Nowadays having a website for your business is a necessity. A website is the most cost-effective way to promote your restaurant business, showcase your cuisine expertise and announce events and promotions. Moreover, it is one of the many ways to attract, engage and retain your customers.
However, having a website alone will not do the trick. It would help if you had a strong SEO strategy to enhance your website’s visibility and ranking. This will bring your website in front of the right audience and convert leads.
62% of customers use Google to research restaurants before making a decision. However, only the top five results on Google receive nearly 68% of all clicks, emphasizing the need for restaurants to optimize their SEO to rank higher.
But is SEO for restaurants different from other businesses? Which SEO tips are proven to skyrocket the performance of your restaurant website?
This blog delves into the depths of SEO and lists the top 10+ SEO tips for restaurants.
Why is SEO Important For Restaurants?
On-page restaurant SEO refers to a set of strategies that your team takes to rank your website higher for relevant searches.
For example, you would want your potential customers to find you as the best Italian restaurant in town. But without SEO, your website won’t appear anywhere for relevant keywords, and you will lose your brand authority.
By making your website SEO-optimized, you can:
Increase traffic: The higher your website ranks, the more people will click, and you will soon have a huge customer base.
Boost brand awareness: You can showcase your expertise in your niche and build your brand identity that appeals to the customers.
Increase revenue: Once you start to get sufficient traffic on your website, you can offer your customers to view the menu and book tables online. Therefore, enhancing customer experience and sales.
User-friendly website: On-page SEO will ensure that your website loads faster and has relatable content, call-to-action buttons, and a user-friendly interface. All this contributes to the website’s high quality, which is easy for customers to navigate.
On-page SEO will equip your website with the power to emerge as the #1 restaurant in town and build a community of loyal customers. So, if you want to stay ahead of your competitors, exploring the best restaurant marketing agencies is the first step.
10+ On-Page SEO Optimization Tips To Rank Your Restaurant Website
On-page SEO is one such way that will yield your results even if you don’t spend hefty on advertisements. Here are 10+ On-page SEO tips to optimize your restaurant website and rank.
Choose relevant keywords
Keywords are phrases or terms that people enter on search engines to find answers. In your case, keywords will mean phrases that are relevant to your restaurant and want people to click on or find your website when they search those terms.
First, you need to find out the primary keywords related to your restaurant. Then every webpage will have its own primary and secondary keywords that you should target. Do not forget to include long-tail keywords in your webpage content. For blogs, you will have a separate set of focus and subkeywords for each blog.
In addition to these, restaurants should also consider local keywords. For example, suppose you are an Italian restaurant in London. In that case, you should also target keywords like “best pizza in London”, “best Italian restaurant near me”, “best pasta in London” and more like these. You can also narrow down on the locality, like, “best pasta in Baker Street”, “top Italian restaurants in Baker Street” etc.
You can use SEO tools as mentioned below for keyword research.
- Google keyword planner
- Semrush
- Ahrefs
- Ubersuggest
- AnswerThePublic
Please note that keywords should occur naturally in your content. Do not stuff your content with keywords. Google might identify your website as spam as per the recent updates.
Give crawlers a robots.txt to read
Search engines use bots to crawl your website. They use the instructions in robot.txt to crawl the website and collect data. These data are then indexed on Google.
Any page that is not indexed will not be visible on SERP. So, your web pages must be indexed properly on Google.
Therefore, including a robot.txt file on the website is vital for your SEO efforts to show results.
Submit a sitemap
Although the robot.txt file is enough for Google bots to crawl your website and index data. But if you include a sitemap on your website, it will make things easier for Google bots to effectively scan your website.
A sitemap instructs the bots how your website is structured, which URLs are more important and how frequently the pages are updated. It also tells the bots how often they should crawl the website.
So, if your website is new and doesn’t have enough backlinks to prove your website’s authority, a sitemap will do the trick.
Fix crawl errors
You must have come across a 404 error while surfing the internet. This is a crawl error that signals Google to stop indexing the pages with a 404 error.
So, you should always look out for URLs with 404 or Page Not Found errors. You can identify such pages during your website audit.
Optimize meta titles & descriptions
On the SERP page, you can see that every website has a title and a short 1-2 line description of the page.
These are called meta titles and descriptions. Most of the time Google catches these meta titles and descriptions to rank your website pages.
Your meta title should be 70 characters long and the meta description must be within 160 characters. Also, ensure to include primary keywords in your title and description.
The title and description should be relevant to the page it refers to. Moreover, you should avoid including the restaurant name on every page title. Use unique titles that make people click on your page.
Optimize URLs
URLs are a crucial part of on-page SEO optimization and are often forgotten. There is only one rule to writing the perfect URLs – keep them short, include keywords and separate words with “-“.
But do not change your URLs often. Also, it is not advisable to change your current URLs. It will hurt your current rankings.
It’s better to keep this tip handy when publishing new pages next time.
Check keyword density
As discussed above, your content should have primary and secondary keywords. But those keywords should occur naturally throughout the content.
An ideal keyword density is between 1% – 3%. Anything above this is over-stuffing and spam. You can try to include similar terms related to your primary keyword. Or these days SEO experts also recommend using semantic words in your content.
Semantic words are not keywords but terms similar to your primary keyword or topic. Including synonyms of your keyword in the content will also help to improve its visibility.
Add internal & external links
Links are an important part of your on-page SEO as it enhances your website’s credibility.
Always insert external links with statistics, quotations and mentions. But ensure the quality of third-party links. Links to reputed websites or institutions like Forbes, Harvard and media houses are favourable.
When it comes to internal linking, you should be more cautious of where and what you are linking. Always find opportunities to link previous blogs, service pages, home, offers, specialities, menu and table booking webpages.
Also, make sure that the part of the sentence you are linking must have the keyword of the destination page.
Optimize images
Just like your content, your images should also be optimized. Make sure the images on your page have an alt text and are in the proper resolution.
SEO experts recommend using keywords in the alt text to increase the visibility of the webpage.
Add proper CTA
The end goal of all your SEO efforts is to get customers to book tables or order from your restaurant website.
That is why, you should always include proper CTAs in your web pages encouraging people to view the menu, book a table, order online, get exclusive offers or become a member of your restaurant club.
Check page speed
If your technical and on-page SEO is done correctly, you will have no issues with your page speed.
However, you should check the website loading time on desktop and mobile devices regularly.
Conclusion
On-page SEO isn’t just theories. The results from the digital marketing strategies might take 1-2 months to show initially. But once you get a hang of it, your restaurant website will start to get traffic, engagement, and recognition.
If you are looking to build a restaurant website, online ordering system, PoS software or any other digital solutions, get in touch with Foodiv.
