Can potential customers find you quickly online? People increasingly use search engines to find restaurants — whether they are hungry right now or planning ahead for a trip to a specific city.
Research indicates that at least 62% of customers use Google Search to find a restaurant — more than any other digital platform. This means that a powerful restaurant SEO strategy is absolutely essential for helping local customers find your restaurant’s website, book a table, and ultimately visit and eat there!
Search Engine Optimization for the Restaurant Business
Search engine optimization for restaurants means fine-tuning every element of your website to show up in more search results. This includes everything from the code on the backend of your site to the navigation menus and photos of your location and dishes. This will attract more customers who are looking for specific kinds of food or dining experiences in a particular geographic region.
Unlike other SEO agencies, our team takes a holistic approach to your overall marketing strategy and online presence to design a custom-quoted marketing plan that prioritizes your business goals and fits within your budget.
If you’re not sure how to optimize your website to reach your target audience, schedule a free comprehensive SEO analysis with our experienced team, and we can help you take your business to the next level.
On-Page SEO Services for Restaurants
If you want to get more visibility, diners, and online orders in your city, then on-page website SEO is where your company needs to start.
On-page SEO optimization refers to improving everything that is part of your website. Since this digital property is under the direct control of the restaurant owner, general manager, or marketing director, it stands to reason that maximizing its ability to bring in leads is the best place to start.
Improving your restaurant website’s on-page SEO requires looking at every piece of the site, including the backend coding, design elements, and user experience.
Our team starts with a comprehensive review of how your website is currently performing and identifies opportunities for improvement. Then, we design a customized technical SEO strategy to target high-impact areas. This can include advanced SEO improvements, like:
- Improving your schema markup for higher placement in search results
- Optimizing your content, titles, tags, meta descriptions, and alt text
- Standardizing image resolution and display for fast load times
- Optimizing for display on both mobile and desktop search
- Conducting targeted keyword research
At the end of the day, if your website does an exceptional job of matching the search intent of your target audience, then you will see your restaurant’s SEO performance generate new orders and reservations almost automatically simply from appearing at the top of SERPs for hungry internet searchers.
Link Building Services for Restaurants
Everything on the internet is connected by a complex web of links. Search engine crawlers rank your website’s backlinks to determine how credible and reliable it is based on the number of reputable sites that link back to you.
That’s why a proven, long-term link-building strategy is crucial for the restaurant industry — links to unreliable or defunct sites can actually hurt your search engine ranking, as can quick-fix strategies like adding your web address into a bunch of comments on irrelevant pages.
Link building is also a crucial part of your local search strategy. High-quality local citations are some of the best links you can have to increase the number of diners finding your restaurant.
If a diner searches “Mexican restaurant in Cambridge,” then you want to make sure that your site is optimized for that geographically specific term, along with the particular type of cuisine you serve.
Local SEO strategies include listing your restaurant on popular local review sites, like Yelp, Bing Places, and Google Business Profile. At SEO Design Chicago, our restaurant SEO services also include optimizing for maps, voice, and ChatGPT to ensure that your restaurant is top of mind for anyone looking for local dining.
WordPress SEO for Restaurants
Your website is the cornerstone of your restaurant marketing efforts. If your website doesn’t provide a visually appealing, easy-to-navigate experience for diners, they will quickly choose another option.
WordPress is a popular choice for many sites. In fact, WordPress hosts about 43% of the world’s websites. That said, the needs of the restaurant industry are specific. You need to make it easy for potential customers to book reservations online or place an online order. Your hours, menu, physical location, allergy information, history, values, and cooking style all need to be artfully communicated through creative yet accessible storytelling.
Working with a top restaurant SEO agency like SEO Design Chicago ensures that your website continues to run smoothly to generate new leads for your location. We can handle a one-time optimization of your site to correct existing problems.
For restaurants that have both an in-person business to run and the need for streamlined online transactions, we recommend affordable ongoing maintenance packages. These ensure that your WordPress plugins continue to run smoothly over the long term, so diners aren’t frustrated by frequent downtimes, slow load speeds, or reservation pages that break as soon as you’ve typed in all of your information.
Shopify SEO for Restaurants
Purchasing takeout or meal kits directly through your website is a great way to expand your offerings. This requires setting up a secure, user-friendly website on an e-commerce platform. Shopify and WordPress with a WooCommerce plugin are popular choices.
Strong SEO will help customers find your takeout and meal kits and dramatically increase your reach. Our Shopify SEO process includes every element of your online store, including collections curation, product page design and descriptions, link building to improve domain authority, and integrating your digital store with your overall content strategy.
SEO Website Optimization for Restaurants
Is your website bringing people to the table? Effective restaurant search engine optimization will ensure your restaurant has a steady stream of new and repeat diners and online orders by making it easy for potential customers to find you via their favorite search platforms.
At SEO Design Chicago, we custom-quote each SEO package for the client’s individual needs, budget, growth goals, and target audience. Whether you’re a restaurant startup just figuring out your marketing or a multi-site operation looking to bring in more online orders, we will design a strategy based on your existing SEO performance and designed for sustainable, scalable growth.
We always begin with a comprehensive SEO analysis of your site’s current performance. For new restaurants, you may not have any existing traffic yet — that’s okay! We can build your online presence from scratch and offer everything from web design and hosting to customized content creation and photography to get you off the ground.
If you want to improve your SEO performance, we’ll take a detailed look at your analytics, including traffic sources and demographics, CTR of any current ad campaigns, and possible bugs or outdated code that could be harming your rankings without you even realizing it.
If you want a website that brings in consistent business to your restaurant, get started with your free SEO analysis today.
FAQ: Ask Our Digital Marketing Experts About Restaurant SEO
What is SEO for restaurants, and why does my business need it?
SEO is the process of optimizing every element of your website content to ensure that it closely matches the search intent of your target audience. This means that when your ideal customer searches for something like “Italian restaurant near me,” your restaurant is more likely to appear near the top of their search results. This generates more organic leads for your business and ensures that potential customers have accurate information about your restaurant’s hours, location, dining experience, and food.
How does on-page SEO help my restaurant rank higher on Google?
On-page SEO helps your restaurant provide a better web browsing experience for customers and match more closely to relevant search terms. On-page SEO techniques include optimizing content, tags, titles, and alt-text for keywords, ensuring fast load times, improving UX, optimizing image display, and improving source code. All of these elements work together to improve your Google ranking, which places your restaurant’s website higher on search results pages.
Can link building really help a local restaurant get more customers?
High-quality backlinks make it more likely that search engine crawlers will index your site and deem it as high-authority. This means that other credible websites are essentially referencing your site as credible, which ultimately boosts your online reputation and drives more traffic to your website.
It’s important that the backlinks are high-quality. Links to unhelpful sites, links that appear to be purchased or spammed, or broken links actually harm your authority and ranking on search engines.
What’s the best SEO platform for restaurants — WordPress or Shopify?
Both platforms can be customized for restaurant use, with the correct SEO tools. WordPress offers more customization, but generally requires more specific plugin knowledge and ongoing management. WordPress-hosted sites can include automated reservation tools by adding relevant plugins.
Shopify allows integration with your social media channels, making it easy for customers to click on an ad on your feed and be taken directly to order takeout on your website. As an e-commerce platform, however, it is less relevant for brick-and-mortar restaurants that need to prioritize automated reservations and basic location and contact information on their site.
How long does it take for restaurant SEO to bring in more diners or online orders?
SEO is a long-term marketing strategy that provides increasing ROI over months. However, some local SEO services can improve the exposure of your restaurant website for search engines in just a few weeks. Optimizing your Google Business Profile, deleting broken links, and standardizing your NAP (name, address, and phone number) information across platforms are simple restaurant SEO tips that you can usually see a bump from within a month or so.
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