SEO for Restaurants: A Complete Guide

Have you ever heard of Thai Food Near Me? This Thai restaurant in New York chose its name to attempt to game the Google search algorithm and rise to the top of the ranks for Thai food. The name garnered plenty of attention, and it serves as a sign of how important good SEO is for making your business stand out. “Thai food near me” isn’t just the name of a restaurant– it’s a very common keyword when searching for something to eat. 

While you don’t have to rename your business to stand out, this guide will help you understand what you should do to make it easy for people to find your restaurant online. If you want to know how to improve restaurant website SEO, start by taking action with these steps.

Improve Restaurant SEO by Thinking Locally

Who comes to restaurants? Locals and people visiting your town. Restaurants don’t need to worry about global SEO; instead, their concern should be ranking locally, using local SEO. To make sure that you show up in local searches, you need to optimize your business’s online presence to attract customers in a specific geographic area. To do this, you need to find out what local keywords for your neighborhood, city, and overall region are being searched for. 

With the increasing use of mobile devices and voice search, optimizing for local SEO ensures that restaurants appear prominently in local search results, driving foot traffic and reservations. To get the most out of your local SEO strategy, there are several steps to take. You need to claim and optimize Google My Business listings with accurate business information, such as name, address, phone number, and operating hours. Additionally, improving your website content, meta tags, and descriptions with localized keywords, such as city names, neighborhoods, and cuisine specialties, helps restaurants rank higher in local searches. 

Your reviews will also help with your local SEO. Encouraging positive reviews on platforms like Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor improves reputation and boosts local SEO rankings. Engaging with the local community on social media can further enhance visibility and attract local customers..

Keyword Research: Finding The Right Ingredients

When you build your restaurant’s website, you need to make sure you use the right keywords. The best way to do this is through keyword research. Doing keyword research lets you identify the terms and phrases potential customers use when searching for dining options online. By understanding these keywords, restaurants can optimize their website content, including menus, descriptions, and blog posts, to align with search intent. This will improve visibility in search engine results, and attract more organic traffic to their establishments.

 Keyword research also enables restaurants to identify niche opportunities and trends within the industry, allowing them to tailor their marketing strategies accordingly. By continuously monitoring and refining their keyword strategy, restaurants can stay ahead of the competition and connect with their target audience.

Formatting: A Recipe For Success

Your website formatting is important for SEO. While your website’s format isn’t usually something you think about offhand, it’s an important part of the balance between serving content to people and optimizing it for the web. A properly formatted website is easy for your guests to read and navigate. It lets them easily and quickly find the information you need. But it also serves another purpose: Proper formatting lets search engine web crawlers index your website. 

Web crawlers are not human customers. They don’t care about the beauty of your photographs or the uniqueness of your cuisine. Instead, they care about optimized titles, headings, meta descriptions, and image alt text with relevant keywords to improve the website’s visibility for relevant searches. This means you need to use descriptive and relevant keywords that accurately reflect the content of the page, so that the search engines can properly identify and categorize your content.

Incorporate primary keywords towards the beginning of titles and headings, keeping them concise and engaging to attract both search engines and users. Additionally, ensure consistency in formatting and structure across titles and headings, utilizing HTML tags such as <h1> for main headings and <h2>, <h3>, etc., for subheadings to provide clarity and hierarchy for search engine crawlers and users alike.

Cooking Up A Network

Local networks can significantly benefit a restaurant’s SEO by providing opportunities for collaboration, promotion, and backlink generation. Through partnerships with neighboring businesses, such as local attractions, hotels, or event venues, restaurants can cross-promote each other’s services, increasing visibility within the community and attracting more customers. Additionally, participating in local events, sponsoring community initiatives, or hosting charity fundraisers creates goodwill– which means positive publicity. And that means more foot traffic and more web traffic. 

When you establish yourself as part of your local community, your restaurant’s online reputation and authority increase. This is one of the most consequential developments for your local SEO, even more so than the backlinks you can build. For many businesses, strong backlinks are a critical part of their SEO strategy, and one of the main reasons to build a network. 

Backlinks are links from other websites that direct traffic to your website. They serve as a vote of confidence and authority, signaling to search engines that your website is reputable and valuable, which can positively impact its search engine rankings. And while backlinks are important for SEO, restaurants do not prioritize them as much as other industries, given the focus on local search results. However, earning backlinks from reputable local sources, such as local publications, blogs, or directories, can still provide valuable signals to search engines about the restaurant’s relevance and authority within the community. The keyword here is local sources; you don’t need national reviews to tell your community that your restaurant is great.

To improve their local networks, restaurants should actively engage with the local community, participate in events and initiatives, and cultivate relationships with neighboring businesses, organizations, and influencers. Your local reputation will enhance your SEO efforts, increase visibility in local search results, and attract more customers to your establishment.

Serving Fresh Content

Restaurant websites are a bit different from other small business websites, because they serve a very specific purpose. People typically don’t come to restaurant websites to read blogs or engage with content, or to find out more about various services. They come to read the menu, find out what the hours are, and get the restaurant’s location. If they’re looking for additional information, like allergen information or whether or not the restaurant has a kids’ menu, it’s all tied into the dining experience you offer.

This means that if you want to improve your SEO through content, you want to take an expansive approach. There’s no rule that says you can’t do blog posts or featured content, and a blog could be a great way to inform your potential customers about events, cuisine, dinner specials, and anything else your restaurant has going on. And never underestimate the power of social media for content! 

Restaurants can leverage social media to improve SEO by regularly sharing engaging content, such as mouthwatering food photos, chef interviews, behind-the-scenes glimpses, and customer testimonials. By maintaining an active presence on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and other social networks, restaurants can increase brand visibility and encourage diners to view the website or stop in for a meal. 

Social media engagement signals to search engines that the restaurant is relevant and popular, potentially boosting its search engine rankings. Sharing posts, promotions, events, and special offers on social media platforms can encourage likes, shares, and comments, leading to increased visibility and backlink opportunities from social media profiles. A strategic approach to social media marketing can complement SEO efforts and help restaurants attract more customers and improve their online presence.

Creating Meaningful Menus

The main thing people want from a restaurant’s website is the menu. Your menu pages are excellent opportunities for optimization. Make sure that your menus are findable and readable. Don’t just use photographs of the menu; use searchable, properly formatted text. You can even optimize it for relevant keywords, providing detailed descriptions of dishes. Incorporating popular search terms related to cuisine types, dishes, and local specialties can help improve the menu’s visibility in search engine results. Additionally, including descriptive and enticing language for each menu item can enhance user engagement and encourage clicks. 

Organizing the menu into logical sections, such as appetizers, entrees, and desserts, with clear headings and subheadings, improves readability and user experience. Ensuring that the online menu is mobile-friendly, loads quickly, and is easily navigable enhances accessibility and user satisfaction, which can indirectly impact SEO. And regularly updating the online menu to reflect seasonal offerings, new dishes, and special promotions keeps content fresh and relevant while signaling to search engines that the restaurant’s website is active and up-to-date.

Is Paid SEO Worth It?

Restaurant marketing might seem like a daunting task for your already busy schedule. And there is definitely a learning curve that can be frustrating to overcome. That’s where paid SEO comes in. By partnering with an experienced SEO firm, you reap the benefits of their expertise. You don’t have to spend time working up your strategy; you can focus on your business and feel content knowing that your SEO is in good hands.

How Can I Improve My Restaurant Website SEO?

If your restaurant needs results, there’s no one recipe to follow; instead, you need to look at the big picture. Where does your restaurant’s SEO fit into your overall marketing strategy? How can you balance your website and social media content to attract more customers? 

For many restaurateurs, the answer is partnership. You just need to find the right partner– and that’s where we come in. At BKA Content, we have the content expertise you need to build your brand and help you share your love of food with a wider audience. Learn more about our writing services and SEO for restaurants today.