Any owner of a dining establishment knows that the restaurant industry is a highly competitive one. With so many options for customers to choose from, how do you stand out from the crowd? How do you let people know you exist?
Developing a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy is arguably the most effective way to improve your organic rankings, which directly impacts people’s awareness and consideration of your brand, and in this case, restaurant. Here’s how.
A good SEO strategy will improve your online visibility and help you reach the people you want to target. By creating a website that users want to use, and by incorporating the correct language and information that users want to read and engage with, you’ll be able to attract customers like never before.
This strategy is also more cost effective than paid marketing alone; after all, PPC and SEO go hand in hand. Sure, there are plenty of benefits to a paid search marketing strategy by itself, especially for small restaurants that are competing with well-established franchises. But you can’t ignore the importance of website optimization and other SEO best practices. Think about it: You can have all the money in the world to spend on a PPC campaign, but if the landing page isn’t good, users aren’t going to stick around. But, if the landing page is informative, easy to use, and otherwise engaging, users are less likely to click away.
So, now that we have a basic understanding of the benefits of SEO for restaurants, let’s discuss some of the specific strategies you can implement to make sure that people will want to dine with your establishment after visiting your website.
Claim Your Google Business Profile
Here’s a scenario for you. Imagine you’re looking for a place to eat on Labor Day. You Google “Italian restaurants in Atlanta,” and a few results pop up. One result looks interesting, but since it’s a holiday, you’re worried it might be closed. You do some digging, but it seems like the restaurant’s hours haven’t been updated on their website, and the phone number is out of service! What do you do? You might take your chances and drive to the location, but the more likely scenario is that you simply move on to a different restaurant. So, how could this have been avoided? Local SEO!
Local SEO might just be the most critical part of a restaurant’s SEO strategy, because it ensures that customers can find your location and information about the location when it’s nearby. The most straightforward way to improve your local SEO is to claim your Google Business Profile. This Profile gives you the ability to update business contact information, holiday hours, and more, making it easy for users to find you and determine whether or not you’re open, accept delivery orders, etc.
Make Your Website Mobile Friendly
Back to the scenario above. Imagine you’ve finally found a great Italian place. You want to take a look at the menu before you go, but when you open the website on your phone, you can’t read it! The descriptions are not wrapping to fit your screen, but are, instead, running off the page. Some foods have photos, while other photos won’t load. And it’s extremely difficult to navigate between sections of the menu,
These issues have to do with mobile-friendliness. Did you know that Google uses mobile-first Indexing to rank websites? That means that having a mobile version of your pages is just as important – perhaps even more important – than having a desktop version.
Make sure that your site has responsive design, so that users across devices can have a good experience. And make sure that your images are high quality, but not too big, so that your page loads quickly and still looks stellar.
Create Quality Content
Obviously, the most important part of a restaurant is the food it sells, right? But sometimes, people care about more than that. They want to know the story behind the restaurant and its founders. They want a list of locations. They want to know if the restaurant caters. They want to know if they can host events there, or if the restaurant itself hosts events, like open mics or happy hours.
These are questions you can answer on your website. Build out pages dedicated to these questions, or create an FAQ that explains the answers to the most common inquiries. A fleshed out website is not only more informative, but it can come across as extra genuine, because users can see the care and effort that went into making pages of additional content that weren’t necessarily “essential” to potential diners.
--
We hope these tips helped you understand how you can take your restaurant SEO to the next level. Interested in learning more about our services? Reach out to Relevance Advisors today!
