Great Restaurant Seo Tips to Boost Online Presence and Improve Search Rankings

In a world ruled by digital mediums, securing, maintaining and maximizing the online presence is vital for any restaurant that aims for long-term sustainability. Any business, particularly a restaurant needs a constant stream of new customers walking through the door. The notion that small restaurants do not need an online presence has become obsolete as modern customers have changed the way they perceive their next meal and order it. SEO forms the crux of every restaurant marketing plan lending its benefits to the entire process of digital marketing.

Back in the 90s, people found restaurants through phone directories, while driving through or via a friend’s recommendation. But today, they have the Internet to give them cuisine based, location based results that they are looking for. With mobile search dominating the domain, local restaurant SEO is more important than ever, irrespective of the size of the restaurant.

Understanding the significance of top listings and securing a position in the top ranks is what SEO is all about.

SEO not only increases online visibility but also provides additional value to the target audience. Here are the most important benefits of SEO.

With a meticulous SEO strategy, a website gains organic visibility. This leads to an increased website traffic. This is because SEO is hyper-targeted and customer-centric. A well-planned SEO will deliver the website’s pages to the most relevant audience via pertinent online searches. The need to entice or persuade the reader is reduced.

User experience and SEO are the two sides of the same coin. Websites that are user-friendly are ranked better by Google. An Internet user wants his queries to be answered within a fraction of a second. When a website offers a poor user experience which might include mobile incompatibility or several unnecessary pop-ups, the visitor leaves within seconds. This leads to high bounce rates. Websites with high bounce rates are not recognized by Google and result in lower rankings.

Although SEO results take time to transpire, a high-quality SEO strategy does eventually deliver a spectacular ROI. First Google listing helps a business gain 33% of all search traffic. As pointed out before, search engine visibility and boosted web traffic are directly related to each other resulting in an increased revenue.

SEO efforts never take a break. SEO friendly content remains consistently on the website, always endeavoring to promote the search rankings and gaining the competitive advantage. A restaurant is able to reach customers when they are actively searching for or seeking information, reducing the need to be persuasive.

When a restaurant is ranked on the first page of Google, people consider it as a valuable brand. This increases the credibility of the brand and eventually, the amount of trust that people are ready to place on the restaurant.

When content marketing is driven by SEO, it targets the entire marketing funnel. While conversions will not happen instantly, traits of preferability and positive image will be built, which will eventually turn into customers.

SEO is effective not just for capturing the local market, but the entire target audience even if they are geographically dispersed.

Since organizations today operate in a digital era, the ones that wish to stay on page one with a great brand identity and more number of clicks must engage in a well-devised SEO plan.

PPC (Pay Per Click) is paid search engine advertising. PPC and SEO always work hand-in-hand to achieve top rankings in paid search results and also get first-page organic rankings. This gives customers more chances to get redirected to the restaurant website, thereby, bolstering the brand credibility.

Well planned and executed SEO often gives results within a year. It also leads to greater reach and better results for several years. Results from SEO are purely based on the budget, effort and time committed to it. But, when SEO is looked upon as an investment, the long-term return is remarkable.

Local SEO is important for beating local competition and emerging as the most preferred food destination of the neighborhood. Follow these steps to become a pro in local SEO.

This starts with a simple step – adding the target location to the homepage and other relevant landing pages. Including title tag (50-60 characters long), H1 (the page’s heading), content (well-researched and organized content), Alt tags (the text describing what the image represents), meta description (the snippet that appears below the Google search result) consisting not more than 160 characters. 

Consistency in NAP (Name, Address & Phone Number) across the entire online presence is essential to improve online trust signals. Embedding a Google Map on the restaurant website is also highly recommended. Always include your opening hours, allergy details, dietary requirements, location spotter and table reservation information on your contact page.

By providing backlinks and citations, Google will start considering your restaurant as legitimate. This will create a good impact on a restaurant’s organic search. Maintaining consistency in NAP on general business directories, review sites, news websites, local blogs and social media is an important criteria for good SEO

Social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc. are a great asset for restaurant business. The NAP given on every individual social media restaurant must be consistent. When you are actively present on social media, customers start talking about you, sharing the restaurant content and also engaging with the brand. 

Local citations are mentions of the restaurant or listings on virtual places. Such mentions are another trust signal for Google to recognize the restaurant as genuine and recommend it in the first place.

The primary goal of this schema markup for restaurants is to get Google’s attention towards the menus that contain a lot of information about the restaurant. A schema can either be as simple as directing visitors to the correct URL or lead prospective customers all the way to calories, fat count information, etc.

Once the size of photos is altered, unique title, descriptions and coordinates must be added to the photos. Another option is to upload images on platforms like Flickr and include the location and keywords. By doing so, another opportunity to show up in Google image search results is created.

The content on the website must cater to a variety of search intentions. By including FAQs and blog content on the restaurant website, visitors can procure several answers. Judicious use of content can also be extended beyond the restaurant website by contributing guest posts on local blogs, collaborating with food bloggers, active participation in food industry forums and social media platforms, and sponsoring local events. 

Reviews strengthen search ranking signals and improve the restaurant’s visibility. A customer always reads restaurant reviews before making a decision about choosing it or rejecting it. Facilitating easy submission of restaurant reviews on Google will increase the legitimacy of your brand. Restaurants can add a review link directly on the website and ask customers to leave a review, hand out business cards or create a Google My Business short name and place it in emails, footers, newsletters or leaflets.

Adopting various techniques to find a place among Google’s top search results alone is not enough. A restaurant must always keep in mind the people and the user experience they derive while using the website. A restaurant must not stop with generating online traffic, but also strive to convert them or at least initiate some Call To Action. Ensure that contact information, online menu and reservation icons are highly visible and well within their reach on the home page. Remember to manipulate the very brief attention spans of people and make them yours during their short stay on your website. 

Adding the restaurant menu to Google My Business listing is important to make the content crawlable and improve search results. While using images of restaurant food, decor and staff in Google My Business listing, use high quality, stunning images so that customers are brought to the table. Visual elements to be included are logo, cover photo, the interior and exterior of the restaurant, the team and members at work and a video too. Google posts work magic in the case of restaurants. It is a kind of microblogging that gives an extra space to present the business to diners seeking information. Restaurants can use Google posts to display new dishes, highlight happy customers and also promote upcoming offers, discounts and events. 

For this, a restaurant must choose the keywords for which the ad gets triggered and appears on the screen. The keywords must be properly chosen by the restaurant – words and phrases that define you and words that the customer is likely to use to reach out to a restaurant like you. Restaurants can, then, place a bid on each of these keywords. When a user is searching a particular keyword, the search engine chooses the advertisers who bid the highest and place their ads above normal search results.

An ad consists of the following parts:

1. The Title

2. A link to the restaurant website

3. A snippet about the business

When visitors click on the ad link, they get redirected to the restaurant website. Once the customer has landed on the website, the restaurant can start the process of converting a prospective customer into a long-term patron. 

People always resort to the internet to make purchasing decisions. Even to choose the restaurant for their next meal, they rely on top search results. Since people do not go past the first three results on the first page, it is important to find oneself a place there. 

PPC offers an opportunity for small-scale restaurants to beat the big ones and secure better rankings in search engines. By bidding the right keywords, small restaurants can get a top shot. As businesses pay only when people click on the ad, the financial risk is also comparatively low.

A website’s architecture is the process by which content on a website is linked together and presented for visitors and search engines. It is nothing but the website’s framework. A perfect website architecture makes navigation between pages smooth and easy. Search engines are provided with crawlable content that makes it understand the business better. All the pages in the website must relate to one another. How the pages branch off the homepage and are grouped within deeper directories aids in SEO.

A good site architecture must have the following characteristics:

• Grouping similar topics together
• Highlighting the important pages
• Simplifying the content and organizing it in a logical hierarchy

SEO is beneficial in several ways for a restaurant business. But the only prerequisite is that it must be handled in the right manner to yield expected results . Also having an own website to implement SEO practices is of utmost importance. Getting a well architectured, SEO friendly website can be done within your budget. Get in touch with restaurant website builder like Restaurantify for getting a great website ready within 10 minutes.