A menu only as a PDF or a photograph
The most common one, and it hides every dish from every search that names a dish.
Guide
Local SEO for restaurants
Somebody deciding where to eat tonight is not researching. They search once, on a phone, look at the map, read two reviews, glance at the photographs and book or walk. The whole decision happens inside Google, before your website is ever opened, which is why the Business Profile does more for a restaurant than any page on the site.
8 steps
Free to read, in the order it pays to do it. Nothing to sign up for and nothing to download.
The searches are specific and they are made at the moment of hunger: "tacos near me", "brunch [neighbourhood]", "restaurants open now", "dog friendly pub [town]", "book a table [restaurant name]". A restaurant whose profile answers those, with the right categories, current hours, a menu Google can read and photographs from this month, gets the booking. A restaurant with a beautiful website and a profile last touched at opening does not.
Almost none of this needs a developer, and most of it can be done from the phone behind the bar.
What restaurants are actually competing for
These are the shapes the searches take. The words in brackets are whatever the searcher puts there, which is usually a town, a neighbourhood or a brand.
- restaurants near me
- [cuisine] restaurant [neighbourhood]
- brunch near me open now
- dog friendly pub [town]
- book a table [restaurant name]
- best [dish] in [city]
The work, in the order it pays to do it
- 1
Set the categories to what you are, in order
The primary category decides which map results you appear in at all: Italian Restaurant is a different pool from Restaurant, and Cafe from Coffee Shop. Set the primary to the most specific true category and add the secondaries you genuinely are, such as Bar, Brunch Restaurant or Takeaway. Attributes matter here more than in any other trade: outdoor seating, dog friendly, vegetarian options, wheelchair access, reservations, delivery. Each one is a filter somebody applies.
- 2
Keep the hours true, including the holidays
Nothing loses a restaurant a booking faster than a profile that says open when the door is locked. Set the special hours for every holiday in advance, mark a kitchen that closes before the bar, and update the day something changes. Google shows a hours-might-differ warning on profiles it does not trust, and that warning costs clicks.
- 3
Give Google a menu it can read
A PDF or a photograph of the menu is invisible to search. Use the profile’s menu section, or a menu page on the site in plain text with dish names and descriptions, so that "best [dish] in [city]" and "[cuisine] near me" can match what you actually serve. Keep it current: a menu with last winter’s dishes reads as a closed restaurant.
- 4
Photographs from this month, by you, of the food and the room
Profiles with recent photographs get more clicks, and diners choose with their eyes. Plates as they leave the pass, the room at service, the outside so people can find the door, the terrace if you have one. Diners add their own, so keep yours coming or theirs become the face of the place.
- 5
Make the reservation link the first thing on the profile
Connect the booking system to the profile’s reservation button so a diner books from the map without opening a site. If you take walk-ins only, say so in the description; a diner who cannot tell how to book goes to the one who told them.
- 6
Reviews: ask at the table, reply to every one
The count and the recency feed the map ranking; what the reviews say decides which of the three places on the map gets the booking. Ask at the point of happiness, which is the bill, with a card or a code rather than an email a week later. Reply to every review briefly, thank the good ones, and answer the bad ones without arguing, because the reply is read by the next hundred diners rather than by the reviewer.
- 7
One page per thing people search you for
The site is the second visit, but it still needs pages that match the searches: brunch, private dining, the roof terrace, the Sunday roast, the tasting menu, catering. A single home page with everything on it ranks for none of those. Each page carries the hours, the address, the menu for that thing and the booking link.
- 8
Be consistent everywhere else diners look
The name, address, phone number and hours on the delivery apps, the booking platforms, the guides and the directories should all match the profile. Google reads them, and a different phone number on a delivery app is a small crack that costs map ranking. Claim the listings on the platforms diners actually use in your city and keep them true.
What usually goes wrong
Hours that drift
Christmas, a private event, a kitchen that closes an hour before the bar. Every unmarked change is a diner at a locked door and a one-star review the next morning.
Photographs from the opening, years ago
Diners upload their own. If yours stop, theirs become the face of the restaurant, taken under the worst light in the room.
Fighting for "restaurants near me" and ignoring the dish
The near-me search is decided by distance and the profile. The dish and cuisine searches are decided by what your menu and pages say, and those are the ones you can win with words.
How to tell whether it is working
Rankings are not the measure. These are, and all of them come from accounts in your own name rather than from a report you have to take on trust.
- Reservation clicks, calls and direction requests from the profile, month on month
- How many covers on a quiet night came from a search, asked at the table or read from the booking system
- Search Console impressions for the dish, cuisine and occasion pages, not only the home page
- Photo views, and the share of diners who reached the profile from a discovery search rather than by name
Protecting what you build
Getting the visibility is the half everybody sells. Keeping it is the half that decides whether restaurants still have customers arriving from Google in three years, and almost nobody writes it down, so here it is.
For a restaurant the specific risk is the profile itself: a suspended or duplicated listing during a change of ownership, a move or a rename takes the reviews and the map position with it, and a reinstatement can take weeks in the busiest season. The second is the delivery and booking platforms rewriting your details, so the name or the number diverges from the profile without anyone at the restaurant changing anything.
What actually breaks a business in search
Not usually an algorithm update, whatever the industry press implies. Core updates move positions; these remove you.
A redesign or a platform move
By a distance the most common cause of a real collapse. URLs change and nothing redirects, or the new site ships with the staging robots.txt still in it. Both are entirely preventable and both are usually discovered weeks later.
A plugin or a setting nobody audited
One checkbox marked "discourage search engines", one SEO plugin defaulting to noindex on a template, one caching layer serving a stale page. Small change, total effect.
Losing control of an account
The Business Profile owned by a former agency, Search Console verified to somebody who has left, the domain registered to a developer. None of this hurts until the relationship ends, and then all of it does at once.
A suspended Google Business Profile
For a business that serves an area this is worse than any algorithm update, because it removes you from the map entirely and on the same day.
Letting the work stop
Nothing dramatic happens. Reviews stop, hours drift, a competitor keeps going, and a year later the position has quietly gone. This is the most common ending and the least noticed.
What to refuse, however it is sold to you
Every one of these still gets sold, usually by email, usually cheaply, and usually to somebody who does not know it is being done in their name. All of them work for a while.
-
Bought links, in any packaging
Guest post networks, paid directories that exist only to sell links, anything offered by email with a price per link. These are the clearest thing Google acts on manually, the action can arrive years later, and recovery means removing what you paid for and then waiting.
-
Reviews you did not earn
Bought, incentivised, written by staff, or traded with another business. Google removes them, and where the pattern is obvious it suspends the listing rather than the reviews. It is also the one that damages you with customers if it is ever visible.
-
Keywords stuffed into the business name
It moves the map pack for a while, which is exactly why it keeps being sold. It is also the single most common cause of a suspension, and the suspension takes the whole listing rather than the extra words.
-
Pages written to have pages
A page per town you have never worked in, a page per service you do not offer, content generated to fill a content calendar. It does not rank and it drags down what would have.
-
Anybody who guarantees a position
Nobody controls Google’s results. A guarantee means either the terms are meaningless or the method is one of the four above.
The monthly discipline
Twenty minutes a month, and it is the difference between noticing a problem in week one and noticing it in month six.
- Check Search Console coverage once a month and look at the Excluded reasons, not just the errors.
- Watch impressions rather than clicks. Impressions fall first, usually weeks before anybody notices the phone is quieter.
- Open the Business Profile and look for edits the public has suggested and Google has accepted without telling you.
- Reply to every review that arrived since last month, and keep asking, steadily rather than in bursts.
- Before any site change, write down what the URLs are now. After it, check they still resolve.
- Keep one note of what changed and when. Almost every traffic mystery is solved by a change nobody wrote down.
- Re-run the audit checklist once a year, and the first two sections after any redesign, host move or new plugin.
Own your own accounts
The domain, the hosting, the Google Business Profile, Search Console and Analytics should all be registered in the business’s name with the business’s own email, and anybody working on them should have access granted rather than ownership transferred. It costs nothing to set up that way and it is close to impossible to unwind afterwards. If any of those are currently in somebody else’s name, that is worth fixing this week whether or not anything is wrong.
If you would rather not do it yourself
Everything above is work you can do without hiring anybody, and the profile half of it is worth doing whatever else you decide. If you want it done for you, this is the service that covers it, and we scope it on a call before anything starts.
Other guides
Questions about local SEO for restaurants
What is local SEO for a restaurant?
It is the work that makes the restaurant appear when somebody nearby searches for what you serve or the occasion they want: the Google Business Profile with its categories, hours, menu and photographs, the reviews, the reservation link, and pages on the site for the things people search you for. For a restaurant the profile matters more than the website, because the decision is made on the map.
Do we need a website at all?
A small one, yes. The profile wins the map. The site is where the dish, occasion and private-dining searches are won, where the menu lives in a form Google can read, and where the booking happens if the profile button is not enough. Three or four honest pages beat a large site nobody updates.
How do we get more reviews without buying them?
Ask at the bill, with a card or a code, and make it easy. A steady trickle from real diners outranks a burst, and bought reviews are the fastest way to lose the listing. Reply to every one; the replies are read by the next diner deciding.
How long until it works?
Profile changes show within weeks, sometimes days, because the map reacts quickly to categories, hours, photographs and reviews. Pages for dishes and occasions take a season to settle. Watch the reservation clicks and the direction requests rather than a ranking.
Book a call with us
A 30-minute call in your working hours. Tell us what you sell and where, and we will tell you what we would do first and what it involves. Prefer email? Send your website through the form and the Passieon Team will reply within two working days.