Nine Local SEO Tips for Restaurants

Local search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing a business’s website and social media pages to rank higher in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) for people searching locally. Since restaurants primarily target local customers, restaurant owners should understand how to maximize the benefits of local SEO.
Local SEO for restaurants can increase online visibility, as customers can easily find you when looking for a restaurant to dine at online. Increased visibility can lead to higher foot traffic, increasing your revenue.
When you serve your customers as expected, they are more likely to leave positive reviews on online platforms, improving your online reputation.
Levy Online can help you implement the best SEO strategies for restaurants to attain the aforementioned benefits.
Nine Effective Local SEO Tips for Restaurants
1. Optimize Your Google Business Profile (GBP)
A Google Business Profile (GBP) allows you to provide potential customers with the relevant information they need on Google Search and Maps. Your profile should have your business’s name, phone number, and address (NAP). It’s also important to include your operating hours and high-quality images.
A link to your menu should also be on your profile and, if applicable, a booking link. It’s even possible to have customers reserve a table or join a waitlist from your GBP.
You can engage with customers on your GBP. Customers can leave reviews, to which you will respond. You should actively encourage customers to write a review after dining at your restaurant. Your staff can request them to do so after dining, or you can share your GBP review link with customers by email or on social media. This link is under “ask for reviews” on your GBP profile.
To create a GBP:
- Go to google.com/business
- Log in with your Google Account
- Enter your business name
- Choose whether your business is an online retail, local store, or service business
- Add a business category to help customers discover your business by industry
- Add areas where your business provides deliveries to
- Add your phone number and website
- Enter your business address
- Verify your local listing by entering a code sent via a postcard to your business address or through a phone call to prove you are the legitimate owner of the business
- Add other essential information, such as your operating hours, logo, menu, photos and videos, and a booking link
After verification, your profile may take a few days to fully appear on Google Search and Maps. For instance, photos and videos may take up to 48 hours to appear on GBP.
Ensure you confirm every detail you provide is accurate. Confirm you have spelled your business name correctly and the phone number and address are accurate.
Moreover, update the provided information when necessary. For example, when you change your phone number or have promotions/events. This way, customers will always have the most up-to-date information.
Inaccurate information can lead to poor customer experience. If your operating hours are up to 8 p.m., but your GBP states 10 p.m., you may upset some customers, who may leave negative reviews on your profile.
Another benefit of having a GBP profile is you can tell its performance through the GBP performance reporting. This report can inform you how people search for your business on Google — do they search your business name or address? How are they interacting with your business on Google?
For instance, you can tell the number of calls or bookings your GBP received. Accordingly, you can determine if your GBP benefits you as expected and when to make changes.
2. Use Local Keywords
Using local keywords is a profitable restaurant SEO strategy. You need to know the words people would likely search for when looking for a local restaurant and use those words on your website content and GBP listing.
Use tools like SEMrush or Google Keyword Planner to perform keyword research. Enter the words and phrases relevant to your business (seed keywords) in your chosen tool, choose your desired location, and click “Search.” You will then examine the list of local keywords given. From these platforms, you can see the number of times a keyword has been searched and how difficult a keyword is, helping you make the right choice.
It’s crucial to focus on phrases with local intent. For example:
- Best pizza in (city)
- Restaurants near (landmark)
- (Neighborhood name) brunch spots
- (Neighborhood name) family-friendly restaurants
- Best vegan food in (city)
- Italian restaurants in (city)
In addition to specifying the location, you can use keywords specific to your niche or cuisine, as seen in some of the above examples. The more specific your keywords are, the better.
You need to incorporate keywords naturally into website headers, meta descriptions, and blog content. You can also include keywords in your URLs.
Ensure that you use the right number of keywords based on the total number of words on a page (keyword density). Not having enough keywords can negatively impact your rankings because search engines may not understand your content and its relevance to a search query. On the other hand, too many keywords (keyword stuffing) can result in search engines identifying your content as poor quality, lowering its rankings.
While no set optimal keyword density exists, 1-2% keyword density (including the keyword one to two times per 100 words) is recommended.
3. Create Location-Specific Landing Pages
If you have multiple outlets, it’s vital to have landing pages for each location. This ensures you provide customers in all your locations with relevant information.
Include the location in your headings and meta descriptions and highlight local dishes, events, and neighborhood-specific information. If one of your outlets is close to a landmark, highlight this in your content. If the community has an event, have content that informs customers of this and so forth.
Your location-specific landing pages may not need to include all the details, such as your history, on your general homepage. These pages should be simple. They should have essential information, like the menu, how to book a reservation, contact information, and location.
Consider using structured data (schema markup) to help search engines categorize content. This code understands the content on web pages and identifies their local relevance, classifying them accordingly. This can make it easier for a customer to find content relevant to their location on your website.
4. Optimize for Mobile Devices
Optimizing your website for mobile devices is an essential restaurant search engine optimization strategy. A significant percentage of people use smartphones to find restaurants. If friends are walking down the street and they decide to eat pizza, chances are they will use their phones to find the best pizza restaurant near them.
That’s why it’s crucial to ensure your website is mobile-friendly and fast-loading. You should also enable click-to-call functionality to help customers reach out to the restaurant easily, as opposed to dialing the number or copying it from the website. Furthermore, it integrates maps for easy navigation, saving customers from the hassle of opening Google Maps to know their location.
Use emulators and simulators to test your website’s usability on various devices. You should also test your website across different browsers and operating systems. Do this regularly to correct errors earlier.
5. Build Local Citations
Local citations mention a business’s name, phone number, and address.
They include:
- General business directories, such as Yellow Pages
- Industry directories like Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Zomato
- Local newspapers
- Local-themed blogs
- Social media platforms like Facebook
Building citations for your restaurant on different platforms can benefit you considerably. Ensure that your business name, address, and phone number are constant across all platforms. If you change any information about your business, it should be edited in all local citations. Not only does this ensure your customers get the correct information, but it also helps your business rank higher on search engines because the consistency proves to algorithms that your business is legitimate and active. Accuracy of information can also make your business appear more credible to customers.
Local citations offer restaurants many benefits. For starters, they allow you to put your business in front of many people. Yelp has about 178 million unique visitors each month, with over half of them searching for restaurants. When you have an optimized profile, your profile is complete with relevant local keywords, and you have provided accurate details and added photos, your menu, and other irrelevant information, you can rank higher on Yelp, attracting the attention of millions of potential diners every month.
Furthermore, being listed on reputable local citations can improve your business’s legitimacy. A customer is more likely to trust a restaurant listed on Yelp or Zomato. Appearing on local citations can also help improve your customers’ user experience because all the information they need is readily available across several platforms.
To maximize these benefits, you need to manage your citations. These include actively monitoring your details to ensure consistency, submitting updates to different local citations, responding to reviews, actively searching for new online mentions of your business, and removing duplicate entries that could negatively impact your local SEO. Citation tools, like BrightLocal, can manage your citations effectively.
6. Manage Online Reviews
Online reviews are critical for restaurants. Many diners read online reviews before visiting or ordering from a restaurant. Your online reputation plays an integral role in the success of your restaurant. Consequently, managing online reviews can’t be missed on this list of strategies for local SEO for restaurants.
You need to encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews on your website, GBP, or local citation. You can send customers follow-up emails inquiring about their experience at the restaurant and then include a link to your review page. You can also have small table cards on each table with a call to action, asking customers to leave a review on any of the online platforms you have listed your business on — including a QR code or a link on the table card. It can also help to mention the benefits of sharing their experience and a brief message thanking them for dining with you.
Having your staff ask for reviews is another way to get online reviews. Your staff should choose the right moment to ask for a review to avoid ruining a customer’s experience. It’s wise to ask for a review after a customer pays or when they are about to leave.
You should regularly monitor and respond to reviews on all platforms, including Google, Yelp, and Facebook. Your customers will feel appreciated when you respond to their reviews. Besides, you should respond to negative reviews professionally to demonstrate commitment to customer service. Thank the customer for leaving feedback, apologizing for their experience, and offering a solution.
7. Leverage Social Media for Local Engagement
In addition to optimizing your website, leveraging social media for engagement can boost your restaurant’s SEO tactics. It’s important for restaurants to be active on social media — post updates about local events, specials, and community involvement to build a loyal following.
You can encourage engagement from your customers through your posts. For instance, you can ask them to name a new item on your menu or talk about their experience at the restaurant.
To increase discoverability, you should use location tags and hashtags. Include your location on your posts and location tags on the caption, mentioning the neighborhood and city.
If a customer searches for a restaurant on social media, geo-tagged posts typically appear at the top of search results. You are also likely to appear on a local customer’s feed when you include location and location tags on your posts.
Hashtags can also increase your visibility, particularly those that include your location. For example, #Italiancuisinein(city), #veganfoodin(city), #sundaybrunchin(neighborhood), #foodloversin(neighborhood), or #(city)foodies.
Besides location-based hashtags, you can use branded hashtags, such as those specific to promotions, events, or seasons/holidays, like #Springfoodin(city) or #specialmenutodayin(neighborhood).
With hashtags, you can reach new audiences, boost engagement, and increase brand awareness.
Another way to leverage your social media is by collaborating with local influencers to reach more people. An influencer has a following that trusts them. These followers are more likely to trust a restaurant the influencer recommends. You can also work with local organizations. You can host an event, participate in a food festival to sponsor a local sports team or partner with a local charity to donate leftovers.
8. Use Schema Markup for Local SEO
Add structured data (schema markup) to your website to highlight key details, like address, operating hours, and menu. Essentially, this code tells search engines what specific information is on your web page and where it’s located.
Examples of details you can inform search engines using schema markup are:
- “This is our location.”
- “This is our menu.”
- “This is where customers can book reservations.”
- “These are our operating hours.”
- This is our contact information.”
If someone searches for a recipe included on your website, the recipe page will appear on the SERP when you use a search markup to specify the page that contains the particular recipe. Implementing other SEO tactics, such as including the cooking time, images, and reviews, can increase the chances of the reader clicking on your recipe. Then, from your content, the reader should know you are a restaurant that makes that recipe and more and how they can visit your restaurant or order food.
Search markup improves how search engines read and represent your content on SERPs. For example, as mentioned before, you can use schema markup to categorize your content in specific-location landing pages.
Use Google’s Rich Results Test to validate your schema markup implementation. With this test, you can check which rich results can be generated by the structured data it contains and any errors or suggestions for your structured data.
9. Incorporate Visual Content
Visual content is a powerful SEO tool for marketing restaurants. Uploading high-quality photos of your dishes, the interior and exterior of the restaurant, and events to Google, Yelp, and your website can increase customer engagement. Customers are more likely to contact you if they can obtain clear information from the photos and videos you upload than if your content is blurry.
You can also use video content for virtual tours or cooking demos to engage users. It can be beneficial to work with a professional photographer or videographer to help you capture quality content.
Best Practices for Local SEO for Restaurants
Integrating the above practices for local SEO for restaurants is essential for long-term success. With thousands of restaurants within your neighborhood, you need to determine how to rank higher on search engines and maintain your position. It’s also vital to consistently monitor and update your SEO strategies to align with search engine updates and customer behavior trends.
Sources:
Foster, J. (2022). Why Keyword Density Matters.
Revankar, S. Yelp Statistics By Demographics, Stock, Revenue, Purchase Behavior And User Engagement.