Are you foody and that’s why you’ve chosen the restaurant business as your passion? Well, you’ve chosen a good business idea but have you ever thought about why a restaurant business needs SEO? The main reason among several others is that it will bring your business to the top of Google search results and it will help you get more clients. You need to apply the best SEO strategies to your business to ensure it. Are you a bit confused about this topic? Please read my blog-” TOP SEO Strategy for Restaurants: A Complete Guide to Increase Sales” to remove all your confusion.
What is SEO for a Restaurant?
“Restaurant SEO refers to the process of ensuring that search engines keep the most important information of your restaurants such as location, contact number, menu, operation hours, and the like updated when showing it to your potential customers and visitors.” You’ll get a complete idea about what SEO is for a restaurant if you read this blog.
How Can Restaurants Improve SEO?
Restaurants can improve SEO by taking the following steps:
- Register the Website of Your Restaurant with “Google My Business Profile”
- Develop Engaging Content and Localize It
- Execute Schema Markup and Use Structured Data for Your Business
- Develop & Optimize the Website of Your Restaurant
- Mobile Optimization of Your Website
- Keep Your Business Enlisted on Different Online Directories
- Preserve Consistency
- Utilize Google Places and Get Yourself Discovered Locally
- Develop Your Restaurant’s Social Media Channels
- Increase Social Media Visibility by Sharing Your Activities
- Develop Trust by Getting Online Reviews
- Get Your Website Voice Search-Optimized
- Internal Linking, Backlinks, and Mentions
- Maintain Regular Customer Engagement
- Boost UX or User Experience
- Take Care of the Five Key SEO Concepts
- Review and Evaluate the Outcomes
- Measure and Analyze Results
Let’s discuss these steps thoroughly.
1. Register the Website of Your Restaurant with “Google My Business Profile”
You can develop a listing or profile on “Google My Business” without any cost so that customers can find you easily and get vital information. When you generate your business profile, you’ll see your restaurant name and some relevant information on the Google search results page’s upper right corner. Learn the detailed process by visiting here.
Learn more: How To Add & Claim Your Business Profile on Google
2. Develop Engaging Content and Localize It
Developing engagement is a vital aspect of SEO strategy. You need to develop helpful, relevant, and unique content that can rank you and attract increased traffic to the restaurant as everyone is searching for content. You can follow these tips to create helpful content for the restaurant:
- Apply long-tail keywords
Try using long-tail keywords in the titles, images, and descriptions. These keywords let your restaurant website rank better than restaurants that just apply short-term ones like restaurants or burgers. For instance, rather than applying the long-term keyword “burger in Dhaka” use something more elaborative like “classic cheesy burger in Dhaka.”
- Develop unique content
Create the content on unique topics or at least ensure that you write better on general topics than others do. So, when anyone looks for these topics, they can get your website first rather than someone else’s. It’s crucial not only because Google acknowledges uniqueness but also because if you can’t serve something better, you won’t get any visitors.
Read also: How to Find Content Ideas for social media
- Create mouth-watering advertisements
If you want to do remarkably better, go beyond creating unique content and try creating mouth-watering advertisements for your restaurant to attract more customers.
- Localize content
When you are trying to develop your business in a specific locality or community, you need to create content that understands the local people’s sentiments and appears in local search outcomes. For instance, if you’re going to start a Chinese restaurant in Bangladesh, you need to write about the fundamentals of Chinese preparations such as their unique preparation techniques, special spices applied in cooking, and the history of some conventional Chinese dishes.
Learn more here: Tips to Help You Publish Awesome Content That’s Helpful To User
If you can afford it, you can also hire a content-writing agency to perform this task because they can do it better.
3. Execute Schema Markup and Use Structured Data for Your Business
Schema markup provides increased information regarding your business. Where as structured data does the same more technically. Both let search engines become aware of the type of content you’re offering to serve users with better search results. Precisely, both of these let search engines know about your restaurant’s operation in short.
For instance, does it serve spaghetti? Is there any gluten-free recipe on the menu of your restaurant? Does your restaurant run any special programs at the venue? You can answer these questions through the exact execution of structured data and schema markup.
Google has already made it quite simple to execute both of these developments into websites because you don’t need to write the codes yourself and mostly, all the latest content management programs contain plugins that will perform this automatically.
4. Develop & Optimize the Website of Your Restaurant
You need an exact website to implement the SEO techniques. That’s why develop a responsive site with XML sitemaps, clear navigations, helpful content, and awesome visuals. Ensure to have a section called “Contact Us” where you’ll give your restaurant phone number, address, and other relevant contact details. Don’t forget to include other necessary information like operation hours, discounts, special offers, and other attractive features present in your restaurant.
If you add a “Blog” section to the site, you can get increased traffic and build your image as an information leader in your niche. You’ll be rising your traffic high by generating useful content that your audience wants. Don’t stuff your content with excessive keywords and follow an exact format of content that is SEO-optimized such as adding H1, H2, and H3 tags, exact keyword placement, interlinking, backlinks, fixing broken links, and the like.
Read also: Common SEO Mistakes for Small Businesses Must Avoid
5. Mobile Optimization of Your Website
Nowadays, most people browse various sites from their mobiles. Whether they are working, roaming around, or sitting idly, they have smartphones in their hands, and they are passing time on social media or finding out necessary data on the internet on their mobiles. In such a scenario, if your website is not optimized for mobiles, you’ll lag undoubtedly.
You can keep your site optimized for mobiles by following these tips:
- Apply a responsive design
If your site has a responsive design, the page layout will be changed depending on the device you’ll use to see it. So, if a user sees your site with a mobile will see it differently than if anyone views it with their desktop or laptop. A responsive design is sometimes developed with CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) media queries.
- Apply a mobile-optimized template
Templates refer to code packages you buy from places like Template Monster or Theme forest and then put into the WordPress website as a portion of the website design process. They perform each heavy lifting for your site so that when the visitors see your site from whatever screen size, everything looks awesome.
- Quick loading speed
Ensure that your website content doesn’t have any long paragraphs. Also, try including contact forms or maps where visitors can directly send messages from their mobiles if these can be helpful for them rather than roaming around the city to find out a suitable place for having dinner.
6. Keep Your Business Enlisted on Different Online Directories
Several people look for restaurant information on different online listing sites or directories. They love to see what several people have said about the food, ambiance, and other mentionable features of a restaurant before going there for a dine. If you are doing a restaurant business but haven’t enlisted yourself on these sites, you’ll certainly lose some probable customers.
So, enlist your business not only on Google but also on other search engines or directories like Bing, Yellow pages, Yelp, and the like to get more clients.
Recommended reading: Local SEO for Small Business
7. Preserve Consistency
Nowadays, various restaurant review sites are available as mentioned earlier “Google My Business”, Yelp, and then Facebook, Zomato, OpenTable, Zagat, and the like. If you have enlisted your restaurant on various listing sites but you’re unable to keep consistency among them, it becomes useless and people will lose trust in your business. For example, Yelp says that your restaurant is open from 9 am to 12 am but Zomato says that it’s open from 12 pm to 12 am, then visitors will become confused. You need to update all your information on various sites to maintain consistency and remove any type of confusion.
8. Utilize Google Places and Get Yourself Discovered Locally
If you utilize Google places to get your business discovered locally, you won’t miss out on some of your potential clients. It helps your business to come up with a snippet of helpful information like address, operating hours, and the like in an online local search. Suppose, someone is not feeling like searching for any listing site and just wants to search on Google for restaurants near me or my location, you’ll be golden in such cases if you’ve utilized Google places to locally optimize your business.
Recommended reading: How to Optimize Your Google Business Profile Properly
- Optimize Business Information
Optimizing your business information is a crucial step in maximizing your restaurant’s visibility and attracting more customers through SEO.
Make sure that your restaurant’s name, address, phone number, and website are accurate and consistent across all platforms, including your website, social media pages, online directories, and review sites. Inconsistencies can confuse search engines and potential customers, negatively impacting your SEO.
- Post Regular Updates and Photos
Posting regular updates and photos is an essential part of any successful restaurant’s SEO strategy. By sharing photos of your food, drinks, and restaurant ambiance, you can entice potential customers and keep your current customers engaged.
When it comes to social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, posting updates and photos regularly can help increase your visibility and reach. It’s important to create a content calendar and stick to it, posting updates and photos at least a few times a week.
- Best Time To Post on Social Media
Determining the best time to post on social media is crucial for optimizing your restaurant’s visibility and engagement.
It’s important to consider your target audience and when they are most likely to be active on social media. For example, if your restaurant caters to a breakfast crowd, you may want to post in the early morning when people are waking up and checking their phones.
In general, the best times to post on social media are during off-work hours when people have more free time to browse. This can include early mornings, lunchtime, and evenings after work.
Learn more: Best Time to Post on Social Media
9. Develop Your Restaurant’s Social Media Channels
If your restaurant has accounts on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the like, it will become easier for you to get more clients. The more social media accounts you have, the better it will be for your business. Adorn those channels with attractive images, videos, and mouth-watering ads to get visitors attracted to your restaurant and increase your sales. It will also help you to get reviews from your customers.
10. Increase Social Media Visibility by Sharing Your Activities
Just having social media channels won’t be enough for your business to get visible online. You need to share your activities frequently on your social media channels so that your customers won’t forget you and your potential customers will be attracted to your business and you’ll have increased sales.
Read also: How to developed social media marketing campaign
11. Develop Trust by Getting Online Reviews
Get online reviews from your customers. Just having filled up the review forms offline from them is not enough today because people are getting more online day by day. If your customers give great reviews on your services after having food on Google, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and the like, your restaurant name will spread quickly and help you to increase your sales.
- Monitor Online Reputation
Monitoring your restaurant’s online reputation is an important aspect of your SEO strategy. It’s important to track what customers are saying about your restaurant on review sites, social media, and other online platforms.
Regularly monitoring your online reputation allows you to respond to negative reviews and address customer complaints in a timely and professional manner. Responding to negative reviews shows that you value customer feedback and are committed to improving their experience.
12. Get Your Website Voice Search-Optimized
People are gradually becoming more used to using voice searches than typing because they are getting busier. Again, voice searches can be more accurate than typing because there won’t be any spelling or typing mistakes. So, if your restaurant website is voice-search optimized you can easily outperform your competitors who aren’t utilizing it yet. Your sales will increase and at the same time, your customers will become happier because they won’t need need to stain their fingers.
13. Internal Linking, Backlinks, and Mentions
Internal linking, backlinks, and mentions are effective ways to improve your restaurant website’s visibility online and increase authority and trustworthiness. New sites and bloggers will help you lift your SEO position only if they mention your business and link back to your restaurant website. Take care of the following things:
- Create helpful and supreme quality content. Don’t just link back to your blogs and home pages forcefully, link only for the sake of the reader’s necessity and to help them.
- Make sure that you are getting mentioned in the extract pages of the restaurant website. Be specific about where you are redirecting your readers because it will also help you rank higher on Google SERPs. It will, in turn, help you increase your sales.
Read also: How to Get Backlinks with Infographics?
14. Maintain Regular Customer Engagement
Just developing social media channels and not being active there and not interacting with your customers, is completely meaningless. You need to be active there by sharing helpful posts that your audience wants. You also need to reply to your customer’s queries, and comments on your posts frequently. Otherwise, they’ll feel that you don’t value them.
Try to keep regular customer engagement on social media sites, and also on your website. It will help you draw more customers and increase sales.
Recommended reading: Identifying Target Audiences For Social Media Marketing Campaign
15. Boost UX or User Experience
It’s your first and foremost duty to boost UX or user experience for your users because they are the ones who bring in money for your business. Ensure that your website has a user-friendly interface, the pages load quickly, and your customers can easily place orders, book tables, give feedback, and the like. If your customers can’t easily access your online services, your business can’t flourish well. Ensure better user experience to get more visitors, and increase conversion.
16. Take Care of the Five Key SEO Concepts
There is no denying fact that you need SEO to keep your restaurant website at the top of search results online. SEO has five key concepts which you always need to take care of:
- Title Tags:
Title tags are the most crucial on-site SEO tactic. The things which you view in search results are the title tags. They play a significant role in your site’s CTR or click-through rates. You should write it in such a way that you are writing a tag without heading markup.
It needs to be your page’s first sentence.
- Keywords:
These are your web page’s main topics. They help your website to get found in the search results of Google. You need to include them in the title tag, meta description, and also on the page.
- Header Tags:
These tags help you to structure your content on the web page. The browsers and search engines won’t understand the hierarchy of your content on your site and won’t determine which part of it is more vital. So, you need to add header tags so that the search engines understand how the parts of the content are related to one another and which part is more important.
- Meta Descriptions:
Meta descriptions offer short summaries of your pages. It’s crucial because users don’t know what they’re going to view when they’ll click on a certain site. It shows the content summary as a snippet on the search engine result pages.
You need to write different meta descriptions for different pages and you need to write them for humans, not search engines. Then your chances of getting top rank on search engine pages will be higher.
- URLs:
URLs are necessary concepts because they are the links between your site and search engines. They need to be short, easy, memorable, descriptive, and without any spaces. You need to avoid duplicate content, and ensure that each of your website pages has a unique structure, with the exact URL so that index bots of all search engines including Google can read them easily and your website ranks on the search engines.
17. Review and Evaluate the Outcomes
Last but not least, review and evaluate how your SEO efforts are bridging results for your business. SEO is an ever-changing sector and numerous changes are taking place frequently. You need to be aware of all the changes and also check what your competitors are doing to get a better outcome. Take corrective actions accordingly to improve the performance of your restaurant and increase sales.
18. Measure and Analyze Results
Measuring and analyzing the results of your SEO strategy is crucial for understanding its effectiveness and identifying areas for improvement.
One important metric to track is website traffic. By monitoring the number of visitors to your restaurant’s website, you can see if your SEO efforts are driving more traffic to your site. You can use tools like Google Analytics to track website traffic and other important metrics like bounce rate, time on site, and pageviews.
It’s also important to track keyword rankings. By monitoring where your restaurant ranks for relevant keywords, you can see if your SEO efforts are helping your restaurant appear higher in search engine results pages. You can use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to track keyword rankings.
Final Words:
The restaurant niche is highly-competitive and you need to keep your website well-optimized and follow the best SEO strategies to get better sales. By now, you must have got a clear idea about it from this blog.
So, If you’re a restaurant owner looking to attract nearby customers, having effective local SEO is essential. Our local SEO services in Bangladesh can help ensure that! Your Restaurant needs smart and data-driven SEO strategies and we can help increase your restaurant’s online visibility and drive more foot traffic to your business.