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6 ways to master SEO to get more customers in the door

If your restaurant needs more visibility, SEO may help.

March 23, 2018

By Shanna Mallon,seniorcopywriter for Straight North

Whether you run a small or large restaurant brand, you can't ignore the power of the internet when you want to attract more customers. More diners are going online to learn about new restaurants, restaurant locations and/or menu offerings at certain destinations. This is why restaurants have to consider the value of search engine optimization.

What is the point of SEO?
If you aren't familiar with it, SEO is the practice of making your website more attractive to search engines. It's the process of building online authority and visibility so that more people organically search — and find — what you offer. For example, when someone searches for “vegetarian café near me” or “nearby coffee shop” while driving through your neighborhood, your website will be prominently displayed in his or her search results. Likewise, when people search online for restaurants in a certain city or region, your restaurant is more likely to show in those results.

Why use SEO as a restaurant?
Essentially, the goal of SEO is to increase the organic search traffic of your restaurant's website — through strategic content, link building and a range of other best practices. By extension, that should lead to more patrons. If your restaurant needs more visibility, SEO may help. If you're looking to build business, SEO is worth exploring.

How does this work? How can your restaurant use SEO to get more people through its doors? To help answer these questions, here's a look at some tips for attracting diners via SEO.

1. Take advantage of local search. As a local business, you want to optimize online listings for your restaurant across local search properties. From search engine directories to social media sites, get your restaurant name and location information distributed. Likewise, make sure your name, address and phone number are consistent across all these locations for the best SEO results.
2. Create fresh content. In terms of SEO, producing unique, high-quality content is essential. You need to regularly publish relevant content that will attract search engines. One way is by creating a blog, and posting to it every week for at least a period of six months. Set up a blog calendar of topics and faithfully publish each week.
3. Optimize content with keywords. Content alone isn't powerful enough to move the needle. You need relevant, keyword-optimized content to generate the best returns. The first thing you'll want to do is research keywords — a professional SEO firm can be helpful here. Based on the terms and phrases you select, you need to create content filled with those search terms to match what users type into search engines when they are looking for a restaurant like yours.
4. Create strategic titles and descriptions. All pages and posts need SEO-friendly titles and meta descriptions that are optimized with keywords. They should be descriptive and succinct.
5. Guest post on other websites. Link building is a huge component of online authority, so it's a great idea to guest post on other sites. The more quality websites you can get to link back to your restaurant's site, the better.
6. Encourage reviews online. Positive reviews are not only powerful for increasing your reputation and authority with prospective customers but also are important for SEO. With structured data markup, your star ratings can appear in search results, advertising your restaurant's value from the search results page.

The bottom line: Restaurants need to consider SEO if they want to attract more online visitors and, ultimately, patrons to their restaurants. Use the tips above as a starting place for improving your search authority and web presence — and keep growing your restaurant's reputation online.

photo:istock

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