Restaurant SEO

The tables are reserved, and orders are flowing into the kitchen. The sounds of clinking glasses and forks and knives clacking against plates combine with the low murmur of happy diners. It’s an ideal day in the restaurant business. Does this scenario seem too idealistic? Not when we add SEO to the mix.  SEO is more or less like wine with a universal taste that blends well with all business types, and this time, we will add this timeless wine to the restaurant business cuisine.

Just as we can’t jump to the main course without opening our taste buds on some starters, we can't understand how SEO will benefit a restaurant without first defining what it is.  SEO, short for Search Engine Optimization, is a strategy for increasing the page rank of a website on the search results page (SERP) of a search engine, usually based on a few targeted search terms. A higher rank results in more visibility and traffic, and therefore, more customers and money. In the case of a restaurant, it would mean a fuller dining room and the ka-ching of the cash register going off throughout operating hours.

SEO for restaurants works on the same lines as regular SEO does; it’s just flavored according to the taste of the restaurant industry.  Take a look at our restaurant case study about how users look for restaurants on Google to get a taste.

Online ranking for restaurants is a dish that takes a while to prepare. It demands the right blend of excellent content, a dash of social media presence, and a healthy and nutritious backlink consommé. We will cover these areas in depth later.

To juice it all in a definition, restaurant SEO is revamping the search engine optimization techniques for the restaurant business. Although there are many different aspects at play that might give it a slightly different taste than a regular SEO, we did say revamp, didn’t we?

Well, we could be smart and answer that in a single line: it goes as far as you do, See? That explains absolutely nothing. Okay, jokes aside, how far SEO can take you depends on the quality of the elements that go into it. The type of content you pick, the way you engage with social media, or how you treat your website, shapes the overall SEO pattern.

You own a restaurant and a website; now it’s time to optimize that website. Optimization here means modifying the content on your site according to the tastes of your customers and the preferences of the search engines. Remember, we said it was delicious content? This partly defines it. We know the Oxford dictionary won’t be proud of our definitions, but we can’t help it.

Back to the content, you can host various forms of content on your website. This may include blogs, articles, press releases, your web page content, etc. Now think of it all as your restaurant’s menu (you know, for motivation and stuff) and then decide on your content. Too vague? Let’s dig in and define it further.

The Recipe Corner - This one’s exclusively for the restaurant business. Here you can share something simple from your menu. Try to cover some easy-to-make snacks. You can also go with some exquisite delicacies but keep that to a minimum. The bottom line for the recipe corner is to showcase dishes that attract food lovers who love to cook as well as eat.

Share a Story or Press Release - It’s time to flaunt your inner celebrity. Do you have something worth showing off? Craft a catchy story and tell the world. This content can be your official ticket to publicity. However, a low-quality or loosely bound story can slide your reputation to the lower front. It’s best to employ this only to advertise your rockstar moments.

So, that was a glimpse at the various types of content. For any content, quality plays a pivotal role. So, always maintain the quality and keep challenging yourself to produce better content to retain your readers. When it comes to content, these are golden words written in black.

The next serving we have is the offsite content, which is also part of restaurant SEO. As the name implies, offsite content deals with material that exists in other places outside of your website. Time to cook some foreign content. The broad outline of this sort of content involves:

Offsite Press Releases and Blogs - The same blogs and press releases we talked about earlier, just posted on a different domain. There are various websites and online forums that host foreign content. The only catch is, your content must be catchy. An exciting and informative blog post or a press release that reflects a groundbreaking event with you at the center would be ideal.

The demand for quality content all across the Web motivates webmasters to host their content on different domains. So,  well-crafted offsite material can help you reach a new audience, and from there, get more diners into your restaurant.

Where would we go without adding some SEO salt to the content mix? Nowhere, if you ask us. Brewing high-tier content without adding SEO techniques is like serving a marvelous dish to an empty table. The logic is simple: your content needs an audience, and that audience is the online community. To get that, we try to optimize the onsite content so that it reaches its target.

So, now, we'll learn how to use SEO tactics within the content, involving several practices.  We will try to cover all of them, bit by bit because slow and steady bakes the cake.

When you have decided on your keywords, it’s time to place them. This can be a bit ticklish but fret not; we are going to help you get a clearer idea on everything that's involved.

Importance of Choosing Specific Keywords
To elaborate further on relevance, it is better to focus on a few highly relevant keywords rather than on a vast group of tangential ones.

For example, a multi-cuisine restaurant could go with of keywords like “best Chinese restaurant,” “Mexican cuisine,” “best continental restaurant,” etc.. While these choices might be relevant, they are still too broad and unfocused to have an impact. Not only are you stepping into a kitchen that is far too hot, but you are also inviting in too many chefs. A better choice might be “best dim sum in Cleveland” or “tastiest enchiladas in Boston.”

Finished the keywords soup? Hope it tasted informative. That was just the first course. Employing keywords is no uphill battle, but their clever placement can be a complex affair at times.

A header tag, as the name suggests, is the heading of your page that briefly explains the various sections and subsections of the content on the page. A page without proper header is like a pizza without cheese, and that’s unthinkable (especially the latter part). Deciding on a header tag requires specific measures to boost its efficiency.

So, it’s time we learn how to sweeten up those header tags — let’s jump right to it.

Speckled HTML Tags with Keywords
The right quantity of keywords blended with the header tag is what we seek here. We all understand the value of keywords. Employing keywords within the header tags not only helps the search engine bots to define the content on your page better, but it also helps the reader find the answers he or she is looking for. It’s a win-win move.

Cook a Perfect Meta Description
We had the toppings; now we go for the cake. Yeah, these food references make us hungry, too. Coming back to the point, meta descriptions are like a summary of your page. A snippet, to be precise.

Now, how does that help us to get more traffic (and more diners)?

By flaunting a fetching summary of our page in the search results to attract readers.

But, just like the other SEO techniques, it involves following a series of steps to ensure the best results.

Steps to Write a Great Description for Your Restaurant Website Pages

Dwelling on Details
We can’t take the liberty of missing out on important details about the page just because we are writing a synopsis. A meta description must have all the necessary details about the page. To achieve this, try to focus on the primary areas that the page stresses on. Note down all the fundamental details that the page talks about. Now, grind them all, mix them well, and pour them all into the meta description, and bingo, we have the best meta description.

Including details like your service areas, happy hours, meal discounts, etc. can help you stand out and improve your click rates significantly.

“Downtown Las Vegas neighborhood urban dining located at 6th St. & Carson Ave., in the historic John E. Carson Hotel.”

Text links that help users navigate through a website easily. That’s the definition of anchor text. Anchor text streamlines website navigation and makes it user-friendly. As a bonus, anchor texts also enhance the indexability of the website. To make the most out of this tactic, we need to follow a few steps.

The Text Matches the Link
Have you ever clicked on an anchor text that reads “best restaurant in Atlanta” that transfers you to a webpage that is not about Atlanta, let alone restaurants?  You were probably frustrated and immediately clicked off the site to continue your search for an Atlanta restaurant elsewhere.

As you might expect, misleading users is never a good way to get traffic, well, traffic that converts into customers, anyway. Always provide what you promise. In this case, your anchor text must be firmly related to the link it points at.

Easy Navigation Ride
This step is more like a concoction of the above two measures. This step underlines the significance of employing anchor text to promote a user-friendly website model. The end motive of any webmaster should be to add to overall positive user experience. Using anchor text to ease navigation through your website is one example.

This was a brief class on anchor text in context to SEO for restaurants. Here, we learned a few steps on how to optimize our anchor text to ensure promising returns. This quick session also gave us a brief idea of how to create a user-friendly website.

It’s time to widen the horizon for our restaurant SEO strategy. To promote our food palace, we need to enlist the help of social media and backlinks.

Before we start hitting our cookbook to prepare the best backlink and social media strategy, we must understand that this method of promotion is like baking bread: a bit tiring but worth the effort. There is no denying to the fact that building a sturdy backlink structure and gaining stardom on social media is a time-consuming process. No overnight endeavors work here. However, the end-product truly makes it worthwhile.

Just like we said, this process of forming a proper backlink and social media network is not instant-noodle stuff. So, we need a systematic approach.

First off, we start with learning the recipe for a healthy backlink web for our restaurant website (online restaurant also sounds good). So, like good sous chefs, let’s start that oven.

Recommended Practices for Building Relevant Backlinks
So many roads, yet a single way to go. That’s our inner Socrates right there. Well, a bit philosophical that was, but with it, we meant to explain that there is a plethora of ways to acquire a good number of backlinks, but only one can be regarded as a fruitful one.

This healthy way of backlink acquisition can be termed as Recommended Practices. Let’s unravel what we mean by this term.

Niche-Specific Backlink
Links from anywhere we can get them are good, right?  Well, not exactly. Our whole backlink web must be relevant to our niche. The rationale behind it is also obvious: who would expect a link to a restaurant site on a page dedicated to computer hardware? Just remember, you are a restaurant genius (we really believe you are) and your followers (backlinks) must bear the mark of restaurant and food industry.

Amassing backlinks that share no direct or even far-away ties with your niche is considered spammy by search engines like Google. So, host healthy, serve healthy, and avoid the wrath of Google.

Disavow the Suspicious Links
In the real world, people who associate with shady people can become perceived as shady themselves. The same is true online; if shady sites link to you, they can taint your reputation as a trustworthy source of information.

Because Google and other search engines have the goal of providing users with the best, most accurate, and trustworthy content, their algorithms penalize sites with untrustworthy backlink profiles and reduce their rank in the SERPs.

So, if you want your restaurant website to rise in the search results (because of course, you do! If not, why are you reading this?), then pay attention to the company you keep online. It can pay you big dividends in the long run.

The Ones We Don't Recommend
Resisting cheating is tough, trust us; we speak from experience. After all, why walk when you can fly? Unfortunately, our restaurant search engine optimization ethics don’t agree with this whole flying philosophy. Well, restaurant SEO does hold logic here; there are no foodies to serve in the sky.

Coming to the point, we are going to list a few tactics of backlink creation that you should never employ. There is a good reason why we label these tactics Not Recommended. Although they promise instant backlink acquisition, these promises are shallow, empty, and to a great extent, hazardous.

Using these backlink creation methods would unquestionably ruin the overall reputation of a website. Now that we are done with our moralizing, it’s time we introduced these not recommended practices to you.

Littering the Online Forums
If you frequent online forums, you will never choose this measure. Many use their splendid acumen in promoting their website on an online public forum. That was a sarcastic remark, by the way. It’s true, you can use online forums for promoting a website, but to do it right, it requires tact and an artful demeanor.

If you want to promote your website on forums, you must play the role of a concerned individual, suggesting a helpful link, but the practice we are talking about is the opposite of this. Here, the sole aim is to advertise yourself, and it's done in the blandest way possible. The result? Most of the forum users disregard your link and label you a spammer. The forum administrators may even ban you for violating the forum rules regarding irrelevant self-promotion.

Thin Content Blogging
While many fancy the idea of writing excellent and highly instructive blogs on guest blogging sites while subtly promoting their website, there are more than a few who engage in writing and posting thin, low-quality blogs as a way to earn some easy backlinks. The practice backfires on the blogger more than it hits the target.  We’re sure you’ve heard the phrase “content is king,” and it has never rung truer than it does today. Internet users have grown ever pickier about what they expect from a piece of content, and the search engines have responded by aggressively filtering out those results that provide too little information and no value to the reader.

As we’ve said before, always have giving value to the reader in mind when creating content, whether for a guest blog or your website. If you do this, you’ll never have to worry about getting de-ranked for thin content.

That’s about all for the do-not-dos. These practices not only falter on providing a solid backlink base but also drain the authority juice of the website — the ultimate recipe of doom and losses, to be precise. So, try not to wander into this unhealthy domain and follow the code of honest backlink creation.

Although a world peace enthusiast would faint from happiness, watching so many people come together, this complicates things for us. Sensitivity originates from the bloodline of diversity. In other words, the more diverse a platform is, the more sensitive it becomes. This means we must turn up the vigilance volume before posting anything on social media. Trust us, it’s all worth it, considering the rich dividends it delivers. If we haven’t frightened you away with our scary speech, let’s dig up a few methods that can help us better maneuver our SEO efforts on social media.

To properly use social media, you must first become familiar with the different platforms from which it is made.  Each platform has a unique ecosystem of expectations and mores. Among them, some giants host millions of users every day. Corporate minds often use these platforms for advertising their enterprise, and it is into this mix that we must add our spice.

The Different Mechanics - Just like we said earlier, each platform operates differently. For example, Instagram is designed around posting mostly personal photos and videos. We can’t say the same for Twitter, however, which revolves around posting short messages covering various domains, such as politics, the entertainment industry, or any other area of general interest. See the difference? So, try to plan your strategy according to the platform.

Platform-Specific Population - This is an extension of the previous aspect. Each platform hosts a different kind of audience. For instance, an Instagram citizen is inclined towards hashtags, photos, and videos. It’s the perfect place for anyone who enjoys looking at pretty pictures and laughing at silly GIFs and memes. On the other hand, a native of Facebook might not be inclined to post pictures and selfies. There are many on Facebook who use it for more formal pursuits, such as a political party hosting a page on the platform. So, before going neck-deep in social media optimization, thoroughly understand the audience expectations for each platform.

We know this isn’t the stone age and everyone knows about this stuff, but still, a basic overview can always come in handy. So, we hope this finds good use in your restaurant SEO design.

It’s time to talk about content again (by again, we mean for the fifth time. See? We’ve been counting). Back there, we talked about where to post; now we discuss what to post. This is where the tricky part starts, and this exactly where diversity comes into play.

Sensitive-Proof
Remember, we had a brief chat on the sensitivity aspect of social media? We are about to elaborate on that part. While you prepare the social media meal, make sure that its taste does not offend anyone. In other words, design content that does not touch on any sensitive idea or thought. The social media community is unforgiving when it comes to tampering with sensitive issues.

The Ever-Flowing Content
Be consistent. That’s the keyword here. You have come up with fresh, aromatic ideas regularly that you can translate into a catchy post for a targeted platform. Also, remember to craft content according to the platform design. For instance, you might showcase mouth-watering photos of your latest menu addition on Instagram or a pithy tweet from your chef on Twitter. The main point is this: be regular, be uniform. This will help your content gain the attention of the social media community.

The Style Statement
A restaurant with an app — doesn’t it sound cool? It’s okay to give in to style a bit. While it does not directly influence the business of your restaurant, it gives you an edge in the industry. It adds a bit of tech-savvy flair to your restaurant’s image.

The Other Source of Order
Ordering food through an app means more business for us. That was the primary intention to put it precisely. You are, in a way, adding another platform to do business on. Your official app will accumulate its share of customers, i.e., the ones who download the app. This can easily be considered as a business expansion move through a digital medium.

As they say, “The more, the better.” So, making your restaurant app-friendly would mean more for your food hub.

The Local Traffic
The local listing optimizes your business according to the local search. In simple terms, if anyone in the area searches for a local restaurant, chances are your restaurant will pop up in the search results. This supplements your online ranking, plus it helps you get more traffic on your website.

The Credibility Factor
This is an easy one. The local listing displays reviews about your business. The online customer feedback, to be precise. This adds to the credibility factor of your restaurant. These reviews act as a trustworthy source as they come directly from your customers.

We hope you enjoyed our little dish on restaurant SEO. We also hope this recipe aids you in your SEO efforts and helps you rank better for your target keywords.