Top 8 Restaurant SEO Strategies That Helps to Increase Foot Traffic and Online Visibility

Are you planning to attract a greater number of customers to your restaurant by simply boosting rankings on Google with SEO?

00:08 What is Restaurant SEO?

Even amidst the disruptions due to the pandemic, in this age of mobile search and increased competition, to find or locate top quality products and services, customers often rely on online reviews, testimonials, presentations and more to make their choices. This aspect holds huge value and relevance, particularly for a competitive and niche segment like – “Restaurants”. Restaurant SEO is an important factor for being found online, across multiple platforms. Adopting smart ways to improve SEO within this niche area can help get restaurant businesses back on track, retain clients, and improve brand recall.

00:58 Top ways to increase a restaurant’s foot traffic and improve search engine visibility

Here discussed are some top ways to increase a restaurant’s foot traffic and improve search engine visibility. Some of the ways to do this include digital marketing campaigns, where as others relate to offline actions. Anything that increases foot traffic will tie in with SEO efforts to a lesser or greater extent. Let’s get into the list:

01:24 Store Signage and Logos: Creating a good online presence is important. The logo and signage of the restaurant should be of the same font and colors as your website. Consistency is a key aspect in this area. For instance, when you get a chance to read the article you’ll see the McDonalds photos, the left image is the restaurant’s physical location, and the right is their webpage. There is consistency in both the color and logo.

Now let’s move on to,

01:56 Communicate brand story: Convey a unique brand story by humanizing your website.  Focus on key aspects that make your restaurant unique. For instance, whether the restaurant is a family owned business that has passed down recipes for decades, or whether the food comes from the local farmers within the specific area, so that it is always fresh and organic. Keep your brand distinct in the customer’s eye by doing stuff like that and also making sure to convey the brand story on the website. You can do small things like, placing the brand’s story on the “Home Page,” or the About us section. Creating a riveting video also can make it even better, as human attention span can be short, with so much appealing options out there. Doing this option is also more beneficial as opposed to having an infographic or just writing infographic would be the second option but the number one option would be, Video.

03:00 Mobile-friendliness: Make sure to focus on optimizing your restaurant website for mobile users. According to Statista, approximately 53 percent of global website traffic comes from mobile devices. If the restaurant website takes too long to load or looks unprofessional on a mobile device, customers obviously will quickly leave your site or look for another site that is mobile-friendly.

As I mentioned before, human attention span are small. So you want to make sure that you’re doing everything to keep their attention on your site. So things like mobile friendliness, those are the things that you want to make sure that once you finish of our PC, you sign up for a website and they’ve done like a really quick design for you or again you have a site like ours take care of quick design at a very fair price in. You’ll go ahead now and just make sure that the mobile site is also good. So you’ll double check and let us know look the mobile site has this portion on this showing stuff like that so make sure mobile friendliness is something that you put above all else when it comes on to the friendliness of your site, in terms of usability.

Okay next would be,

04: 23 Holding events: One of the best ways to increase foot traffic is by holding events as these provide the opportunity to target specific audiences. For instance, family restaurants can hold events that cater to children whereas an upscale bistro with an extensive wine catalog can conduct wine tastings. Events can build a loyal clientele base if an effective website is combined with strong social media presence.

So, basically, with this section what we’re trying to say is that depending on the restaurant that you have, you’re the way that you hold your events, would be more specific to the audience that you’re looking for. So don’t go generic and try to hold it for everyone. Make sure that you’re targeting the specific audience that you’re looking for.

So, make sure you have a strong plan in action when holding an event. So, first find out what your main purpose of holding the event will be. Then it can be convert first-time visitors into regular clients and then from there you’ll create your theme accordingly offline, which is at the venue spot, that goes for the invitations created also the layout of the venue, posters etc. Now, on online section, having a call to action or a gift certificate can help in this regard to bring in people to the event but also giving them a taste of what to expect in person.

06:03 Use Location-specific Keywords: Now this portion goes right back to the online section. Most people who are looking for a place to eat want something that’s nearby. So, considering location-based keywords when creating an SEO strategy, this can be very very beneficial. So let’s dive a little bit deep into it.

So, you can use local keywords like the city, region, or neighborhood where the restaurant is located on the title and header tags, as well as the body copy of the website. This will help the restaurant show up in search results when people search for dining options within a specific area.

So once you’re online and you set these things up again you can access within the comments just leave comments and we will just work with you to figure out, you know is it WordPress you’re using is in another system, CMS system to set your website up and then we’ll just figure out what it is that you need to have. So of course the key words that you know they’re focusing on you run them through Google keyword planner or any other software that you specifically use and just find out the volume as well as if people are spending money to do ads for that keyword, that way we will also let you know these are buying keywords we should just focus on these.

So, when it comes to your site, even though you may not have a lot of content to push right away, setting up your Google My Business account will help a few people to pick you up online, and some of those few may visit your site, and call without searching for content that’s helpful to them.

This takes me into the next bullet point, which goes straight into:

07: 58 Claiming your Google My Business listing: When performing a Google search for restaurants and say for instance, you’re just seeing if you’re at your restaurant is popping up you go ahead and do a Google search for specific area which restaurant listings from Google often show up at the top of the results page. So you may not see yours right away but you’ll see someone else in your place.  In some cases these listings are also shown in an excerpt from Google maps. To show up in these results it’s important to register the restaurant with “Google My Business”,  making sure to fill out the GMB or Google My Business listing information completely and accurately and then using the address format that Google uses. Make sure there are no duplicate listings.

So of course there is a simple way to set this up is kind of self explanatory when you go to the Google My Business but leave comments within the post and will definitely reach out to you and just assist you with getting your business up and running.

So the next thing that will go right into is the next,

09:15 Citation Building: This portion of course is another online portion but on some levels it works with your offline portion because of the messaging. So citation building is beneficial to both the SEO efforts and to increase foot traffic. It is the practice of sending out information about a restaurant to listing directories so that people can locate the brand itself. In terms of SEO, it is a type of link building that ultimately points back to a website.

The restaurant’s address and phone number at the very least should be made available as widely as possible. Now this is how you go right back into the offline so this is the section you add those information. So instead of people going to your site to go find your local store, you’ll also add the numbers and stuff so people can call it directly. So giving you more opportunities to not need to worry about content creation; without losing the attention of the traffic coming to the site. For those that decide instead of call in right away, let me just look online and see what they have.

Now, if you still don’t have time to create content, focus on this bullet point about,

10:32 Posting or Updating the site with Quality Content: Okay, so quality content doesn’t have to be long form right out the gate. You can build towards that. In short you can Create a schedule for content schedule on the main point of your site. So, to get people in your restaurant, trying your food etc, you can create a schedule around that. So you’ll do small things, you can do you can have the content like upcoming specials new recipes and if you have holiday themed meals you can post those upcoming menus. So scheduling will keep the content honest and avoid long periods without posting.

11:14 Conclusion

There are a lot more points not mentioned on this audio. But these few will put you on the right path both offline and online, so use each strategy given to piggyback off of the next. Doing this will have a positive effect on your business regardless of which one works best to get the most seats in your restaurants or restaurant. So anything that you see that is not working, towed away, leave it for another campaign that might come up. Go ahead and use everything else that you see that’s working for a business and if nothing is working, leave a comment, let us know what what’s not working also tried to stuff out that on the blog post itself that I mentioned here of course like I mentioned. But apart from that reach out, let us know we can help you depending on your situation and just personalize your campaign around the goals that you’re trying to accomplish.