A solid online presence is significant for your restaurant; it enables potential customers to easily and quickly discover you across different platforms. Online food deliveries have interrupted the traditional restaurant model of dining in recent days—equally, even people looking to dine in a restaurant search for suitable menus online. Therefore, an online presence is vital for success in the restaurant business. Search engine optimization is one of the best ways to boost your online presence and withstand stiff competition. This article will guide you on seven restaurant SEO tips that can help boost your online presence according to a food and drink SEO case study by Type A Media.
Construct a keyword planning roadmap
Keyword planning involves selecting the target keywords that you want your website to rank for. They can be either double or single words, for instance, “best chicken in London.” After picking the most suitable keywords, you can use a keyword planning tool to help you come up with similar keywords. This tool can also enable you to decide which keywords to prioritize depending on how frequently people search for them in a given period. You can categorize your target keywords into different categories such as niche keywords, high-intent broad restaurant keywords, and branded keywords and pick the ones you think are most impactful in each category.
Start a blog
In addition to specific web pages like the homepage and about us page, you can add a blog page to your restaurant’s website to help you drive more traffic and expand your customer base. A restaurant blog can write articles on a range of relevant topics, including special recipes community involvement. It can also be used to promote different marketing campaigns in creative ways.
Encourage reviews from customers and have your restaurant listed on review sites
Potential customers use reviews to determine the quality of services provided by various businesses. This helps determine if it’s worth trying. Therefore, encouraging customers to leave reviews can be rewarding to your restaurant. Potential customers can also rank search results for restaurants centred on the number of stars on Google. Equally, Google is more likely to rank restaurants with the most positive reviews than those with more negative reviews. It is important to go through each review and respond to them. This can also help you identify areas that require improvement to enhance customer satisfaction.
Optimize for your local SEO
Google search engine displays location-based search with the Google Map carousel feature. To optimize for your local SEO, you should add your restaurant website and standardized company data to all business directories, social media profiles, and review sites. An important tip is creating an account with Google My Business listing with all the necessary details about your restaurant, including the address, schedule, menu, and contacts. This helps show Google that your business is legitimate and reliable. It also strengthens your brand reputation and gives you an upper hand against your competitors since your restaurant has higher chances of ranking first.
Experiment your online ordering System
Online ordering systems are essential aspects of every restaurant website due to the popularity of online ordering among customers. But just having an online ordering system is not enough. You must ensure it is easy to use for customers. Because if your ordering process is complex, you are likely to lose customers to other restaurants with a simpler online ordering process. Therefore, you should have several users try out the system step by step to identify any bugs or confusions and fix them.
Get other websites relevant to your business to link your restaurant website
Getting high-quality links from websites in your niche is known as link building. You can have websites such as food business sites or other blogs about food to include hyperlinks to your restaurant websites in their content. If many food authority blogs link your restaurant’s web pages, Google can see that your business is relevant to the food industry. Therefore, the more links your restaurant website receives from other websites, the higher the likelihood of ranking better in search engine results. However, getting backlinks from irrelevant businesses from a different niche, the relevance of your business will most likely decrease.
Ensure your website is mobile-friendly
A larger percentage of users use their mobile phone devices to visit different types of websites. Hence, making your restaurant’s website mobile-friendly can help improve its overall performance. Some of the factors that determine how mobile-friendly your website includes; an easy-to-use mobile order-placement system, strategically placed links, fast processing pages with minimum load times.