Digital Marketing

The Complete Guide To SEO For Restaurants Business: A Step-by-step Guide in 2024

Over the last few decades, brands and companies witnessed a significant change in the way they market their services and advertise their products. This is because of the rise of the internet and billions of its users across the planet. Companies now have the access to showcase their brands and products to millions of people online. So they are moving on from the traditional way of marketing and shifting to digital marketing. In digital marketing, brands promote their products to connect with potential clients all across the internet in digital forms like E-mail, Social media, and web-based advertisement. And utilizing SEO is probably the most important factor in Digital marketing. In this article know about the best Restaurant SEO services.

If you are currently running a Restaurant business and want to grow your reach to attract more customers to your restaurant and make your business grow, you can hire a company that provides restaurant SEO services. Serving great meals falls into your expertise but building an online presence through SEO may not. So it’s better for you to hire professionals to handle this task for your brand.

The first thing we need to understand is what is SEO and how can it be useful?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a marketing strategy that businesses use so that they can rank higher than their competitors on the Search Engine Results Page for relevant keywords. It helps to generate organic traffic to your website and helps your business grow.

Now since you are in the restaurant business, Local SEO will be more helpful for your business.

Local SEO:

Local SEO is a search engine optimization strategy that helps your business be more visible on local search results on search engines like google.  Get info about Restaurant SEO services can provide you with the best guidance which will help your restaurant business grow.

In the restaurant business, local SEO is more beneficial as this helps those businesses that have a physical location or operate in a fixed geographical area. Imagine you have three outlets of your momo shop in Noida. Someone sitting in Bengaluru searched “the best momo shop” and your website is on the search list. This is ridiculous, right? That’s why you should use local SEO so that when someone in Noida searches “The best momo shop near me” then google shows your shops’ name at the top. This is the way restaurant businesses can grow with the help of SEO.

Define Specific SEO Goals For your Restaurant business:

While creating a marketing strategy you should always keep the goals in your mind. In reality, it is quite difficult to measure success with local SEO because it only gives info about how many people have visited your website and how it is building its reach. But to convert any random visit to success, there are some features you need to include in your restaurant business, such as advance booking in your outlets and providing delivery at doorstep option with COD. These will help build a successful restaurant business and SEO will facilitate the process.

When you set SEO goals, you can measure, track and analyze results to see what is succeeding for you and whatnot. You can also make adjustments in case you require it. Let’s say you own a restaurant that offers pure veg dishes. Your goal is to serve meals to as many new customers as possible. And also want your old customers to return regularly. Thus You have successfully identified your three main SEO goals: 

  1. Conversion: That is turning your website visitor into your customer. It’ll only happen when the website of your restaurant will rank higher because it defines credibility.
  2. Engagement: That is interacting with your customers online to know how you can serve them better and convert them into your regular customers.
  3. Acquisition: Which is acquiring as many customers as possible.

With the help of proper utilization of SEO, your restaurant business can create a firm grasp over the market. Here are the few steps you need to follow to utilize SEO to your advantage and help your restaurant business grow to a new level.

Keyword Research:

Keywords are the foundation of SEO marketing. Depending on the relevance to your website, you can differentiate between effective keywords and not-so-effective keywords. Effective keywords help to generate a huge amount of traffic to your website which eventually leads to more potential customers. But low search volume keywords lead to less traffic to your website. Which will never help your business grow. That is why it is really important to spend time researching high search volume keywords relevant to the service you provide. They will help you rank higher than your competition on the search results and achieve high SEO optimization.

You have to identify what keywords or phrases people mostly use to search for the products or services your company offers. You can use short-tail keywords or long-tail keywords according to your preference. Let’s say you have a restaurant which offers good quality non-vegetarian meals. So instead of using short-tail keywords like “ Best restaurant” which is not very specific, you can use “Best restaurant for non-vegetarians” or “good quality non-veg meals” which is very specific. It will draw more relevant customers to your restaurant. Also, short-tail keywords face more competition than long-tail keywords. It’ll help people find you easily when they are actually finding your products.

How to choose keywords?

It is a very important question. As we know doing keyword research is important but what do we need to consider while searching and selecting keywords so that we can reach our SEO goals and benefit our business.

Let’s take an example, suppose your restaurant serves non-veg food and it specializes in selling butter chicken. Your restaurant also provides home delivery through your website to increase business online. You have also heard about SEO and searching keywords to implement. Now if you use “Chicken” in your website as a keyword thinking it’ll draw more customers, it probably can but your ultimate success is when people order from your website. Let’s say, a person is searching for “Chicken Biryani” and after searching on the internet your website will pop up because of the keyword “Chicken”. But the customer will leave your site being disappointed.

Now you understand why specific keywords are really important. If you sell really good butter chicken, you really need to know the terms people often use when they search online for that dish. Otherwise, visitors to your website are looking for one thing and you are talking about another.  Use more long-tail keywords, which not only face lower competition but also bring customers straight to your website who are actually in need of the dish you serve like “Best butter chicken in Kolkata” or “Delhi’s most popular butter chicken”.

You should consider three things while choosing the keywords for your SEO plan.

  1. Frequency: It is the number of times a keyword is searched for. For your restaurant, you want your website to include the terms that people use very often relevant to your dish. But one thing you have to keep in mind is that it becomes difficult for search engines to differentiate websites for highly searched-for terms.
  2. Competition: remember, for highly searched terms the competition is also very large. It works fine for established brands like if you search for “Pizza”, most probably Dominos’ or Pizza Hut will top the search results though there are hundreds of restaurants that sell the same dish.

In this case, small brands or businesses can use long-tail keywords to reduce the competition. Instead of “Biriyani ” use “Get the best biryani near Victoria” for less competition and if your restaurant outlet is near Victoria.

  • Relevance: This is the most important thing brands need to consider. The keywords or keyphrases you select must be close to the product you actually serve. You need to make sure that the dishes you serve online must match the intent of the people who are searching. You can use Google Search Console to see which are the websites that appear in the search results and get clicked.
  • Analyze the results: Once you are done with selecting good keywords for your website. The next thing you need to do is to analyze how the keywords are actually performing on search results. Make sure to identify how many of those keywords and phrases are bringing up your website on the organic search results. Find out the specific words that are not bringing much traffic to your website. This info will help you to figure out what is working for you and what is not.
  •  Regular Update: Work on SEO is never over and there is no overnight success in it. Suppose you are done with searching the perfect keywords and analyzing the data of how they are performing. After you have figured out what keywords are not performing as you expected, there is a need to fix it. Try to figure out what people search online trying to find the same product you serve. Then fix the content according to the need.

Suppose your restaurants have started to offer free delivery within 30 minutes. You have to include this on your website. Or maybe none of your content on your website mentions that you offer special discounts on children at your outlets. Then update your content. This is the way you grow your business.

Give yourself a deadline for each task and stick to an SEO planner throughout the year. Remember to update the content of your site when you start offering a new dish or any current trend the restaurant business is following.

Finally, adjust your plan when something is not working. If your website is not witnessing new visitors, it probably needs a refresher. Or it is failing to convert visitors to potential customers. Then your website may be in need of a strong call to action. Review and analyze the results regularly and shift your focus to the areas that require it. And that is how you build an SEO plan for your restaurant business.

Use Google My Business For Local SEO:

SEO means different for different businesses. For restaurants, it is more localized because mostly it is concerned about attracting local traffic to a certain geographical spot. And Google offers a tool called Google My Business mainly to help local businesses grow.

It is the final destination to manage how your business will look and perform in the search engines. With this tool, you can manage how your site shows on Google maps and organic search results.

Google My Business relies on three major factors to determine how businesses will rank on search results.

  1. Relevance: It determines how well your business matches the intention of the person searching.
  2. Proximity: It is the most important factor for ranking local restaurants. If your outlet serves the best biryani in Delhi then you can’t rank in the local search results in Kolkata.
  3. Prominence: It is all about how your business is performing. Ratings and reviews help local businesses be more prominent.

When it comes to reviews and ratings, it is very important for local restaurant businesses to grow. You are more likely to go out for dinner in a restaurant that has more positive reviews and good ratings on search engines. Google considers your brand’s reputation while ranking it on search results. The more people prefer your restaurants over others, the more likely it’ll rank on search and grow. Restaurant SEO services can help your restaurant business grow through proper planned SEO.

Final Thoughts: Though ranking in local SEO is easier in comparison to non-local SEO but also it is very crucial. How your website ranks on the search may bring a significant amount of crowd on your site but it doesn’t properly define success. Create local content for your site for specific keywords. Ask customers to give feedback on your service. See how you can make your service even better. Also, focus on the website to make it user-friendly and attractive to the audience. Hope this information helps you.