What is Local SEO ?
Every big and small sized restaurant wants to grow their business and attract as many customers as they can. The most effective way to market the business online is the use of Local SEO. It is all about increasing the searching visibility for businesses that serve their communities face to face. Moreover, it helps the businesses to promote their product and services to its local customers.
Challenges faced by most restaurant owners
A great website is supposed to help the business to make more customers and be a better business. Most of the websites are setup to be search engine friendly and help in high ranking. However, there are lots of strategies that one can use to give its website an extra boost and perform better than its competitors.
It is very challenging and hard for a restaurant business to get new customers through the door. While searching for a good restaurant, the customers are more likely to choose the internet to find what they are looking for. Now if you want your website to be displayed at the top and above, then observe the website of your competitors. You need to implement some very great Local SEO strategies to increase the ranking and position of your website and boost its web presence.
Industry Expert solution
Following are the 15 tips to grow your better business using local SEO that will help your website rank higher for a very long time.
1- Optimize website and content
Here are some of the points that you can consider while optimizing your website and content:
- Optimization is the very first and best thing to be done which will help your website shown up on search engines.
- Write a good amount of relevant and high-quality content.
- Do not only focus on keyword rich anchor text.
- While writing the content for the website always think from a customer’s perspective, write for your customers not only for search engines.
- Write about what your clients want to read and what will inspire them.
- While focusing on only keyword stuff, you might skip your competitive edge so write high-quality content for the customers which will attract them.
- Include your address, contact number and other contact information like email, etc.
- All these should be very clear and visible to the customers. So that they can easily find it on your website.
- Adding reviews will also help the customer to make a decision easily so make sure to include all this content strategically in your website.
2- Google+ business page
Google+ is a social media platform. It is owned by Google and helps in Local SEO ranking and online marketing a lot.
- To increase your spot in search results, the first thing you will need to do is set up a profile.
- Fill out the business profile as thoroughly as possible. Get active and add people, your customer circle.
- Post your content consistently.
- There is a very high potential for your content to be published on Google+ to appear on search engines than content published on other social networks.
3- Local Directory Citation building
Citations in SEO are an essential component in improving your local search results to make your restaurant a better business.
- It is one of the primary pillars of local SEO for running a proper, improved and better restaurant.
- A citation is an online reference to your restaurant’s name, address, and phone number, i-e NAP.
- Citations help search engines to verify that your restaurant business exists.
- It signals the search engines that your business is legitimate which automatically improves the ranking and make your better
Here are some important Citations for Restaurants to rank better in Search Engines
- Facebook – Simple steps to create facebook page for Free
- Google Maps – Get listed on Google Maps
- MerchantCircle – Easy steps to add business to Yelp
- Apple Maps – Add free Business profile on Apple Maps
- Bing Places – 4 simple Steps to add business to Bing Places
- Foursquare – Add free business listing on Foursquare
- TripAdvisor – 5 easy steps to add business to TripAdvisor
- Yellowpages – Add free business listing on yellowpages
- SuperPages – How to add business to SuperPages
- Hotfrog – Simple steps to add business to Hotfrog
4- What to post
There is more to Local SEO than just local keywords. You can post nearly anything to boost and build your web presence to make your better business.
- Posting new menu items, restaurant events or other local news can be optimized with keywords to make your website stand out during a search.
- Photos of customers in your restaurant, your dishes, new renovations or even a video of the bartender mixing drinks.
- Moreover, the most important and inspiring part that you can post is REVIEWS. So post your customer comments praising your recipes, service, and ambiance.
- Not only it can boost your Local SEO strategy, but it can also lure in more new diners.
5- Enable Reservations for customers
- You can add a link to your profile page allowing customers to do reservations and book tables.
- Customers being able to book their reservations within three clicks can create a very good impact.
- This reinforces how important it is to include up to date information on your Google+ business page.
6- Real Pictures of your Business
This area is often missed or poorly optimized. Most of the time restaurants post dreary pictures of their empty premises and company logo etc. Get into the shoes of the customer.
- Posting high quality and relevant pictures are a very simple but effective strategy for optimizing Google+ profile.
- Include pictures of busy days, classy pictures of your premises and your staff.
- This can bring more effective reviews to your site which will automatically boost your search results.
7- Customer experience matters
User experience is critical to local SEO and the success of your entire website. Now when you are on your way to posting a great content to boost your search results, customers may click through your site more than usual, but poor user experience can do great harm to your business.
- Make sure that your website is user-friendly.
- It’s crucial to keep mobile users happy with your web experience when more people are searching for the local restaurants on their smart phones.
8- On page SEO for the website
It is the practice of optimizing web pages to rank higher and earn more quality traffic in search engines.
- Title tags are the second most important on page factor for SEO after content.
- Moreover, URL structure is important because it helps the search engines to understand the relative importance and adds helpful relevancy metric to the given page.
9- Off page SEO for Business
It refers to the techniques that can be used to improve the position of a site in the search engine result page.
- Off page SEO’s refers to actions you can do outside the boundaries of your website which are social media marketing, social bookmarking and link building.
- A successful off site SEO will generate an increase in rankings, increase in PageRank and more exposure.
10- Business Category
Your content must include the references to the areas from which you want to attract your customers. It is very important to include your location in your content to clarify the potential customers where you are and also to benefit from these geographically targeted search terms.
11- Use Google places
It allows your restaurant, food truck or catering business show up in Google search and Google maps.
- It helps customers in finding an address, operation hours and contact information to make orders.
12- Be consistent:
Search engines like Google and Bing do not like inconsistent listings, and it could negatively impact the restaurant. Moreover, it is very important to be consistent with the business name, address and contact information on a website, social media profile, and citations to make better business.
13- Online Reputation Management
It is a broader term for Local SEO. Restaurants and bars live and die by their reputation. In ORM, the goal is to show your restaurant and hotel in its best light. It does not only ensure that your restaurant is found on a lot of websites. But making sure that all the information is correct and active which creates a good image of your restaurant.
14- Monitor or analyses your results
It is important to know what you are doing is actually working or not. There are many good tools that you can consider to monitor or analyses your local SEO efforts.
- The most useful tool is Google Analytics and Google My Business Insights.
- You can set this tool on your website to track how many organic visitors are coming on your website.
- More organic visitors mean your Local SEO is working fine.
- You can consider Moz analytics. It works perfect and analyzes your website improvement.
- It also allows you to track keywords progress week after week.
15- Join Restaurant Directories
The final local SEO tip for the restaurant is to make sure that you claim your restaurant listing on all the restaurant directories. Many SEO people believe that this is not optional as it allows to you update contact information and keeps the tabs on for what is being said about your business