However, you have to stand out from the competition by ensuring you have enough unique content on your website.
Having a wealth of engaging and helpful content on your site will serve you well if it is valuable to your prospects and customers. Building a strong brand will translate to better rankings, higher brand recall, and greater brand affinity.
Keep in mind that content doesn’t all have to be written copy; you can present your menus, in-house promotions, and more through video, photography, and graphics.
The search engines are focused on context and not just the keywords on your site.
By identifying and regularly generating new content, you also can keep the pipeline full of engaging material that helps you stand out from your competition.
For example, if you have a niche restaurant, embrace that and set yourself apart from the generic chain down the street (no offense if you own, operate, or do marketing for a chain – you have a different challenge of scaling your efforts).
Share information about the founders, the culture, and most importantly – the product.
Give details about your menu, including sourcing of ingredients, how you developed recipes, and the compelling reason your chicken marsala is the best in town.
6. Consider Content Localization
Again, single-location restaurants have an easier road here. Based on decisions you’ve made about your market area, make sure you provide enough cues and context to users and the search engines as to where your restaurant is and what area it serves.
Sometimes, the search engines and out-of-town visitors don’t fully understand the unofficial names of neighborhoods and areas.
By providing content that is tied into the community and doesn’t simply assume that everyone knows where you’re located, you can help everyone out.
One example of this is a 100-location chain that started small with a single paragraph for each location written in a way tailored to the store, local history, neighborhood, and community engagement.
From there, we were able to find other areas to scale, and it worked well to differentiate stores from each other.
When it comes to nuanced and potentially confusing location names and context, addresses can be misleading. Think about how Google will handle those.
These are important factors to consider so you aren’t trying to have a location compete with too broad of a geographic area for search rankings.
7. Apply Basic On-Page SEO Best Practices
Without going into the details of all on-page and indexing optimization techniques, I want to encourage you not to skip or ignore the best practices of on-page SEO.
You need your page to be indexed to ensure you have the potential for visibility and on-page SEO to ensure the proper classification of your content.
You can spend a lot of time on a full SEO strategy, but if you’re just getting started, I recommend putting the rest aside and starting with these two areas.
To ensure your site is crawled and indexed properly now and in the future, check your robots.txt and XML sitemap. Set up Google Search Console to look for errors.
When it comes to on-page, ensure that you have unique and keyword-specific page URLs, title tags, meta description tags, headings, page copy, and image alt attributes.
This sounds like a lot, but start with your most important pages, like your home, menu, about, and contact pages, and go from there as time permits.
8. Think Mobile First
Mobile accounts for a high percentage of visits to restaurant websites. Google now crawls the mobile version of a website to understand its content.
Hopefully, you have a responsive website or one that passes the necessary mobile-friendly tests.
But that’s just the beginning when it comes to mobile.
It’s also critical to think about page load speed and providing a great mobile user experience.
9. Implement Schema “Restaurants” Markup
Another area where we can build context for the search engines and gain exposure to more users in the search results is by using structured data.
In the restaurant industry, implementing the Schema.org library for restaurants is a must.
This task requires a developer, website platform, or content management system with the right plugins or built-in options.
10. Measure Your Efforts
This could have been tip No. 1, but I’m including it here, as it is important throughout the process. With the previous nine tips, there’s something to do and implement.
But before you embark on any aspect of optimization, make sure those efforts are measurable.
When investing in your strategy, you want to know what aspects are working, which ones aren’t, and where your efforts were (and are) best producing a return on investment.
Track visibility, engagement, and conversion metrics as deep as you can connect them to your business.
Beyond that, you’ll need to identify the right progress metrics tied to goals to know you’re moving in the right direction.
11. Don’t Ignore AI
This is less of a specific recommendation or tactic and more of a wide-reaching one. AI provides a lot of opportunities to scale content, create efficiencies, and do more with less.
Whether you’re leveraging AI tools natively, using SaaS products to help you research, optimize, and measure efforts, or relying on things like AI Overviews in Google to engage with users in search, it is hard to ignore.
Know that while AI is helpful to further scale efforts and be where searchers are finding content, you don’t want to abandon your brand or generate content that is clearly generic and not human-generated.
Don’t ignore AI, but use it with care to avoid losing out on the unique value important for search and searchers for your restaurant.
Restaurant SEO Matters For Visibility And Traffic
There are unique challenges for restaurant SEO. However, if you can dedicate the time and effort to a strategy and follow through on tactics and measurement, it can be highly rewarding and profitable as well.
While you might not be able to directly attribute SEO performance to ROI for restaurant SEO, you can find correlations between a stronger brand presence and visibility and volume in your location(s).
I encourage you to nail down your strategy and dedicate focus to the tactics to see it through.
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Featured Image: PeopleImages.com – Yuri A