How to Increase Local SEO For Your Restaurant

Keywords have become the basis most businesses depend on for awareness and clientele. On the one hand, most customers rely on digital feedback from other customers who've been through the same experience. Therefore, customers are actively seeking to find products or services that match their criteria and hit all five stars. Unfortunately, with so many competitors and choices consumers have, how is the ideal business found in the first place? Ultimately, this is where search engines play a significant role as a bridge between consumers and providers; let's dissect this concept from a common point of view. Let's say it's Saturday night and Joe is searching for an Italian restaurant for an important date. Unfortunately, Joe is running late and is searching for the most convenient option. Therefore, he doesn't want to spend a lot of time filtering results in the search engine. Also, Joe is located in Winter Garden, Florida, where there are a few reputable Italian restaurants that appeal to him. In this situation, Joe is searching for keywords like "best italian restaurant in winter garden" or "italian restaurants near me," yet, Joe doesn't want to spend too much time looking since he is running late.
However, Joe stumbles upon a credible restaurant with various reviews and appealing local citations, meta tag descriptions, and a  user-friendly website.   

As a result, Joe decides on Cariera's Italian Restaurant, which ranked as the third result for the "best Italian restaurant in winter garden" keyword. In other words, most customers are more likely to convert to restaurants that have a higher online presence and ranking. In this article, I will discuss the most crucial restaurant SEO tips that will increase your online presence organically and also highlight essential components for your restaurant.

Restaurant Search Engine Optimization Guide

    SEO or Search Engine Optimization, has become the talk of the online marketing community and most digitally aware businesses. However, as trends pick up traction, they also pick up false information. Unfortunately, SEO is no exception, as organic growth is an essential part of scaling businesses, there are many ways to implement a successful SEO strategy. Therefore, just like any part of building sustainable practices, SEO requires a decent amount of time and budget for link building, hiring freelancers, or contractors to maintain rankings for highly coveted keywords. However, once you’ve created a bulletproof SEO strategy, you will be unstoppable in the search engine realm, enjoy quality organic traffic, and nourish leads that could become on-going customers for your business. Primarily, in this article, we will cover ways to highlight your restaurant menu, building quality business citations, and promoting your restaurant in cost-effective methods. 

1. Local Business Citations  (Google My Business, Yelp, Tripadvisor, etc)

Business Citations are extremely valuable for Local Restaurants; business citations establish credibility and accessibility for customers. Google My Business or GMB is one of the most important citation tools for businesses to be found and reviewed. Therefore, it is vital to set up this tool as soon as you start your digital marketing strategy. First, you must set up and verify accurate business information like phone numbers, addresses if (multiple locations), and description of your offerings. Afterward, it is crucial to create appealing content, visuals to highlight the appeal of your business.

Highlight Favorite Dishes

It is vital to highlight favorite dishes or new dishes on GMB for existing and new customers. For instance, you can use this tool for advertising dishes or the latest promotions. Ultimately, this advertising tactic will attract customers organically and at lower acquisition costs. For reference, check out Carriers GMB postings and this guide to optimize your business citations and reduce your investment on Google Adwords.

2. SEO Restaurant Menu Guide (Schema Markups)

Now that we've discussed business citations', it's time to dig into the meat of selling and advertising your menu items in the search engine results page (SERP). However, to achieve this goal, we need to look at a technical term known as Schema Markups. Although this term sounds like tech jargon, it is merely just highlighting your website's information in the SERP as featured snippets, which is a significant advantage over other competitors who overlook this simple task. Besides, this task can quickly be completed in 5 minutes, with just inputting the right information.

Schema Markup Generator

Let use this Schema Markup generator, which is simple and straightforward towards our objective of highlighting menu items. This generator also writes out the code to implement it towards our objective pages, though it also allows you to pick from a range of categories from recipes to blogs. The only thing you have to do is input the right information and ask a developer to implement the code to the page. Check out this video for further reference and assistance on Schema Markups.