SEO for restaurants, from the map pack to the booking click
Most guests find a restaurant in Google Maps, not on your website. SEO for restaurants means winning the map pack, the menu link and the booking click.
A guest two miles away opens Maps and types pizza near me, and three results appear above everything else on the screen. Your homepage is not in that decision. Your photographs, your hours and your review count are.
Much of this job sits outside the website. It sits in your Google Business Profile, in a menu a crawler can read, and in whether the order button hands a guest to your checkout or to a marketplace.
We have built restaurant sites since 2018. Retainers are the newer half of what we sell, and we would rather write that down than imply a decade of campaigns we never ran. So the offer stays narrow and we take a small number of clients.
More on this:restaurant website design and build·how our monthly SEO retainers work·WordPress speed and Core Web Vitals work·get a scope and a monthly figure
Where the bookings leak away
The menu is a PDF
Google gets a file with no dish names to match a query. Your guest gets pinch and zoom.
Hours that lie on a holiday
Regular hours and special hours are separate. Miss the second and the profile says open while the door is locked.
Someone else owns the order button
A delivery marketplace can supply the ordering link on your profile. You then pay a cut on guests who searched for you by name.
Ninety photos, none of the room
Guests upload plates and receipts. The shot that decides a Friday booking is the room at eight, and nobody took it.
What we work on each month
A menu page a crawler can read
Dish names, prices and sections as real HTML text, with the PDF kept as a download. That page picks up searches for a dish rather than a category.
The Business Profile gone through line by line
Primary category, service options, the reservation link, the menu link, and the attributes that only appear once the category is right.
Queries about dishes and streets
Best restaurants is a national fight. Birria tacos plus a neighbourhood name is winnable, and the person typing it eats within the hour.
Schema that matches the page
A Restaurant node carrying servesCuisine, the menu URL and acceptsReservations, generated from the same data the page already renders so the two can never drift apart.
Speed on a phone on cell data
Hero video pushes Largest Contentful Paint past Google's 2.5 second threshold. We read yours from the Chrome UX Report, not from a lab score.
In every retainer
- A month one audit of the profile, the menu, the booking path and Core Web Vitals
- Monthly reporting from your own Search Console property and your own profile insights
- Template and on page changes made by us, schema included
- Semrush keyword and competitor research
- Menu, reservation and food ordering links on the profile checked every month
- A quarterly review where we reforecast or tell you to stop
What restaurant SEO moves, and what it will not
How a retainer runs around a kitchen
Month one is profile work, not website work. We walk the profile with you, fix the category, the service options, the special hours, and the links across the top. Then we set a dated baseline in Search Console, so later months measure against something real.
From month two the hours split between the site and the profile, and the split follows the data. If the menu page is the only thing earning impressions, we build it out. If the profile is invisible past half a mile, more blog posts will not fix it, and SEO for restaurants at that point is category and proximity work. Proximity is not a thing we can edit.
Publishing is slow on purpose. One or two pages a month, each aimed at something a guest types before choosing where to eat: a dish, an occasion, a dietary need, a street. You read every draft first.
On reviews we help you ask, and nothing beyond that. We build the ask into the receipt and the follow up email, pointed at your own profile. We do not write them, buy them, filter them, or trade a free dessert for one. The FTC rule on consumer reviews is real and the exposure would be yours.
- One person you email, who knows your menu
- Hours fixed monthly, logged and read back on the call
- Site changes arrive as commits you own
- Thirty days notice, no annual contract
The first 90 days
- 01
Week one, the audit
We crawl the site, read the profile against Google's documentation, and check what a phone on a slow connection loads. Findings come back ranked by value.
- 02
Week two, the profile
Category, service options, special hours, menu link, reservation link, ordering links. Most early movement comes from this week, and none of it touches your website.
- 03
Week three, the menu
The PDF becomes a page. Sections, dishes, prices and allergen notes as text, with schema built from the same source so a price change updates both at once.
- 04
The monthly cycle
Profile work, site work, one or two new pages, report, call. The agenda never changes, so you always know what the hours bought and what is coming next month.
- 05
Day 90, then every quarter
We compare impressions, clicks, direction requests and calls against the month one baseline. If nothing moved and we cannot say why, you hear that on the call.
What the work costs
One room or six
A single site is one profile and one set of hours. Six locations is six profiles, six sets of holiday hours, and a page structure that avoids six near identical pages.
What the site runs on
A current WordPress install takes few technical hours. A nine year old theme with stacked page builders takes a great many.
How the booking works
A site already wired to OpenTable or Resy needs the link checked. A site where the only way to book is a phone number inside an image needs building first.
How many pages you want
One a month and four a month are different retainers. Each one gets researched, drafted and read by you before it goes near the site.
The ordering link nobody checks
Open Edit profile, then Business information, then the Links tab. There are separate slots for a menu link, a reservation link and food ordering links, and the ordering slot can carry links a delivery marketplace supplied rather than you. Google lets you add your own ordering URL there and mark it as preferred. Owners find this after months of paying commission on guests who searched by name.
Sources:Google's help page on menu, ordering and reservation links·Google's instructions for setting special hours
Do one thing before you talk to anybody. Open your profile on a phone, tap through to order, and look at whose checkout you land on. If it is a marketplace you never chose, that row is taking a cut of guests who searched for you by name.
Then send the menu URL and the profile link. Back comes a written list of what is wrong with both, ranked, and it is yours to keep whether you hire us or hand it to whoever runs the site. Three or four items on it are usually free to fix yourself in an afternoon.
Get a fixed-price quote Back within 1 business day
Questions owners ask us
How do I get my restaurant to show up on Google?+
Claim and verify the Google Business Profile first, because that is where searches land. Set the primary category precisely, add real photographs of the room and the plates, and keep holiday hours current. The website supports that rather than replacing it.
Does SEO work for restaurants?+
It works differently than it does for a law firm. Most of the return sits in the Business Profile, the menu page and local queries about dishes. A kitchen chasing best restaurants in a big city with no links behind it will struggle, and we say so.
How much does restaurant SEO cost?+
We price by the hours the work needs rather than by a package tier, so a figure follows a look at your site and profile. Location count, the build and the writing volume are what move it. Ask for a quote.
Do I need a website if I have a Google Business Profile?+
Yes, for two jobs mainly. The profile cannot hold a readable menu, and Google reads your site to corroborate what the profile claims about cuisine and hours. A site also owns the booking click, which no marketplace should stand inside.
How long does SEO for restaurants take to work?+
Faster than most verticals, because the work is profile led. A category change or a corrected ordering link republishes in days, and new photographs of the room can move the map pack inside a fortnight. Page work is slower, though a dish plus a street name is thin enough to land in weeks.