The following is a definitive guide to optimizing your restaurant website to improve your search engine ranking on Google. By the end of this article, you will be able to immediately put into practice a long-term SEO strategy by yourself that will make your website traffic shoot up.
For restaurant SEO, we refer to a set of practices aimed at optimizing the website of your business to improve your ranking on Google, and therefore get more customers into your restaurant.
The objective is moving up the SERP (Search Engine Result Page) and reaching the top with those keywords used by your potential customers. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that people who land on your website only Google the name of your restaurant. This doesn’t make any sense! People who don’t know your restaurant definitely won’t Google your business name.
The best place to hide a body is on the second page of Google.
You should rank for those keywords that will bring prospects to your business. For example, if you have your restaurant in London, it may be interesting to rank for keywords like: “Best Restaurant in London”, “Romantic Restaurant in London”, “London Pizzeria”, “Vegan Restaurant in London”, “Restaurant in London city centre”, “London steakhouse” etc.
I highly recommend reading this guide because you can earn a lot of money through this technique, or in the worst case, save money. Ruling the first pages of Google with those targeted keywords means having hundreds of guests that knock on your restaurant’s door every week.
Even if you have hired a web agency to manage your online activities, it’s good to learn the best SEO techniques to see if they are working properly – especially if you are paying through the nose to get traffic to your website.
By the way, here is a guide to check if your site is SEO optimized.
A study by SearchEngineLand shows that 70-80% of users ignore the paid ads that appear in the search results, focusing on organic results.
In this article I will deepen the 10 basic on-site SEO techniques and the best off-site strategies to optimize your website and get as close as possible to perfect SEO.
Let’s cut the talk and learn how to do restaurant SEO.
Restaurant SEO: How to improve Google ranking
First of all, you must have a mobile-friendly, indexable and effective restaurant website. This means that it should be readable and indexable by search engines. This is not as simple as it sounds, as there are many site structures that are unintelligible for web crawlers.
For your restaurant, having an optimized website is not a superfluous thing, but a powerful way to grow the business. You can love it or hate it, but SEO is a basic pillar of inbound marketing.
Having a successful website is not something that only big players can afford, but is perfect for the modest restaurant manager/aspiring forketer too. Planning a SEO strategy is crucial for any rewarding web marketing project. By not doing this, it means you are missing a big chance to hook customers in the flourishing Internet world.
In simple terms, SEO activity relates to two main areas:
- On-site: all the actions performed within your site.
- Off-site: All the actions performed outside of your site, such as social media marketing and digital PR activities.
Let’s see both of them in detail.
On-site SEO: Anatomy of a perfectly optimized page
Many factors should be taken into consideration when it comes to optimizing a website. Some of them are listed in the Search Engine Optimization Starter Guide for webmasters released officially by Google; others are, as it were, “tacit.”
Let’s see one by one the 10 key on-page SEO factors.
1. User-friendly website navigation
Usability, not the visual design, play a large role in determining rankings. If users quickly find what they wish to, you will increase visitors’ average time spent on the site as well as decrease the bounce rate (percentage of visitors who land on your site and then leave without clicking to other pages). These are two factors that the search engines take into consideration when assessing websites.
When you design a website, organize its content in simple hierarchies, trying to predict your users’ behaviour within the site. Google tries to reproduce the human process of sorting relevant pages by quality.
Use unambiguous names for the links and position them where the user expects to find them. Keep in mind that users might be confused as to where to go and what to do, but if you leverage familiar standards of usability you will definitely make the users’ visits a positive experience.
The navigation menu should be on all the pages, and placed where it usually appears on most websites. It includes all the links both users and search engine encounters, and therefore must contain only important pages. All the unnecessary links added will only distract users and Google spiders from the main pages.
Finally, it is very important to use breadcrumbs, namely a kind of secondary navigation scheme that shows users their location on a website.
2. “Talking” and Search Engine Friendly URLs
URL is an acronym for Uniform Resource Locator and is a sequence of characters that uniquely identifies the address of a Web resource. It is what is typed in the browser address bar by users.
For SEO purposes, it is important that the URLs of your restaurant website should contain the keywords used in the pages’ titles, especially for those sites built on CMS platforms such as WordPress or Joomla which automatically generate incomprehensible URLs like the following:
http://www.yoursite.com/?post_type=page&p=116
Even if Google is able to interpret those URLs, it is crucial to make them understandable by users and not too long, like the example below:
http://www.yoursite.com/menu/starters
You should consider that if a user receives the URL by email they would be able to figure out what it is about.
3. Tag title and meta description
The Tag Title communicates the page’s title to both search engines and users. To set it, add the tag <title> within the <head> of the HTML page.
<html>
<head>
<title>Restaurant in central London | John’s restaurant </title>
<meta name=”description” content=”old restaurant with a big terrace and the best British recipes of the city.”>
</head>
<body>
The homepage’s title should contain the business name and other important information like the location and the main services.
The Meta Tag Description is helpful for briefly telling users and search engines about the topic of the page. Like the Tag Title, it has to be inserted within the HTML of the page.
<html>
<head>
<title>Restaurant in central London | John’s restaurant </title>
<meta name=”description” content=”old restaurant with a big terrace and the best British recipes of the city.”>
</head>
<body>
Title Tag and description may appear on the SERP.
Adding a title and description to every page of your site will play a part in improving your search engine optimization and therefore get traffic to your website.
Additionally, bear in mind the following:
- Title and description should be unique for every page.
- So that Google doesn’t trim them down, make sure they do not exceed 65 and 156 characters respectively.
- Don’t use a list of keywords; instead, accurately describe the page content.
Use the online free tool SEO site checkup to see if the HTML of your webpages contains the meta tag description and title tag.
4. Images
All the restaurant images on your website must be optimized, especially the food pictures taken professionally by you, which could be large.
In fact, the size of an image should not exceed 150KB since otherwise the page could load slowly and make users exit as a consequence. Try to find good a compromise between quality and size.
The file name should be as descriptive as it can, avoiding names like “IMG-1326750.jpg.” Try to use some keywords but without overdoing it.
Once you’ve uploaded the picture on the page, add the Alt tag on the HTML page as it describes the image’s content, especially when it is not possible to load it.
<img src=”../pizza-margherita.jpg” alt=”Pizza Margherita”/>
It is also helpful for the sightless who use text-based web browsers that ignore graphic content and read only the alt attribute. Finally, to reduce the loading time it is highly recommended to specify width and length of the image.
<img src=”../pizza-margherita.jpg” alt=”Pizza Margherita” width=’300’ height=’150’”/>
Go to Google PageSpeed Insights to see if the images uploaded on your website are too large, and if this is the case follow the procedure to optimize them. Through seositecheckup.com you can check if the width and length of the images are set as well as the alt tag.
5. Heading tag
The heading tags are the headings and subheads of the pages. They range from <H1> to <H6>. The higher the number, the less important the heading. Try to create an organized hierarchy of heading tags within the pages.
To check how the Heading tags are organized on your webpages use the function “Inspect Element” (Press Ctrl + Shift + C on Windows or Cmd + Shift + C on Mac) to see the HTML of the page.
Watch this video and find out how to optimize the Heading tags.
6. Robots.txt and meta tag Robots
Sometimes you need to prevent Google from ranking a certain page. To indicate to search engines that you want to keep the page away from the search results, you use robots.txt and Meta Tag Robots.
The first one is a simple text file which contains the rules that search engines should respect. For example, if you want to hide a whole folder from Google you should create a .txt file with the following commands:
User-agent:*
Disallow:/folder-to-be-hidden/
The robots.txt should be reachable at the address http://www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt. This should be uploaded on the main domain folder.
Alternatively, you might add the Meta Tag Robots within the HTML of the page you don’t want to rank. For example:
<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex,follow”>
Through this tag you can indicate the following:
- index/noindex: tell search engines if you want to rank that page or not.
- follow/nofollow: tell the search engine whether it can follow the links that are found within the page or not. It may be considered as a notice sign for Google saying “don’t count this.”
Learn more about robots.txt on Google’s guidelines for webmasters.
7. Rich snippet
As you probably know, in the search engine results the pages displayed are made up of three elements: title, URL, and description. This block of information is called a Snippet.
Through the markup of Schema.org is possible to give more information about your restaurant to search engines. Consequently, Google would be able to enrich the snippet with more details, creating what is known as a rich snippet.
For your restaurant, you may display the reviews that your customers have written on your site.
How do you implement the rich snippet? The best way to do it is by the Schema.org vocabulary. This is protocol launched by Google, Bing, and Yahoo! to create a vocabulary that all the search engines understand to allow webmasters to promote their content with structured data markup.
On the official website www.schema.org, you will find all the information to add microdata on your website and enrich your restaurant website.
Once you have implemented the Schema microdata, go to Developers.google.com and check there are no errors.
8. Content
We’ve already spoken about content marketing for restaurant, but here I want to emphasize its importance for SEO purposes. The content of a page is the reason why users visit your website.
For restaurant SEO, useful and original content is among the best signals that search engines can receive. You can successfully carry out all On-site SEO techniques, but if you underestimate the importance content creation plays to get traffic to your website, it will become mission impossible.
Bear in mind that who is on the other side of the screen is not an idler willing to waste time reading a jumble of nonsense words. Instead, they will give you a maximum of 5-7 seconds to convince them not to click on the back icon and return to the SERP.
Users are able to recognize good content that will answer their questions. The primary goal of content is make users’ lives easy. When you write a piece, keep in mind the common questions of your customers, starting with the most trivial: “Is there parking? Where is it? Is it free of charge? What is your special recipe? What ingredients are you using?”
Also, it is important to create the piece in depth, and not limit yourself to writing a few lines. You should write using paragraphs, bulleted lists, bold, and subheadings to ease both search engines and users’ reading.
If the content is useful, users themselves will promote it across forums and social media, improving your SEO. The more users consider your piece important, the more Google will give you trust.
Learn how to write for the web.
9. Speed
The site speed impacts on the search engine ranking. If your website loads slowly, users abandon your site, and Google interprets this as a negative signal.
Many online tools let you test the website speed for free; the best one is Gtmetrix.com.
10. Sitemap.xml
The sitemap may be considered as the table of contents of a book. It is a file in XML format (Extensible Markup Language) that provides search engines with a list of the all URLs that make up the website.
To create a sitemap, you can use one of the many plugins that exist if you’re using a CMS, or alternatively, a free online tool like xml-sitemaps.com.
Once you’ve created the sitemap, you should upload it on the main folder of your website and let Google know about it on the search console.
Off-site optimization
To improve the ranking of your restaurant website, you shouldn’t focus only on On-site optimization, but Off-site strategies too. What does this mean? In simple terms, you want to make others talk about your restaurant on the net.
Among these Off-site SEO techniques, the most important is known as Link Building, although I prefer talking about Link Earning. The latter is a set of strategies which aim at getting third-party websites to link to a page of your website.
Not so long ago, webmasters utilized this technique to manipulate PageRank or a site’s ranking in Google search results. If search engines found out you were cheating, they simply ignored the links.
Now, Google’s algorithm is increasingly sophisticated and identifies and punishes those who rely on link spamming schemes. If you do this, the risk of seeing your site permanently removed from the index and search results is just around the corner. Every link pointing to your site must be natural and spontaneous since Google is very good at detecting unnatural links.
When you get another website to link to one of your pages, ensure the following:
- Links must come from a website of the same topic as yours.
- The word or the phrase that contains the link, namely the anchor text, should be well integrated with the whole content. It should appear natural, not artificial.
- The links you get should not be on the footers or sidebars of the other sites.
What are the tactics for earning links?
Take part in forums, blogs, social activities and communities in the field. Speak about what you know best and establish yourself as an expert, although don’t do this in a self-praising way. Also, create press releases and rely on digital PR strategies to promote your restaurant’s events.
Publish offers and promotions on your website. This encourages people to share your content across Facebook and the net in general.
With these restaurant SEO strategies, you’ll put your project on track to improve rankings and get traffic. Remember though that SEO is a medium- and long-term strategy, especially if you’re starting from scratch.
And you? What are you doing to optimize your website? Are you getting new customers from your website? Use the comment box below and share your experience with us.
