5 Restaurant SEO Tips Backed by Diners & Data

People don’t always search by cuisine. Sometimes, they search for a specific dish. You’ll likely stand a better chance of showing up for their search if the dish they searched for is on the menu uploaded to your Business Profile.

For example, if I search for “carbonara” in Google Maps, this nearby restaurant pops up because this dish is on its menu:

Given that thousands of people across the US search for “carbonara near me” (and many other dishes “near me”) every month, this is an easy but often overlooked way to show up for more searches.

Having the option to book a table on your profile reduces friction and improves your chances of converting searchers to diners. There are plenty of third-party apps that can add this functionality, such as Resy, OpenTable, and Yelp.

Most restaurant owners will already know these. If that’s you, note them down and move on to the next step. If you’re doing SEO for a restaurant and have no idea what’s nearby, use this query to ask ChatGPT:

give me a list of 10 popular attractions near: [restaurant address]. don't give me any descriptions, just a comma-separated list of attraction names

It should give you something like this:

It only makes sense to optimize for attractions where people are searching for nearby restaurants. Here’s how to check which those are:

In this case, Nationwide Arena is the most popular, but people are also searching for restaurants near Easton Town Center and Franklin Park Zoo.

This is really all about mentioning the attractions on your site in natural and helpful ways.

Here are a few ways I’ve seen this done:

Moran’s Bar & Grille featured a Yelp review that mentions the arena and a few related terms on their homepage:

This is likely what helped them to rank #9 for “restaurants near nationwide arena”:

The White Horse Pub has advice for those booking to dine before a big game or concert on their homepage: 

This is likely what helped them to rank #8 for “food near wembley stadium”:

Burger & Lobster created an entire page about restaurants in the area:

This is likely what helped them to rank #8 for “best restaurants by rockefeller center”:

However, while this seemed to work, the execution is a little spammy for my tastes. Most of the copy is just fluff that ChatGPT could write.

If you want to give this tactic a shot, I’d suggest creating a page with genuine local restaurant recommendations. Your joint can be one of them, but be helpful and feature some of the other places you ****, too.

Backlinks can also help diners to discover your restaurant on other websites.

I discovered a coffee shop in Boston through a recommendation from a local blogger and have been multiple times since. Her description and photos really sold me on visiting, and it was a great find. I’ve visited a few of her recommendations.

I was able to discover a nice little bistro through a food blogger’s site that gave a detailed review and had a link to the restaurant’s page. Because of this, I had one of the most memorable meals in my life.

I’ve discovered new restaurants from food bloggers’ Instagram accounts before, as well as from blog posts. For example, I learnt about a new Mexican place in Rome from the instagram page of Wanted in Rome.

Getting backlinks can be challenging, but here are a few tactics to get you started:

Food bloggers who review you will usually link to you from their website.

Here’s a quick way to find bloggers to reach out to:

1. Go to Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis tool
2. Switch the toggle to “referring domains”
3. Enter your website in the “Not linking to this target” field
4. Enter a few competitors’ websites in the “But linking to these competitors” fields

Hit “Show link opportunities,” and it’ll show you websites linking to one or more of your competitors but not you.

Eyeball the domains and food bloggers should jump out at you.

For example, three popular pizzerias in my city have links from a site that clearly belongs to a food blogger:

Hit the caret in each competitor column and you’ll see the linking page:

Each linking page in this case is a restaurant review, so it would definitely make sense to invite this blogger down for some grub in return for a review.

Reviews have benefits beyond SEO

Many food bloggers also have large followings on Instagram and TikTok, where they’ll likely also post their reviews.

For example, this blogger in my city has over 11,500 followers on Insta:

Every restaurant has suppliers, and those suppliers often have pages on their websites listing their “stockists.”

For example, this supplier of cured meats lists and links to all the restaurants they supply:

If your suppliers have a page like this, getting a link is usually as easy as reaching out and asking if they can add you.

To find these opportunities, just search Google for: [supplier name] partners|stockists

If you’re likely to have shared suppliers with competitors, you can also sometimes uncover these opportunities by searching their backlinks with Ahrefs:

1. Go to Ahrefs’ Competitive Analysis tool
2. Switch the toggle to “referring pages”
3. Enter your website in the “Not linking to this target” field
4. Enter a few competitors’ websites in the “But linking to these competitors” fields
5. Hit “Show link opportunities”

If you then filter for referring pages with words like “stockists” or “partners” in their titles, you might see some opportunities:

Not finding any supplier pages?

If they have a blog, ask if they’d be interested in doing an interview or spotlight piece with one of their customers.

This is exactly what Adam Atkins, who runs a pizza food truck in the UK, did with one of his suppliers:

Most restaurant websites are a total mess.

For example, here’s the homepage for one of my favorite pizzerias:

Everything is visually misaligned, there are buttons all over the place, and for some strange reason it’s asking me to buy a tshirt. (I don’t want a fashion show, I just want to see the menu!)

Other diners agree that a bad website leaves a bad taste in their mouths:

A bad website is a huge turn-off. For example, near where I live, I prefer ordering from Formosa Taipei over Mulan in Waltham/Lexington—even though Mulan might have slightly better food—because Formosa Taipei has a much easier ordering system. A cumbersome website can make the whole experience frustrating, so I’ll often choose convenience over slightly better quality if it means avoiding the hassle.

An awful website can discourage eating out or ordering from certain eateries. Annoying PDF menus or complicated navigation are some examples of such issues that create a bad impression and might imply that the restaurant does not value its customers’ experience; hence, it will impact our decision whether to visit them or not.

For example, the pizzeria I mentioned above has an orphan page (page with no internal links) getting organic traffic:

Do you recognize the page? That’s right—it’s the dodgy blank menu page from earlier. This is exactly how I found that issue. To solve this, the site should either noindex this page or, ideally, put its menu there (instead of in the ugly PDF) and internally link to it.

If you’re not sure how to solve an issue that pops up for your site, click on the “?” icon to see advice on how to fix it:

If you’re not SEO-savvy enough to do the fixes yourself, export the affected pages and send them to your developer or a freelancer.

It doesn’t matter how amazing your food is unless you can get customers through the door. That’s why SEO matters for restaurants. Your food may do the talking once the customer is dining with you, but it’s what they see online that’ll get them there.