “Pizza”, “Chinese restaurants,” “romantic restaurants,” and other types of cuisine and unique features.

If you are worried about the specific categories or wordings to be used, then Google Maps (the Google My Business listings), and TripAdvisor and Yelp can help you in this regard. Implement the filtering criteria in your location in order to check the general categories they use.

Brand terms

Never take it for granted as you will automatically reach the top of the brand searches. You must have the information regarding the number of users looking for your restaurant by name so that you can compare it to the top-level and niche-specific search volume.

You must be assured that your website outranks the social sites and directory in your location for your restaurant, as the number of people visiting your website is trackable and higher.

Once you are done with search terms and volume data, you can slow down your focus to the specific terms that fit your restaurant at high, category-specific, and brand levels.

Covering this spectrum helps you to properly focus on what to measure and defining your content.

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2. Dominate in Local Search

It is one of the most important and useful tips in order to boost your Restaurant business. You need to claim, standardize the data and optimize the listings of your restaurants over all the relevant and major local searches.

This involves a combination of social media sites, search engine directories, and industry-specific directory sites. There are specially designed tools like Moz Local and Yext that can help you understand what directories and external data sources are there so that can ensure that they are updated.

Apart from this, perfect NAP (name, address, phone) data that is consistent in all the data sources is a very important and foundation element of Local SEO.

Further, you can focus on optimizing the fields of information like the business categories and business descriptions to set up the terms that are identified in your keyword research.

Start focussing on the valuable directories that matter. Google My Business is what you can start with and then follow other websites such as Tripadvisor, Yelp, various yellow pages, and other emerging websites. 

All the above terms are very helpful to improve your online visibility.

3. Connect with Customers on Social Media Networks

Even though there are lots of discussions regarding the impact of Social media on SEO, but it is well known that social media engagement can drive users to your site.

Social media can act as a powerful element of the customer journey, showing what customers can expect to experience at your restaurant.

A strong social presence directly relates to a powerful organic search presence in the form of content, engagement, and popularity aligned with the major SEO pillars of authority and relevance.

Implement the best social media strategy and follow with proper planning.

Reply to all inquiries promptly and make sure to engage with your followers. It is very crucial because the way you communicate online creates an overall impression of your overall customer service and approach.

Look for your audience, connect with them, and influence other users through them on your behalf for your services.

Promoting your content and engagement with followers will eventually attract visitors to your website and thus increase the number of audience from social media platforms.

This can put a great impact on an SEO strategy for your Restaurant that relates to the benefits for your site from the rest of your SEO efforts.

4. Encourage Testimonials & Reviews

It’s quite impossible for a restaurant that anyone searching for it and could not find any review or rating scores in the search results. The reason behind this is people usually click on the higher ratings.

Ratings and reviews are considered to be a part of social media strategy and helpful in engaging with the audience. Along with this, it also affects the traffic to your site through search result pages.

With the help of a structured data markup, you can achieve the required ratings appearing in the search results. It offers another valuable reason for the users to click on your website rather than your competitor’s.

If you think that your online ratings are not good enough to reflect the quality of your restaurant then, you can come up with the review strategy to achieve as many reviews as possible.

It will definitely bring up your score by implementing the code that will pull the ratings into the SERPs.

The result is exactly what you want. A high star rating means higher click which increases the click-through rate and finally, that leads to more traffic.

5. Create Unique Content

It is easier for you if you have a single location rather than a multi-location when it comes to creating unique content. Moreover, you have to stand out from your competitor with enough unique content on your website.

A well-planned content strategy can be helpful and serve you well if it is valuable to your customers and prospects. Creating a strong brand will result in high rankings, greater brand affinity, and better brand recall.

Remember that content is more than that of a written copy. You can include certain videos, interesting pictures, graphics on your website. You can even go for in-house promotion and, present your menus.

The search engines are not only focused on the keywords but also on the context of your site. So, by proper research of content and generating them regularly, you can keep the pipeline full of engaging material that helps you in your business growth.

For example, if you have a niche restaurant, hold on and set yourself to be different from others down the street. These are some of the best restaurant tips that can hike your brand promotion.

Share required information about the cultures, founders, and products. Mention the details regarding the menu including the recipes, sourcing of ingredients why your chicken masala is best in town, and many more. 

6. Consider Content Localization

Once again, single-location restaurants are proved to be easier in this context. Make sure to provide the required context and signals to the users and the search engines as per your decisions about your market area.  So that it will be easy for the users and search engines to find the particular location of your restaurant.

It is important to mention the accurate area that you serve, as sometimes out-of-town visitors and the search engines do not understand the unofficial names of your nearby areas.

Now, you can help each user by providing content that is attached to the community and not just assumes that everyone has an idea of your location.

For example, there is a 100-location chain starting from a single paragraph for each location. Each paragraph was written in a customized way in different categories such as the local history, the store, neighborhood, and community engagement.

From this, one can easily find other areas to scale and a perfect way to differentiate stores from each other.

7. Follow Basic On-Page SEO Best Practices

Before you get into the details of all on-page and indexing optimization strategies, we would like to encourage you not to ignore or skip the on-page SEO best practices.  

Indexing is essential for the search engines so that they can ensure your presence and on-page to check for the proper classification of your content.

You can spend enough time on your full SEO strategy, but if you are thinking to start then, keep everything aside and begin with these two areas.

The first thing that you can do is check for your robot.txt and XML sitemap to make sure whether it is indexed properly or not. You can go for setting up Google Search Console to look for any kind of errors.

In the case of on-page SEO, it is very essential to have unique and keyword-specific page URLs, meta description tags, page copy, headings, title tags,  and image alt attributes.

This can sound you a lot but get started with the most important pages like your menu, home, contact pages, about, and proceed from there as time permits.

8. Focus on Mobile-friendly Website

Nowadays, there is a high percentage of mobile users visiting restaurant websites. This is the reason, Google is focussing on the mobile version of every website for understanding its content.

Fortunately, you’ve already created a website that is responsive or that has passed the required mobile-friendly tests.

Well, there is much more when it comes to mobile. It is also important to check the proper rendering, page load speed, and providing an amazing mobile user experience.

9. Implement Schema Markup “Restaurants”

You can create the context for search engines in another area by using structured data and achieve maximum exposure to your audiences. This is the best way to boost your website promotion and increase the number of visitors to your website.

Implementation of Schema.org is has become the necessary factor for the restaurant industry. This method includes a website platform, a developer, content management system with the perfect plugins or built-in options.

This important tip is a must for a successful Restaurant SEO.

10. Measure Your Efforts

Along with all the above nine SEO tips, this point is something that cannot be ignored. You need to measure all your efforts with all other tips for the best results at the end. All that matters is making your restaurant must have a strong online presence and gain a maximum audience. 

Make sure that all your efforts are measurable before you start on any aspect of optimization. Monitor regularly whether they are working or not and on what terms your efforts are best producing return on investment.

Track other factors such as engagement, visibility, and conversion metrics to strongly connect them to your business. Apart from this, you need to identify the right method that can be helpful in achieving your business goals and can assure you that you’re on the right path.

Final Words

We are aware of your busy schedule for investing in multiple things to attract new customers to your restaurants. When most people are searching for new places online, it is necessary to stick with restaurant SEO services and make sure your website is always optimized.

Now, that you are clear about how to get started and with our effective SEO tips for restaurants, you can kick-start by implementing the strategies you have learned. Search engine optimization takes time to show the complete results. So, the earlier you start the better will be your business sales in long term.

If you wish to reduce the amount of time it takes to see the results of your website rankings, then Tachomind is here to help you out. We are a leading SEO agency and have worked with many clients in the past, so we know what is best for you!

If you really looking for the perfect way to make your restaurant full, day in and day out, and want people to be able to find you online, then follow the above tips to build a strong foundation for your restaurant SEO.

This is useful in driving more sales and revenue to your business. Thereafter your job is to handle all that extra traffic coming through your doors.

Last but not the least, if you think, that we have not covered any important topic, please feel free to contact us or write us below!

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