Investing time in SEO (or Search Engine Optimization) leads to increasing organic traffic to your website, thus boosting your brand awareness and turning it into sales. It’s easy to get lost in details, but SEO for restaurants and bistros doesn’t need to be a hassle. In this article, we’ll talk about on-page restaurant SEO, which involves all the things that you can do directly on your website to boost its search engine rankings.
Before you start looking for the best free SEO tools to help with keyword research, first think about your business profile. It’s the same exercise you did when you decided to become a restaurant owner. Which cuisine is your specialty? Where are you located? Do you offer takeaway and delivery?
When customers search the internet for businesses, they try to find something in their area. No one will search for a Thai restaurant in a different city (unless they’re planning a trip there). They will search for “Mexican restaurants near me,” or “Italian restaurants near me,” or… you get it.
Asking these questions will help you define which customers your website is addressing. Trying to get known in an entire country will not only dilute your traffic but also won’t bring extra benefits. Your target should be SEO for local businesses.
Related: Key Benefits of SEO for Restaurant Websites
A big part of local search SEO is narrowing the keywords that you want to rank for. Before using keyword tools, try to write down some short phrases that you, in the position of a customer, would search for online (of course, applying it to your restaurant’s specs).
There is no such thing as the best keywords for restaurants in general. You have to find keywords for restaurants that are similar to yours in terms of cuisine, location, specific, etc.
Example:
Let’s say that Pronto Restaurant in Naples is doing Italian cuisine.
If they’re not searching for a specific restaurant, most users will type in restaurant keywords like:
“Italian restaurant in Naples”
“Best restaurant in Naples”
“Italian restaurant”
In this case, the best option for Pronto Restaurant is to optimize their website for the first two keywords. The last one is a bit too generic, and the competition too high.
Your main goal should be to rank #1 in the SERP for specific keywords. What does SERP stand for? Search Engine Results Page, so the page that you see when you search for a keyword on Google.
Trying to rank first for every word or search phrase related to your business will only dilute your traffic and overall website authority. A search engine like Google will display what’s more useful for the user. If another website has been adequately indexed for some very specific keywords, it will show that one first.
Try to rely heavily on one primary keyword (like “Italian restaurant in Naples”) and work on ranking first for that one. That is the key to SEO for small businesses.
Since you’re just getting started with on-page restaurant SEO, you’re probably looking for a free keyword tool, at least for now. Here are some of the best free SEO tools you can use:
If you’re willing to pay for more detailed keyword research, these tools are some of the very best:
A thing that very few people will tell you is that indexing your page or website in a search engine takes time. The downside is that no one truly knows exactly how much it takes to index it. Indexation depends on many factors and can take anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks. Getting authority, on the other hand, is a different thing, and can take entire months.
These SEO basic tips will help your website get indexed and rank high in search results over time.
Before getting your hands dirty, you’ll need to sign up for Google Analytics and Google Search Console. These two essential tools will help monitor your website performance and keep you up to date with keywords that users searched for to reach your pages.
To crawl a website, search engines use bots that scan your site and read its contents. They do so by following the instructions found in your robots.txt file, which tells them how exactly to crawl your website.
The data crawled by these bots is then collected, and the content is indexed so that it can be served up in search results when someone is looking for that information.
A sitemap sends information to search engines about your pages and how your content is organized. It also tells them how often bots should visit them, how frequently pages are updated, and when the last change was.
The sitemap sends information like the importance of a specific URL in comparison to others on your website. For example, when it comes to priority, a page where you have the restaurant menu will be more important than a page where you list job openings.
It’s not mandatory to submit a sitemap to search engines. If your robots.txt file is in order, that alone will give search engines the information they need about your pages. However, it could help to crawl your website better, especially if it’s new and doesn’t have external links to it just yet.
The Google Search Console tool has a pretty neat feature called “Crawl errors” which lists issues at page-level or site-wide. The latter is more urgent, as any problems that affect your entire website can cause severe damage.
But what you’ll mostly need to watch out for are URL errors – all those 404 (“Page not found”) errors that can signal a search engine like Google to stop indexing those pages.
Make sure that, instead of deleting a URL, you redirect it to another page. Otherwise, in time, these 404s will bite out of your PageRank, thus hurting your entire website. Besides, it’s not user-friendly, is it?
A page or website that takes ages to load is no friend of search engines!
Slow loading time does not only affect user experience but can also lead to poor crawling and indexing. This means that it will affect your PageRank, instead of taking you to the 1st position.
Some things that you and your webmaster can do to increase your website performance:
SSL stands for “Secure Sockets Layer” and it’s a certificate you can get for your website to protect your and your customers’ data. The SSL certificate is what gives your website URL the “s” in “https://”.
While you don’t have to get one, we strongly recommend that you do. First of all, Google penalizes non-https websites, which will hurt your search rankings. Secondly, your customers won’t feel safe browsing through your website if you don’t have an SSL certificate. Not to mention placing an order where they would have to input their credit card information.
Read more: Why Buy an SSL Certificate for Your Restaurant’s Website and How
Schema markup is a bit of code that you put on your restaurant website to help search engines provide users with more accurate and informative results. If you’ve ever googled a restaurant and seen different smaller links under the main one, like in the example below, you know what Schema Markup can do.
For instance, in the case of restaurants, you can choose to display a quick link to your menu or your reservations page. Browse the entire selection of Schema properties for restaurants here. If you want to see whether you’re taking full advantage of Schema markup, use the Schema checker Structured Data Testing Tool from Google.
Read more: How to Correctly Implement the Restaurant Schema Markup
Both internal and external linking can boost your SEO. Internal linking creates relationships between your pages, which helps Google crawl your content. It also divides link value starting with your homepage, which usually has the most significant value because of all the backlinks it has. If you have two pages with related content, link to each other to show they are related.
External links can improve your SEO when they are from high-authority, highly-relevant websites. If the site is trustworthy, it will enhance your credibility as well. Similarly, links of poor quality will damage your website. On your restaurant website, you’ll probably use external links mostly on your blog.
Do you already have a blog for your restaurant? Good. If you don’t, it’s time to start one. It will help your restaurant appear in search results for more keywords, which might end up getting you more customers. Let’s say you want to write an article on “How to Grow a Restaurant from the Ground Up.” You might be featured on the first page of Google for the keyword “how to grow a restaurant.”
Learning on-page restaurant SEO for blog articles isn’t easy, but it’s also not impossible. Here are the basics of SEO in terms of notions you should be familiar with before you start writing your first post:
As the name suggests, YouTube SEO is optimizing your video content for YouTube. This is different from optimizing for search engines because customers will use different types of queries on YouTube.
Do you want to take your restaurant to the next level? Create video content with behind the scenes looks at how individual dishes are prepared or recipes that your customers can get inspired from, YouTube SEO is mandatory.
YouTube keyword research differs from Google keyword research, which means there are different tools that you can use to find keywords for food videos on YouTube:
Definitely yes. Even if Bing doesn’t have as many users as Google, local search optimization on both search engines can get you even more customers. Plus, it doesn’t take a lot of your time, and it’s free.
So, how does SEO on Google differ from SEO on other search engines? It doesn’t, in essence, in that you will have to go through more or less the same steps.
To optimize your content for Bing, start by doing these three things:
Local on-page restaurant SEO can help you market your restaurant to people in your area. But what is local SEO? What’s the difference between local SEO vs SEO? Local SEO is optimizing your content for local searches. To better understand how local search engine optimization can help you, let’s look at a couple of general searches vs local searches.
These are all general searches:
These are local searches:
As you can see, they either include a specific location or the keywords “near me.” The benefits of local SEO are plenty, chief among which:
To learn how to do local SEO, check out our local SEO tips below.
Your local SEO strategy should include listing your website in directories like Yelp, TripAdvisor, Zomato, or Foursquare. There, you can post pictures of your dishes, more details about your restaurant, and, most importantly, get reviews by the community!
A considerable part of local SEO marketing is getting reviews to rank in Google’s local pack (those three businesses that appear at the top of a Google search). Not to mention reviews increase trustworthiness and social proof. If you have many 5-star reviews, customers will be more likely to click on your business listing.
Google reviews are not the only reviews that matter. All local directories that aim to help customers find the business they’re looking for are a great place to collect reviews that will boost your online presence.
Read more: 10 Restaurant Review Sites You Need to Be on Right Now
Claim and list your business so that Google will display a content box on the right side of the search results page whenever a user searches for you.
Usually, this works for branded keywords (that involve your restaurant’s name). Still, in some instances, it can also be displayed for similar searches where you may be relevant for the user.
Not only does it attract a lot of attention, but it will also level up your SEO efforts. However, don’t rely on these alone; everything has to work in tandem!
If you optimize your Google My Business profile right, Google will list your restaurant with all the useful information users might need, based on relevance and proximity.
Some things that you’ll need to have in place to stand out in the sea of Google local business listings:
Learn more about how to optimize your Google My Business restaurant profile in our full guide.
You can improve local SEO optimization by adding different location pages to your restaurant website. If you manage several locations, each one should have its own landing page optimized with keywords relevant to that area.
For example, let’s say you own a pizza place that has 3 New York locations: one in East Harlem, one in the Theater District, and one in Lincoln Square. Create three landing pages just like in this example from our demo website:
Link building is an off-page SEO tactic that we’re going to explore in more detail in our off-page SEO guide for restaurants. However, it’s worth mentioning that one of the most valuable local search marketing tips is to do local link building. Look for businesses in your area that you could build a relationship with and that could link to your content, and get in touch with them.
Read more: The Secret Ingredients of Link Building for Restaurant Websites
Make sure that your website, your social media pages, and all local directories have been talking to one another before the interrogation :-)
It would be embarrassing to have conflicting opening hours, address, or phone numbers on all of these different directories and profiles. Aside from this, make sure that all of your local directory accounts have been verified, as this adds credibility.
Moz Local is a very nifty tool that can help you manage your location data across multiple platforms, delete duplicate listings, manage your reviews, and more.
We know that having a website for a restaurant that meets all user experience criteria is tricky. Google recommends having quality and useful information on your website, focusing on relevant content instead of SEO-driven efforts.
Everyone in the industry agrees that SEO is a must if you want potential customers to discover your website. However, it shouldn't be the only focus when putting together the best restaurant website for your business. Needless to say, restaurants without websites are missing out on a large chunk of potential customers.
Instead of just focusing on SEO, try to include user experience in the mix as well. Here are some restaurant website requirements for positive user experience:
GloriaFood offers all these features and more in a neatly wrapped package for you. If you don’t believe us, you can check out our restaurant website sample, Pronto.
For just $9/month, we can create a restaurant website for your business that is already user- and SEO-optimized.
On-page SEO for restaurants doesn’t have to be a hassle. In fact, it can be quite exciting once you get the hang of it. Follow the tips in this on-page restaurant SEO guide, and you will see your website ranking high on Google and other search engines. If you have questions about anything related to doing on-page SEO, don’t hesitate to get in touch.