Tag Archives: seo for restaurants

15 Critical Reasons why your Restaurant need an SEO Strategy

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A lot of restaurant owners are hesitant or pessimistic about what SEO can do for them.

Small Restaurant's Owner
Photo of elegant small restaurant’s manager at work

Perhaps you’ve had a bad experience in the past, and your confidence in the benefits of SEO have plummeted. Or, maybe you just have a lean budget, and SEO for restaurants seems like a luxury you can’t afford.

Truth be told, SEO can be a tricky beast.

While some of the core fundamentals of restaurant digital marketing will probably stick around forever, some of the nuanced parts are constantly evolving. As a result, many of the “best practices” that people used in the past can get you a penalty from Google today. This can mean a drop in your search rankings. There’s no wonder that some restaurant owners feel like they need the code-breaking skills of a WWII spy to interpret Google’s algorithm.

Yes, SEO is difficult, confusing and constant pain in the neck. But, it’s vital if you want your restaurant business to succeed in a digital world.

Read on to learn why SEO for restaurants is integral to the prosperity of your business.

1. We Live in a “Google It” Culture

In today’s highly connected world, people turn to Google to look for a new restaurant, street food venue, or coffee shop. Gone are the days when flyers and direct mailing (although this tactic is still effective) were the best ways to drive foot traffic to your restaurant. Nowadays, information is just a few keystrokes away.

Maybe you serve heavenly food, have excellent customer service and competitive prices. But, if your restaurant marketing strategies are not on-point and the prospects can’t find your business online, they’ll never know about you.

Whenever someone gets a food craving, they go straight to Google:

Restaurant marketing - maxican food sydney

2. Your Customers Are Searching Locally

There’s nothing wrong with aiming high. But, before you purchase airtime on regional cable TV networks, focus on nearby customers first. It’s better to target a small audience and then work your way up, rather than casting a wide net with big holes and hoping to catch a fish.

By focusing on local SEO, we managed to increase the visibility of ribs and burger speciality restaurant by 347% in four months. 

3. It Increases Customer Engagement

Prospective clients trust online comments and reviews because they expect them to be more objective than your website. Plus, they provide the reassurance prospects need that your restaurant is, in fact, worth their time.

A bad review can affect your reputation and cost you sales if you’re not there to manage it. People prefer to communicate with businesses online. Engaging with them on social media or review sites can provide a memorable experience, making them want to return to your restaurant.

When I search for “Ribs Sydney”, Ribs & Burgers shows up right near the top of the search with a 4.2 star rating. Wouldn’t you like to eat at the restaurant with the best rating in this instance?

restaurant marketing - ribs sydney

4. It Helps Build Brand Awareness

In the digital world, the higher you rank in search engines, the more trustworthy people perceive your brand. Ranking high is one of the most effective ways to bring your restaurant business to the front of people’s minds. And a well-established restaurant digital marketing strategy is the key!

Keep in mind, though, that unless you’re the Starbucks of your industry, people aren’t searching your service by brand keywords. Try to understand your prospects’ needs and use keywords that are likely to match their intentions. Just like the examples I gave above.

5. A Great Search Listing = Great Foot Traffic

72% of consumers who conduct local searches visit a store within 8 kilometres, but how do they choose which store to visit?

If you’re on the first page of a search, then it comes down to your Google My Business listing.

A well-optimized Google My Business Page can ensure that your website will show up higher in search results. But it can also increase the chance of someone clicking through to your restaurant, and turning up at your door.

Make sure to include information relevant to your local audience, such as:

  • Accurate contact information such as your name, address, and phone number.
  • Your opening hours.
  • Relevant keywords based on your location, such as the name of your suburb or city.
  • A map of your area with your business prominently featured.

If you do this well your restaurant could turn up prominently in a targeted search from a potential customer:

restaurant marketing - surry hills

6. Customers Are Now Mobile

According to a report from Search Engine Land, over 50% of Google searches now come from mobile devices.

Imagine you’ve been exploring a new city for hours when you get hungry. What do you do? Most probably, you pull out your phone and look for a restaurant nearby that can satisfy your hunger pains. You don’t walk around scouting out your options. You Google them.

If your website isn’t optimised for mobile, then it’s not going to show up on the first page of search results. That is a HUGE missed opportunity.

7. Word of Mouth Travels Online

There’s no question about the fact that word of mouth is an excellent way to raise awareness about a restaurant.

But, here’s the twist: people are no longer communicating face to face about the restaurants they’ve discovered. They prefer to share their experiences with their friends online – often on social media or review sites. Most of them also provide a link to where their followers can learn more about the establishment. It might be your website, Facebook page or other directories.

If you have a website and active social media accounts, you can influence the way others are talking about your brand in a positive way. The better you are at influencing this digital word-of-mouth, the more likely your restaurant will show up the next time someone searches Google for restaurants in your area.

8. You Get More Food Delivery Orders

People nowadays are no longer using the yellow pages to look for delivery restaurants near their location, nor do they keep old flyers in their kitchen anymore. They look for restaurants online. The only way to capture these customers is to have an optimised site that shows up high in search results.

The search “takeaway pizza dee why” has 396,000 search results. Where is yours going to show up in that list?

restaurant marketing - takeaway pizza

9. It’s the Most Cost-Effective Marketing Strategy

If done correctly, SEO for restaurants can provide an excellent return on your investment. Unlike other marketing strategies, search engine optimization services delivers long-term results.

More than that, every dollar that you invest in SEO can be evaluated thoroughly through the returns it generates. You are building a web asset that keeps delivering your customers in the future, without much additional effort.

10. Your Competitors Are Doing It

If your competitors are using search engines to attract customers, and you aren’t, then you need to start investing in SEO for restaurants as soon as possible to be able to compete with them. If they’re ignoring SEO, you gain a massive advantage. Either way, investing in SEO can be beneficial.

11. You Can Entice Prospects with Your Online Menu

It could be argued that your menu is one of the most important elements of your business. It’s what makes prospects curious about your food and compels them to try your restaurant.

You probably have a menu on your website already but are you placing it on other food and menu sites as well? This simple trick will not only get more people interested in you but also help you build backlinks to your website.

Pro tip: If you set up the structure of your website properly, your menu will show up as a fast link in a Google search!

restaurant marketing - ribs and burgers

12. It Improves Your Bottom Line

A well-optimised website (and subsequent SEO strategy) will increase the number of customers that get through your door. Keeping in touch with your prospects via social media, local directories, or your blog will further enhance the appeal of your establishment. That can translate into increased revenue.

13. Social Media and SEO Go Hand in Hand

Nowadays, people don’t use just go to Google or Bing to research the businesses they are interested in. Just think about it: if you’re looking for information about a restaurant, it’s entirely possible you will be using Facebook’s search option and scrolling through their posts to get an idea of what you can expect.

SEO nowadays has become more human-friendly, and it involves more than just ranking high for a particular keyword. As a result, you need to integrate both SEO and social media in your restaurant digital marketing strategy. Both matter and can help you improve your overall ranking.

14. It Can Improve Your Brand Reputation

When customers have an excellent experience both offline and online, it improves your brand image and reputation. If just five of your most loyal customers get each five of their friends to try out your menu, your restaurant’s visibility and bottom line can increase significantly.

15. You Can Promote Other Services

An SEO-optimised website can be the perfect channel to promote other services. Maybe you’re catering or hold special events at your venue, like weddings or corporate parties. Create a landing page for these services, optimise it, and generate more business.

In a Nutshell

By now, it should be clear that your restaurant business can’t thrive in this digitally-driven world without search engine optimisation.

Refusing to make it part of your online marketing is like not offering the dessert your clients are craving for: you’re making everyone unhappy and losing business.

If you need some help to improve your search rankings, get in touch with Uplers today.

5 Best SEO Strategies for Restaurant Owners

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The wiser search engines get, the need for smart SEO practices becomes more critical. There’s a high chance of losing business if you don’t follow the fundamental, ethical optimization practices.

As the major element of SEO, Local SEO Services help restaurant owners to attract more customers in their own area. Here are five smart strategies which should be considered while developing your local search optimization.

1. Create Local Presence & Keep It Consistent

Customers rarely visit a website to find their business hours or location, rather they Google it or search Facebook, Yelp or other social platforms and local directories. This not only helps people to gain trust, but is easy and quick as well. If you aren’t visible on these platforms, people are less likely to have confidence in your credibility.

Local Listing - local SEO

This makes optimization a mandatory step to raise visibility on all the major social media platforms and search engines like Google, Bing or Yahoo. Just like optimizing your Google My Business account helps you increase your visibility in local search. But be warned, optimizing your listings is time-consuming and requires a certain level of optimization expertise. You may need help from an SEO consultant.

Things to incorporate in your listings:

  • Your NAP (Business Name, Address, Phone Number)
  • Pictures of your business/office/people
  • Website link
  • Working hours’ details
  • Reviews

You should also add details of your services and prices.

Don’t forget to provide consistent and correct information on all listings. If inconsistent information about your business is crawled by Google, then it will cause your search ranking to drop.

2. Location Based Landing Pages

Design separate landing pages for each service or location to make your way to the top of search results in local organic traffic. Each page should be designed strategically to attract local people based on their cultural and social behaviours.

Airbnb has created location based landing pages.

Consider including the following critical details on your landing page:

  • Business name, address and phone number (NAP)
  • Services details
  • A unique URL, page title, meta description (location based)
  • Keywords which help in search engine ranking
  • A map which directs the user to your store
  • Business hours
  • Links to your social media profiles
  • Keep pages responsive for all the devices
  • Compelling content (images, video and text)

rosebery - local seo

BROADWAY SYDNEY - local seo

We used this strategy for our client Zeus Street Greek, which in return, received the benefits of having separate landing pages for each location.

Things not to include:

  • Don’t copy the same content on each page
  • Don’t use same title name and meta description on all pages by just altering the city or names

3. Local Content Strategy

Local content is not only about creating content for blogs and landing pages – it’s much deeper than that. A lucrative local SEO tip for your content strategy is to create content, promote it and make continuous alterations based on the feedback and conversions received.

Local-Content - local SEO

Here are five steps to make sure you follow the right local content strategy:

Step One: Identify your potential customers
Before you start creating content and promoting it, understand your buyers. Get to know a buyer’s persona based on their challenges, objectives, goals, and socio-cultural backgrounds. This will make things easy in creating and marketing the content to the right people.

Step Two: Go to your specific niche
When you’re looking forward to local SEO services for restaurants, going specific helps to define your potential audience and thus, will decrease the competition. This also helps you in creating specific content for your target audience.

Step Three: Keep your message consistent
Consistency is good when you want the same message to be conveyed to all your audience. Make sure you have the same message/details on all your listings.

Step Four: Don’t be quiet
If you won’t speak out, people will not hear you and eventually won’t come to you. Make sure you speak through your blogs, infographics, and images, so that people know you exist.

Step Five: Market on right platform
Businesses often fail to find the right platforms to market their business. Analyze where your audience lives online, which social media platforms they use, and set your local SEO strategies accordingly.

Creating and maintaining the content strategy takes a lot of brainstorming, time, and continuous effort. But the final results of the strategy implementation provide great brand awareness and credibility for your business.

4. Utilize Reviews Strategically

Reviews play a big role in your search engine rankings. An overwhelming majority of 92% of consumers judge a business based on their online reviews. So getting positive reviews is important – but keeping them static is a challenge. Because SEO is not a one-time shot, it’s quite a long journey.

Generally, businesses encourage customers for review their business by hosting social media contests, giving out discounts and sending goodies to the best reviewer. Businesses also encourage their employees to send review reminders after service is delivered as it is the best time where customer’s satisfaction level is high.

Obviously, success comes to those who put forward consistently high-quality services. No five stars can be gained overnight without being on pins and needles.

Consider the following local SEO strategies tips while developing your review strategy for your restaurant business:

  • Set a goal: You should have a clear goal of how many reviews you need – per week, per month and per year.
  • Make it easy: Keep your review process easy with fewer actions. Consumers will hesitate to give a review if they find the process hard and time-consuming.
  • Ask immediately: The right time to grab the review is right after the service has been delivered. As it is the time when a customer has the highest level of satisfaction.
  • Optimize Trial and Error: Did you meet the goals you outlined? If not, figure out what went wrong and tweak your review strategy until you have a successful outcome.

5. Measure Your Efforts & ROI

ROI - local SEO

Measuring your efforts and ROI is an important part of your marketing evaluation, as SEO data helps to make your local SEO strategy more productive.

There are tools available to measure your key performance indicators. With help from the right tools, you’ll be able to identify your strengths as well as weaknesses. That concrete data is the only way to know whether the local SEO strategies for your restaurant is working for you.

Neglecting website development basics can prove costly. Consumers are more likely to find small businesses on their cell phones rather than their computers, making responsive web design and mobile optimization more important than ever before.