Restaurant Marketing Agency (RMA)
What is Restaurant SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO), although far less exciting than other tactics in digital marketing, is crucial in building a successful digital marketing strategy for restaurants. Restaurant SEO comprises of three main pillars that work together to increase website authority and drive sustainable organic traffic and growth!
The three main pillars of SEO marketing for restaurants are technical improvements, on-page content, and off-page optimizations.
1. Technical SEO Improvements
Technical SEO improvements are essential for search engine crawlers to understand the structure and hierarchy of your website. These improvements can include core web vitals, metadata, sitemaps, structured data, alt text descriptions, response codes, canonicals, header structure, and URL structure.
2. On-Page and Content SEO
On-page and content SEO is important for attracting and maintaining visitors to your website. This can include creating excellent content with relevant keywords that help search engines and visitors to better understand the content of your page. On-page SEO also includes the use of internal and external links. Linking is a great way to direct traffic to other relevant pages within your website that are likely to best serve their needs.
3. Off-Page SEO
Off-page SEO builds authority for your website. Website authority helps build trust with search engines. The higher the degree of authority your site holds, the more likely it is to rank higher on search engines. Off-page SEO includes backlinks and local SEO.
Why Should Restaurants Use SEO?
Search engines are the first place consumers search for a place to eat. And, most times, consumers use generic terms to search for a restaurant to dine. While building strong brand awareness is essential to a restaurant's success, restaurant SEO is a great way to capture customers that are looking for your product, without having any previous knowledge or awareness about your restaurant's brand.
Have you ever wondered how search engines choose to suggest restaurants when you search for things such as “Indian food near me”?
Restaurants are completely location specific. Local SEO for restaurants helps customers find you by showing that you’re a reputable establishment.
Furthermore, search engines use SEO to make recommendations that they believe will serve you best. Creating SEO content that utilizes relevant keywords is an excellent way to build search engine authority, leading to increased online orders, reservations, and foot traffic!
4 Ways Your Restaurant Can Leverage SEO
Optimize Your Website For Mobile Devices
When searching for a place to eat, potential customers tend to utilize their mobile devices. In fact, today’s search engines prioritize mobile-friendly content. Search engines like Google now utilize a mobile-first indexing approach, meaning they index mobile-friendly websites first and assume that the vast majority of searchers are utilizing their mobile devices.
Offering a mobile-friendly website will improve user experience, increasing the likelihood that customers will be interested and motivated to visit your restaurant. Make browsing and navigating your site simple! A high-quality mobile website will reduce bounce backs, lowering your bounce rate and improving your restaurant's SEO performance. Furthermore, an optimized mobile-friendly site will improve your core web vitals.
Implement Structured Data
Structured data is composed of relevant information, pictures, and metrics that appear in the search results. Structured data adds value to search results by enticing searchers with additional information. When a website has effectively implemented best SEO structured data practices, it should appear in relevant search results. For restaurants, this means organically reaching motivated potential customers.
Structured data can be challenging to implement, meaning it requires the expertise of a skilled SEO specialist. As a result, many website owners fail to implement structured data. Structured data has the ability to increase your restaurant’s website trustworthiness, meaning search engines will have more confidence in your site leading to a higher clickthrough rate.
Google’s Local Business is another strategy used to implement structured data and appear in google maps and search results. Tell Google about your business and improve your online presence by appearing in local business listings.
Stand out from similar search results with structured data. Invest in restaurant SEO services and leverage structured data. Show off high-quality food pictures, reviews, prices, and any other relevant information that might be attractive to potential customers.
Post High-Quality Content
Posting high-quality content is essential in driving traffic to your restaurant’s website. Content should include a minimum of 300-500 words per page. However, the more words the better! High-quality content acts as a source of both information and truth. The content on your website pages should add some value to your customers.
Restaurant SEO utilizes on-page content to discuss relevant information. Depending on the type of restaurant, owners may choose to offer content that discusses the restaurant's location, the ingredients they use, the type of cuisine, the ambiance, and even the team.
SEO content should add value to both customers and search engines. While on-page content is written with the intent to provide information to readers, SEO content targets search engines specifically. By utilizing relevant keywords, restaurant SEO content helps restaurant websites rank higher for relevant keywords, leading to increased organic traffic!
Create a Keyword Roadmap
A keyword roadmap in an SEO strategy for restaurants involves utilizing relevant keywords to try and rank on search engines to allow more customers to discover your restaurant by capturing searcher intent.
Relevant keywords are chosen based on 3 principles: page context, search volume, and keyword difficulty. First, it is important to evaluate the context of your restaurant's webpage to choose a relevant keyword. For a restaurant location page, content that discusses the location of the restaurant and the type of food might be especially helpful in ranking locally.
Restaurant : Indiana La La
Indiana La La is nestled in a historic building in the old port of Montreal. Enjoy the old port Indian food with a menu that was created by the La La family when they immigrated to Montreal in 1966.
When looking for an Indian food restaurant in the old port of Montreal, customers are likely to search for “Indian Food Old Port”. By organically adding this word into our content, it shows search engines that we are a reputable match for individuals searching this term.
The keyword “Indian Food Old Port” is chosen by assessing the location-specific search volume and difficulty for this word. In general, we prefer to choose words with a high search volume and a relatively low difficulty score. If “Indian Food Old Port” has a search volume of 1.5k, that means that 1.5k people in Montreal are searching for that specific term every single month!
In terms of difficulty, the lower the better. Ideally, when choosing a keyword, aim for a difficulty of <50. If the difficulty for the term “Indian Food Old Port” is 40, then this word possesses an excellent opportunity for content optimization.
Restaurant SEO has the ability to push businesses onto the first page of search engines by leveraging keyword statistics and writing stellar SEO optimized content.
When selecting keywords, it is also important to consider the content on existing web pages. It is essential that the same keyword is not utilized on more than one page to avoid keyword cannibalization. Keyword cannibalization occurs when multiple pages are trying to rank for the same keyword, leading to internal competition. This leads to confusion among search engine crawlers, resulting in difficulty in discerning which page to rank higher.
Conclusion
Leveraging restaurant SEO services to optimize your restaurant SEO is the best way to boost organic traffic and drive growth! While paid ads yield immediate results, their results diminish shortly after the advertising campaign is terminated. Restaurant SEO is an investment that drives sustainable long-term organic traffic.
Implementing an SEO strategy for restaurants and outsourcing to a professional service is the best way to attract visitors to your restaurant’s website and drive conversions. Grow your restaurant with targeted organic traffic that’s motivated and ready to convert!
