As a restaurateur, you should always be thinking about what can be done to increase your restaurant’s reach and visibility on the Internet. After all, the more people who find out about your business, the greater your chances are of drawing in new customers (and keeping old ones!).

Shoring up your brand’s online presence is especially important as the COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage across the United States. The restaurant industry had already lost $120 billion dollars due to COVID as of June 2020. Though the industry may have recovered to an extent after restrictions were loosened in the summer, another, stricter level of lockdown may be instituted sometime in the coming months.

To minimize the coronavirus’s ill effects on your restaurant, you need to adapt your business model to the peculiar circumstances in which we find ourselves. One of the ways to do so is by focusing on strategies such as improving your restaurant’s local SEO. This guide will help you accomplish that. 

What Is Local SEO and Why Should Restaurant Owners Care About It? 

Local SEO stands for “local search engine optimization.” It encompasses the best practices, steps you can take, and tools you can use to help make your establishment show up in the results when potential customers search for restaurants in or near your location.

The facts support the positive impact a successful local SEO strategy can have on a business. According to a study completed in 2019, 97% of those surveyed said they regularly search online to find local businesses. Almost one-third of respondents said they look for local businesses online at least once a week. 

If you optimize your restaurant’s website, social media accounts, and online search directory listings (both big ones and local ones), you could be gaining access to thousands of future diners. 

Four Steps to Better Local SEO

Though your keyword strategy will be a big part of your overall local SEO strategy, to be successful, you need to consider several other aspects of local SEO, including the following:

• A thorough keyword and content marketing strategy, optimized for local searches

• Your restaurant appearing in search results in map applications, such as Google Maps or Apple Maps

• Optimizing your restaurant’s user experience on mobile phones

• Ensuring that your restaurant’s name, address, and phone number are accurate across all platforms and channels

• Your business appearing in local search directories

• Improving your restaurant’s social media engagement to help funnel more users to your restaurant’s website

• Keeping a blog for content marketing purposes

• Offering online ordering and delivery (either by creating a system yourself or using a third-party service like Menufy)

We will dive into four of the most essential tactics below. 

1. Create a Local SEO Keyword Strategy

You may already have a general SEO/digital strategy in place. If not, that’s fine; there are plenty of SEO and keyword research resources for beginners available for free on the Internet to help you get started. 

When planning your local keyword strategy, keep in mind that customer searches can be broad, like “restaurants near me,” or more specific, like “fancy Italian restaurants in Kansas City.” 

To determine what search terms you want to rank for, you can start with high-level, generic terms like “restaurants in Kansas City.” You should also dig deeper into specifics, like what type of food you serve, the atmosphere of your restaurant, the neighborhood you are located in, etc. 

Narrow down your target keywords by plugging them into a keyword planner tool. This will help you identify which keywords make the most sense to target. 

Using your final targeted keywords as a guide, you can create promotional media—fresh blog posts, videos, infographics, and photos that showcase what makes your restaurant stand out from others in your location. 

You can also update pages on your existing website or create new ones for things like your menu, your “About” page, and even your COVID cautionary procedures. Make sure your webpage is up-to-date: one study found that up to 77% of diners look up restaurant menus before selecting a restaurant, so it’s essential to make sure that all the pages on your website (and especially the menu pages) are as good as they can get.

Whatever you do, don’t forget to keep your technical SEO in mind as well!

2. Update Local Search Directories 

To figure out just what directories and channels you need to optimize, start with a tool such as Moz Local or Yext. They will tell you what directories and external data sources are out there, which ones have already been optimized, and which ones have incorrect or inconsistent information.

You can use this information to go through each listing and either add or fix information. One of the most important aspects of this step is checking that your name, address, and phone number are consistent across all channels; if they are not, you can get dinged in the search results. 

3. Optimize for Mobile

If your website is not already optimized for mobile, that should be one of your priorities. In 2019, nearly half of all organic searches were performed on mobile devices. You could be missing out on customers by having a website that is unresponsive or clunky on mobile—and Google may even penalize you in the search results for this. Page load time, rendering, and UX are all factors that determine how your website performs on social devices.

If a restaurant’s webpage (and especially its menu pages) are not optimized for mobile, potential customers may just bounce from your site and find another restaurant that has a more seamless mobile experience. A survey completed in 2019 found that 52% of the diners responding had chosen not to go to a restaurant because of a poor user experience with a website.

Moreover, people have spent an estimated additional 23% on their phones per day this year than they spent last year. Make sure your restaurant offers some interactive, engaging posts to help people in your area find your restaurant as they scroll through Facebook or Instagram. 

4. Offer Delivery and Online Ordering

It is likely that you already have a takeaway plan in place. But do you have a delivery plan?

Food delivery was on the rise even before COVID started. People enjoy the convenience of ordering food online. Studies have also shown that people prefer to order their food online rather than call or order in person.

You can capitalize on this by making it possible to order takeout through your website or a third-party site such as Menufy. The bonus of using a third-party site is that users can find your restaurant via the third-party’s marketplace. Usually, restaurants are searchable by location and type of cuisine.

If you want your restaurant to survive COVID, one of the best things you can do is lean into your local SEO strategy. This will mean completing actions like optimizing for local keywords, keeping your social channels updated and engaging, making sure your site is responsive on mobile, and getting an online ordering/delivery plan in place. If you take these steps, you may just be able to keep your restaurant afloat until the worst of the pandemic is behind us.