This is a guestpost from our partners at AdTrak
Whether you’re struggling to build an online presence for your restaurant, or you’d like a little signal boost for an already-impressive online presence, a few tweaks to your site and a bit of SEO magic can give your eatery the jump on local competition. Read on to find out some of the most effective ways to improve your restaurant’s brand awareness.
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5 Local SEO Steps You Can Take For Your Business
1. Maximise your Google My Business Listing
Visibility is key to any business, and Google My Business (GMB) is key to visibility. Surprisingly, many restaurateurs either haven’t got a GMB listing set up, or they don’t properly use the one they do have set up. By setting up and properly maintaining your restaurant’s GMB listing, you can provide users with more information on the search engine results pages (SERPs).
For example, a user may search ‘restaurants near me’ to plan their evening meal. At the top of the SERPs, Google will display three restaurants based on the user’s location. These three restaurants are immediately put in front of the user, giving them a head start on attracting them to their business. On your GMB listing, you could include your opening times, your delivery/takeaway options and a link to your menu. The more information, the more convenient it is for the user.
2. Encourage Reviews
Reviews carry a lot of weight when it comes to restaurant recommendations. Plenty of people turn to TripAdvisor or other platforms to see how other diners rate restaurants, and so it’s important that you encourage guests to provide reviews after their visit. If a customer has booked into your restaurant through an online booking system, consider a follow-up email asking them to review your restaurant for you to display on your site. Alternatively, leave a card with the bill asking them to leave a review on an independent review site.
Google places importance on reviews. If a business has a lot of positive Google reviews, then it’s likely to rank higher on local search results than a business that hasn’t received many reviews, or has received reviews of a lower quality.
3. Restaurant Directories
Make sure your details are in all relevant restaurant directories. Directories like Yelp receive millions of visits a month, and by ensuring your restaurant is properly listed in these directories, you could be putting yourself in front of any number of potential customers. You may also be able to add a backlink to the directory, which can help improve your standing in the SERPs.
4. Website Elements
Optimise your website for the area you’re based in. On a more superficial level, keywords are absolutely crucial. Location-specific keywords will help your visibility to people searching for restaurants in your area. Including your chosen locations throughout the copy can help inform Google about your business.
As well as keywords, there are some more on-site elements to consider; meta titles and meta description. Meta descriptions and meta titles are HTML elements that help to summarise the content of a page. These are the titles and subheadings, as it were, that users see on their SERPs. The meta title should offer a brief, concise description of what your restaurant provides. For example, ‘Vegan Restaurant Kensington | [Restaurant Name]’ is a good meta title, as it will catch the attention of people searching for vegan restaurants in Kensington.
Meta descriptions work in tandem with meta titles to provide a little more information about your business: the description, situated directly under the meta title, should be one or two sentences designed to encourage users to visit your site.
A specialist marketing agency will be able to help you optimise your site for your needs using a range of methods. There really is no overstating the importance of proper Search Engine Optimisation.
5. Add Schema
Schema is additional code that provides Google with more information about your site. Clever coding can incorporate things like reviews, your opening hours, menus and more, all of which can be displayed in the SERPs when a user searches for relevant terms. The more information you have, the better your standing with Google.
There are plenty of things you can do to help your restaurant maximise its online presence and turn that presence into leads. By taking the above tips on board, you can help your business make the best possible impression on users and turn those users into customers.
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