SEO for restaurants

Somebody deciding where to eat tonight searches once, looks at the map, reads two reviews and books. The restaurant with the current menu, the recent photographs and the reservation link wins the table; the one with a beautiful website and an empty profile does not get looked at.

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A chef plating a dish at the pass in a busy restaurant kitchen while a waiter waits with a tray

6,816 clicks

Peak Endurance, a sports clinic, Sep 2023 to May 2024, from 482,378 impressions. Their Search Console.

Restaurant SEO is almost entirely about the profile and the reviews, with the website doing a few specific jobs: the menu that Google can read, the booking that works on a phone, and the pages for the searches you want, from Sunday lunch to private dining.

Searches we build for, with the place name your customers use:

restaurants near me
best [cuisine] [city]
brunch [neighbourhood]
private dining [city]

What stops restaurants getting enquiries

Three problems we find on nearly every restaurant website we audit, and what we do about each.

A menu Google cannot read

A menu as a photograph or a PDF cannot be read by Google or by an assistant, so the restaurant is not found for the dishes people search for. The menu needs to be text on the page, and kept current.
A profile that stopped in the opening month

The photographs are from launch, the hours are wrong on holidays and the attributes are empty. The map pack is decided by that profile, and it is the cheapest thing to fix.
Reviews with no replies

Google weighs recent reviews and shows the replies. A restaurant that replies to every review, including the bad ones, reads as one that is run by somebody.

What you get each month

The profile first: menu, dishes, attributes, hours including holidays, photographs added weekly, every review replied to
A page each month for a search you want to own: brunch, private dining, a cuisine, an occasion
The menu kept as readable text with dish markup, updated when the kitchen changes it
Citations on the food and local directories, identical everywhere
Technical fixes: a booking link that works on a phone, speed, restaurant markup, accessibility
A monthly Search Console report of the dining searches you now appear for, and the bookings behind them

Where we do this

The method is the same everywhere; what people search for and where the results come from are not. Each market has its own page, and so do the cities where restaurants search for this most.

How pricing works

What sets the size of the month is the number of sites and how contested the area is. One restaurant on a high street is a smaller month than a group across a city centre. We scope the work on a call and send a written quote before anything starts. The SEO services page explains what a month covers and who does it.

Results from real clients

Every number below is from the client’s own Google Search Console, for the period shown. Impressions are how often the site appeared; clicks are people who arrived. What each visit is worth is your sales process, not ours, so these are the visits we can prove rather than a conversion figure we cannot.

See all eight client results

52,993clicks

Up and Running Physical Therapy

Physical therapy · 1 Mar 2023 to 14 Mar 2024

Impressions
2,238,155

CTR
2.4%

Avg. position
13.49

+139,355% clicks against the previous period of the same length.
12,285clicks

Backcountry Physical Therapy

Physical therapy · 6 Jul 2023 to 31 May 2024

Impressions
601,822

CTR
2.0%

Avg. position
19.3

+2,059% clicks against the previous period of the same length.

Questions restaurants ask us

Does a restaurant need a website at all?

A small one, and it has three jobs: a menu Google can read, a booking that works on a phone, and a page for each search you want to own. Almost everything else is the profile.

How quickly does restaurant SEO show?

Profile work shows within weeks, and the map pack is where nearly all restaurant searches end. Pages for occasions and cuisines take a few months.

Should we be on the delivery apps?

They send orders and they send nothing to your profile. Be on them if the margin works, and keep your own booking and menu on your own site so the search traffic is yours.

Can you handle several restaurants?

Yes. Each site gets its own profile and its own pages, and the group site links them so each one ranks in its own area.

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.