Optimizing your online presence starts with improving your website. Your website, social media pages, blog, reviews, and online ordering system can help you reach a wider audience more quickly and build more brand awareness and loyalty.

Customers like to visit a restaurant's website before visiting or placing an online order. The most important part of your website may be the menu presentation. The menu is often the most important part of the website, and it should be easily accessible from the front page, include all relevant information about each dish, and be visually appealing to customers.

Refresh your website on a reasonable cadence to highlight your brand. Making it easy to navigate, viewable on mobile devices, and making it visually appealing can help attract potential customers. Obvious essential information such as your location, an easy-to-read menu, your hours of operation, contact information, and some graphic elements including photos to give potential customers a first impression of what’s in store for their dining experience.

Local SEO for Increasing Visitors to Your Restaurant’s Website

There are many web browsers, but Google’s dominant market share of over 80% means the most bang for your buck will come from focusing on it. Most Operators know the value of local SEO optimization. Optimizing a website for local search engine optimization (SEO) is required to appear higher in location-specific queries when potential new customers are performing a local restaurant search.

How Local SEO Works for Restaurants

Google ranks 4 general factors to match hungry restaurant searchers with suitable local venues based on their search criteria.

1. Relevance: the relation (or not) of the keywords or search questions a searcher uses in their web search. Think “local Italian Restaurant.”
2. Distance: the data Google has on a user's proximity to a restaurant in that search.
3. Prominence: how important Google thinks a business is compared to its competitors, and
4. Quality and relevance of information about the restaurant

Then, Google displays two types of search results for these local searches: the 3-Pack and organic results.

Local SEO Restaurant Search: Italian Restaurants Near Me

You’re looking for an Italian Restaurant. Entering “Italian restaurants near me” in the browser delivers:

The ‘local 3-pack’ results are where you want to be. The organic results, which are still ‘page 1’ results and very positive, are just below.

Roughly, the top factors that Google’s algorithm takes into account to display the 3-Pack listings for this search are your Google Business Profile, online reviews, and relevant restaurant directory listings. So getting into the 3-Pack is the holy grail, and ‘page 1” should be a goal right behind that.

Updating Your Google My Business Listing, the 3-Pack, and First Page

Research shows that 75% of users never scroll past the first page of search results.

So… the first step to getting to the first page is optimizing your Google My Business page if you have not already done so. For those who have NOT updated their business profile, Google My Business is a free tool from Google that allows you to manage your online presence on Google. By claiming and optimizing your Google My Business listing, you can increase your visibility in Google search results, improve your local SEO, and attract eyeballs to your website and more visitors to your restaurant. This can be achieved by using keywords and phrases that people would use when searching for restaurants in their local area.

5 Popular Local SEO Tools to Choose Your Keywords and Improve Your Local Search

There are plenty of online tools and applications to improve your keywords, your local SEO results, and digital traffic to achieve the 3-Pack. Below are some of the most popular:

Semrush: Semrush is an online visibility management platform that enables businesses to improve search engine optimization, content, pay-per-click, social media, and competitive research. Semrush offers sophisticated keyword insights to optimize web, email, and social media marketing. Semrush has over 87,000 paying customers. Pricing: A free trial is available, with 5 tiers of pricing from free to $499.95.

Birdeye: Birdeye is a reputation and customer experience platform for local businesses and brands. Over 100,000 businesses use Birdeye’s platform to effortlessly manage online reputation, connect with prospects through digital channels, and gain customer experience insights to grow sales and thrive. Pricing: There are 3 levels of pricing, starting at $299 per month.

Yext: Yext is an ‘Answers Platform’ that leverages complementary listings, pages, reviews, and search to deliver relevant answers where customers look for your information. Yext helps customers create the right content across search engines, websites, mobile apps, and other potential customer touchpoints. Pricing: There are 4 price plans, ranging from $4 to $19 per week.

SE Ranking: SE Ranking is SEO software that features a set of tools for keyword position tracking and keyword research, website audit, competitor analysis, keyword suggestion and grouping, backlink monitoring, automated professional reporting, and more. Over 700,000 users use SE Ranking. Pricing: There are 4 price plans, ranging from $4 to $19 per week.

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