Restaurant SEO
Restaurant SEO starts with taking your own name back.
Search your restaurant and count how many results above you belong to somebody else: a delivery app, a booking platform, a review aggregator, each running a page about you that they monetise. That searcher had already decided to come to you. Losing them at that point is the most expensive thing happening on your site, and it is usually fixable.
Straight answer
The three cheapest fixes are not marketing.
Hours, menu format and photograph weight decide more restaurant search outcomes than any content programme, and all three are maintenance rather than strategy.
What quietly costs covers
- A PDF menu nobody can read on a phone
- Hours that are wrong over a bank holiday
- Photographs uploaded at full camera resolution
- Aggregators outranking you for your own name
- A booking link buried below the fold
- A monthly blog post nobody searches for
What fills tables
- Menus as pages, marked up, priced and current
- Hours correct, including special and holiday hours
- Photography that loads on mobile data
- Your site as the best answer for your own name
- Booking obvious and one tap away
- Reviews earned and responded to
On aggregators, said plainly
You will not remove them from the results and anyone promising that is guessing. What you can usually do is take the top position back and make sure the result underneath leads to your own booking rather than a commission. Both are achievable, and both matter more than ranking for restaurants near me, where you are competing with everyone in the city.
Scope
What restaurant SEO covers here.
In the order it tends to pay back for a single site or a small group.
Owning your name
Profile, consistency and site structure aligned so a search for your restaurant returns you first, and the click leads to your booking rather than a commission.
Menus as pages
Real pages with items, descriptions and prices marked up, so you rank for dishes and cuisines and can change a price without exporting a document.
Hours and open now
Regular and special hours correct everywhere they appear. This drives the open now filtering that decides a large share of local restaurant search.
The image pipeline
Every photograph kept, served at sensible sizes in modern formats from cache. Food photography is the usual reason a restaurant site is slow.
Booking flow
The reservation route made obvious and fast, measured on a real phone. A booking widget is frequently the heaviest thing on the page that converts.
Multi site structure
For groups, locations that genuinely differ and do not compete with each other, on one domain rather than several weak ones.
Cost
What it costs.
The £95 blended hourly rate, or a monthly package. Minimum engagement is 4 hours, and for a single restaurant that is often most of the work.
Local and site audit
From £380
Profile, hours, menu format, image weight and who is outranking you for your own name, with a list of what to fix first.
Menu and image rebuild
Scoped
Menus converted from documents into structured pages, and the photography pipeline rebuilt so the site loads on mobile data.
Foundation, 4 hours a month
£380/month
Hours and menus kept current, reviews handled through a real process, and regressions caught before a customer finds them.
FAQ
Questions clients actually ask
Why do delivery apps outrank us for our own restaurant name?
Because they are large, heavily linked domains with a page dedicated to you, and Google often reads that page as a legitimate answer to a search for your name. It is infuriating and it is common.
You will rarely remove them entirely, but you can usually take the top position back: a complete profile, a site that clearly states the same name, address and phone, your own booking route made obvious, and enough of your own content that your site is the better answer. Owning your name is the single highest value fight in this sector because that searcher had already decided to come to you.
Should the menu be a PDF?
No, and this is the most common technical fault in the sector. A PDF menu is slow, poor on a phone, frequently out of date, and the content inside it is far less useful to a search engine than the same words in a page.
Menus as real pages let you rank for the dishes and cuisines people actually search, mark up items and prices properly, and update a price without re-exporting a document.
How much do opening hours matter?
More than almost anything else you could spend the time on. Hours drive the open now filtering that decides a great deal of local restaurant search, and wrong hours over a bank holiday send customers to a closed door and produce the reviews that follow.
Special hours for holidays are the part everyone forgets, and it is a fifteen minute job that prevents a genuinely expensive failure.
Do we need a blog?
Almost certainly not. Restaurant blogs are among the least read content on the internet, and the hours are better spent on the profile, the menu pages, the photographs and the booking flow.
The exception is a genuine local angle: a chef known for something specific, a supplier story with real substance, or an event programme people search for. If it is a monthly post about seasonal ingredients, it will earn nothing.
What about photographs?
They matter enormously for conversion and they are usually the reason the site is slow. Food photography is uploaded at full resolution more often than any other sector we see, and the result is a beautiful site nobody waits for on mobile data.
The fix is a proper image pipeline. Keep every photograph, serve it at a sensible size in a modern format from cache.
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Outranked for your own restaurant name?
Send the name and town. You get a straight answer on who is above you, whether it can be shifted, and what else is costing you covers.