A restaurant used to be able to make a fortune by providing excellent meals and attentive service. Word-of-mouth would work its magic during these more innocent days, and the eatery would quickly become the talk of the town.
By 2026, the global food service business is expected to rise by 4.1 trillion dollars. Since the consumer base is expanding, the growth of the food service business is excellent news for restaurants. Still, as restaurant culture quickly expands, it also translates to more competition. The competitiveness increases when social media and Google’s Search algorithm are included.
When patrons submit glowing reviews or tag the restaurant on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, the eatery becomes an overnight sensation. The same restaurant, nevertheless, may also see rapid sales decline due to unfavorable testimonials and rankings on independent websites. The reputation and business of a restaurant can be made or broken by Google Search and social media.
Because of this, restaurants must create a strong SEO strategy to create their narrative and rise above social media noise and congestion. A restaurant SEO plan includes maintaining social media channels and other digital platforms, adding consistent and accurate data to online directory listings, and optimizing the restaurant website. Let’s examine the various strategies a restaurant can employ to boost SEO for its benefit:
1. Focus on local SEO
Restaurants need to have a strong online presence and excellent local SEO if they want to increase their local consumer base. They can post details about their company, such as the address, GPS position, phone number, working hours/opening hours, images, and even their menu, on local directory listings and sites, such as Google My Business and many more. The company information shared throughout various platforms must be consistent, accurate, and often updated in order for potential consumers to find them in order to enhance their online visibility.
Advice: For a potential consumer, a restaurant’s Google Business Profile may be their initial point of contact. However, lacking details like phone numbers could mislead customers into thinking the restaurant has closed and is no longer open.
2. Create a keyword plan
The use of keywords is crucial for SEO.
Restaurants can find out the search terms that potential customers would use to find and look up dining options by conducting keyword research. Presumably, transactional keywords: Japanese restaurant near me, buy an iPhone 13 Windsor, Ontario. Single words or long-tail keywords may be used as these keywords. To assist businesses in creating their own keyword maps, resources like Semrush, Google Keyword Planner, Answerthepublic, Ahrefs, and KWfinder are strongly advised.
Three categories of target keywords are possible:
Branded keywords: These are search terms associated with the name of the eatery. “Greenlight smoothies California”, “
Niche keywords: Long-tail keywords with a narrow industry vertical are known as niche keywords since they are extremely specific. It’s crucial to optimize your website for specific niche keywords rather than simply broad, well-known search terms, which are frequently too challenging to rank for, especially for a new business. ‘Rooftop view’, ‘live match screening’, and ‘Chinese food’ are a few examples of keywords that will face less competition if they are exclusive to a company in a region.
Head keywords: These are general terms that are valuable and frequently searched. Examples are ‘Best New York restaurants’, for instance, or ‘lunch meat’.
In order to increase your organic traffic and maintain your website’s competitiveness in relation to other websites, head keywords are crucial. They may be common search terms with substantial search traffic since they cover a wide range of subjects or are associated with well-known topics.
To put this in perspective, only .5% of all keywords are head terms, but they account for 43% of all accessible search traffic.
3. Register with review websites
Customers are quite likely to trust reviews posted by other customers on independent channels. According to a TripAdvisor survey, positive restaurant evaluations had an impact on 94% of US diners, compared to 85% of diners in the UK.
The SEO of the restaurant is significantly influenced by these review websites. Through their pages, Yelp, Foursquare, and Trip Advisor assist companies in achieving top rankings in search results.
4. Make the website mobile-friendly
According to this study, mobile devices produce 63% of organic search results. Restaurants with mobile websites that are unreliable, slow to load, and have difficult navigation may lose potential customers, resulting in a high bounce rate that is bad news for the restaurant.
5. Create quality content
Your website’s content might include more than just the menu and location. Despite the fact that blogs are part of content marketing, they support your company’s credibility-building efforts. Additionally, your content strategy can assist you in increasing your search engine ranking while increasing your website visitors through backlinks.
Restaurants can include the following on their website, as examples:
Elevate yourself as an Expert in your industry: Long-form content called “thought leadership” positions the restaurant as a leader in the hospitality sector. The content conveys a brand image of the restaurant as hardworking, reliable, loyal, and integral.
Create recipes: Since people are constantly searching the internet for recipes, posting recipes on the website will increase views. Informational keywords in your recipe posts will drive traffic to your site and as they consume content, and get acquainted with your brand, they will be one step closer to being a paying customer.
Feature your employees: You can write articles that provide information to customers about the restaurant’s workers, accomplishments, skills, appealing characteristics
- Publishing promotional content:These are pieces that draw attention to deals, sales, and occasions. You want to constantly have fresh and new alluring deals that entice your audience.
Restaurants can use a variety of topics to produce high-quality content. However, restaurants should also make advantage of their social media accounts to promote their websites, particularly those that offer delivery and reservation services. Restaurants can advertise their website in a variety of various ways. They can collaborate with other websites and online publications to get more authoritative backlinks to their site, which could boost their ranking on Google and increase restaurant reservations, or they can use their existing database to do email marketing and inform their loyal customers about any new updates about their business.
