Andrea AbbondanzaWant to boost your restaurant’s online visibility? SEO best practice is the absolute answer.
Nowadays, the restaurant industry is booming, and it’s time to take advantage of this by investing in SEO!
In this digital era, a restaurant’s digital marketing strategy becomes necessary, especially if you don’t want to miss out on your audience. That’s why your site needs an update to help attract online visitors to your website, including those who are using mobile devices!
A professional Australian SEO agency team might help get your business up on top so potential clients can see what they’re missing. However, it is best to do the work yourself if you’re on a budget.
Check out some SEO tips for restaurants to help get you started!
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SEO Benefits for Restaurants
It’s not surprising to see tons of restaurant start using SEO to boost their sites. In fact, there are an abundant amount of benefits that you can get by using restaurant SEO, including:
- Escalate your website’s traffic
- Escalate restaurants bookings and table reservations
- Increasing the number of takeaway orders
- Establishing awareness of your restaurant’s brand
- Supporting business owners to make more money
- Getting your restaurant’s listing displayed higher than competitors
13 SEO tips for Restaurants in 2023
There are myriad tips for SEO best practices to follow if you want to optimize your site. We have compiled the best tips for SEO for restaurants to help you get started. Check SEO tips for restaurants below!
1) Define your SEO and Content Strategies
Before jumping to the numerous tools or platforms, the first thing to note is defining your SEO and content strategies.
This step is essential to help you narrow down your competition, leading to faster quality traffic increase to your site.
To start this step, try defining your targeted geographic area, including the area where your customers will most likely come from.
Then, continue the step by researching the keyword terms and phrases that are used by your targeted audience using appropriate tools. Some reliable tools you can use are SEMRush, Moz Pro, and many more.
Make sure that you classify the terms to have a more specific result of competition levels for each keyword.
High-level restaurant terms
When conducting keyword research, it’s important to consider the most generic terms people might use when searching.
This will give you an idea of how potential customers search and what they’re looking for in a restaurant.
For example, when you set up searches for “restaurant,” the result will be more general than the result of the keyword “Sydney restaurants.” You can also use other variations of general terms related to your restaurant.
Niche-specific terms
The next level of categorization for your restaurant would be to identify what type your restaurant is.
For example, if it’s a Mexican restaurant, then the categories might include ” tacos” or “burritos” or any other types of cuisine and features of your restaurant.
Tools like Google Maps, TripAdvisor, and Yelp greatly help use the appropriate categories or wordings.
Brand terms
You should know how many people are searching for your restaurant by name and then compare that to the high-level or niche-specific search volume.
Ensure your restaurant’s site successfully outranks other competitors in the directory and social sites. That way, the number of the audience coming to your site will be higher and easier to track.
2) Create a Keyword Planning Roadmap
SEMRush is among the best tool for creating a keyword research. With this tool, you can find out the popular restaurant keywords for online users as well as which ones have more competition. Here’s how you can conduct the keyword research:
- Try entering phrases relating to lunch, fine dining, live jazz, and more
- Utilize high-level restaurant keywords, such as “Melbourne restaurants” or “restaurants in Perth”
- Add niche-specific keywords such as “Indian restaurant” or “vegan”
To increase website traffic, you need to identify specific keywords that users put into their search engine when looking for a restaurant.
By creating an effective keyword strategy and incorporating popular terms onto your site, you can learn what words keep customers coming back.
3) Create Unique Content
You can boost your ranking on Google by updating fresh content regularly, but make sure that the information you post is unique and relevant to what people want. You can create content with various formats, including:
Blog
A blog is a great way to keep your customers engaged and informed. It can also help you build better relationships with them.
By providing weekly or bi-weekly blog content, they will enjoy reading about or could be interested in learning more information about your restaurant.
Photos and Videos
Share your menu with the world! Whether it be a photo or video, people love to see what’s happening in restaurants.
The best way for you and everyone who visits this site is by viewing content that other readers have provided.
4) Apply Basic On-Page SEO Best Practices
When it comes to restaurant SEO, you need to have both indexing and on-page optimization for the search engines to know your site exists.
Optimize your listing across all data sources with complete, accurate information about your restaurant. This way, the business information and online reputation management for restaurants will be more manageable.
Set up your robots.txt and XML correctly to ensure your site can be indexed properly. Here are some of the things that can help your site easier to index:
Keyword specific URLs
Make sure your URL contains a specific keyword that you use for your site. Having specific keywords in the URL can help users understand what your site is about.
Title tags
The title tag is an essential HTML element that exists in the head section of each webpage. It provides the initial context for what your page is about.
Meta description
The meta description tag is like a summary of your page. It tells users what your site is about and why they need to check out your website.
Image alt text
Search engine crawlers can index and rank images correctly in image searches with the help of richer image context and descriptions provided by alt text. Additionally, it gives search engines contextual data about the page’s content.
5) Dominate Local Search results
Dominating in local search results also works best to optimize your restaurant’s site,
How to expand the reach of your restaurant Local SEO
Make your site visible by registering it across all data sources, such as social media sites, search engine directories, and industry-specific directory sites.
The most crucial element of local SEO is the accurate NAP (name, address, phone) data across all data sources. Information about business categories and description play a big role, too. This way, your site will expand its reach in local SEO.
Getting Rid of Duplicate Listings
Make sure you register your site once in every directory since duplicate listings might confuse the crawlers.
6) Create location pages to target surrounding suburbs
It’s important to provide enough context for users and search engines so they know where your restaurant is located in relation to other businesses.
By creating location pages, you can target the surrounding suburbs more accurately. This means providing content that ties into the community, which will also help potential visitors.
7) Encourage Reviews & Testimonials
The best way to get feedback from your customers and influence people is by asking them for reviews ad testimonials. If you’re based in Australia, you can ask your customers to drop their reviews on restaurant review sites in Australia.
In a world where people are more likely to click on the highest star rating places first, restaurants should pay close attention when their review is displayed in search engine results.
More detailed information on what your customers like or don’t like about a specific product in online reviews can really help other potential customers.
This way, you will provide promising reasons for potential customers to click on your restaurant’s site over your competitors.
8) Share your Content on Social Media
Social media is indeed a powerful platform to engage new audiences.
The more people who engage with your social media content, the better.
When they share or like what you post on your social media platforms, search engines will recognize that as an indication of trustworthiness and authority in those topics, especially those related to restaurants.
9) Engage With Customers on Social Media
Social media engagement is important to drive users to your site, especially since engagement aligns with the essential SEO pillars of authority and relevance.
Therefore, it is important to engage with followers and give good customer service to set a perception of your approach.
Eventually, your site visitors will increase through engagements with followers on social media platforms that funnel visitors to your main website.
10) Think Mobile First
Customers love it when your site is mobile-friendly. With the high number of mobile device visits to restaurants, your website must provide a seamless and fast experience when accessing your site. Therefore, good mobile reviews have to be conducted before launching your site.
Good user experience in mobile includes the design, how great each page will appear on various mobile, and also the rendering and the load speed.
To enhance it more, add an online ordering feature so your customers can order from your restaurant swiftly.
11) Boost authority through link-building
Link building is also one of the SEO marketing strategies for restaurants to get other sites to link back to the site.
When other websites link to your restaurant’s site, it is an indication of trust from them that will eventually signal to Google how authoritative your page is for this specific topic.
Therefore, try having more links from other sites, especially reputable ones, to make your site appear more frequently in searches for your target keywords.
12) Implement Schema “Restaurants” Markup and technical SEO best practices for your restaurants
Schema markup is another essential thing in restaurant SEO. Thus, running the schema.org library is a must for your restaurants. This way, you can build context for the search engines and gain exposure to wider audiences in search results.
Make sure to connect with the right developers, website platform, or content management system for your restaurants in order to integrate with schema.org.
13) Measure Your Efforts
Tracking is important to determine whether your efforts in optimizing the SEO best practices are working. With tracking, you can also measure whether your effort produces a return on investment.
Some of the things to track are the engagement, visibility, and conversion metrics of your restaurant site. This way can help you identify whether you’re moving in the right direction or not.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is SEO?
Search Engine Optimization or SEO is a process of optimizing your website to appear in search results for related terms on Google, Yahoo, and other search engines. The goal here would be to get more traffic from these searches to your restaurant’s website.
For instance, if you owned an Indian restaurant in Perth, you would want your website to appear in search engines when some searched for “Indian restaurants in Perth” or “best Indian restaurants near me.”
Why is SEO important for restaurants?
No matter how delicious a restaurant’s menu is in this digital era, it will hardly generate digital revenues without customers navigating through your site. Search engines are essential for restaurants to attract visitors to their websites and get the visibility they require.
How restaurant owners can optimize SEO for marketing?
There are several ways to do marketing strategies for a restaurant via optimizing SEO. However, the most important thing is we know the goal clearly: making the website be seen on search engines. Some step to optimize for these results is to add your restaurant website to all directories, restaurant review websites, and social media platforms with the same uniform corporate information. Also, start by adding the details of your company to sites like Google My Business.
Final Thought: Do restaurants really need SEO?
The simple answer is yes, restaurants need SEO, especially in this increasingly online-focused era. Getting optimal online visibility for restaurants in this digital era is essential for maintaining sustainability and generating digital revenues in restaurants.
Each restaurant must have constant new visitors coming through their doors, and one of the best ways is via their website.
