How to make your restaurant site findable in Google

SEO on your site, not on your Google profile

Ask ten restaurant owners what they do about SEO and nine start talking about something outside their website. Reviews, their business profile, an agency that sends an invoice every month and a report nobody can point at. The site itself, the one part you could change tonight, stays exactly as it was.

That is where the fastest wins are. A page title with no town in it, a menu sitting on your server as a PDF, and a homepage that needs eight seconds to appear: those three cost more search traffic between them than any clever trick will ever win back. All three are fixable without a developer.

This piece is about your site. About the words you want to be found for, about titles and headings, about your menu as readable text, about speed, structure and the links between your own pages. Your Google Business Profile, the little map with three restaurants at the top of the results, and your details on other sites belong to local SEO, and there is a separate piece about that. The two go together, but you do not fix them with the same actions.

What Google can actually read on your site

A search engine reads your site as text. Words, headings, links and the code around them. Anything sitting on the page as an image stays an image to Google: it knows something is there, not that it is satay with a price beside it. That sounds technical, but it is the only thing you need to remember to work out half of this article yourself.

Google then weighs two things you have a hand in. Whether your page matches what somebody searched for, and whether the rest of the web takes you seriously. The first is almost entirely a question of what your page literally says. The second builds slowly, through mentions and links from elsewhere.

• The page title: the line that appears blue and clickable in the results.
• The headings, from the big one at the top to the subheadings under it.
• The running text, including your dishes and their descriptions.
• The words inside your links, so ‘see the menu’ says more than ‘click here’.
• The alt text on your photos, the sentence describing what is in the picture.

One more thing: Google looks at the mobile version of your site first. Whatever looks good on your laptop but disappears on a phone does not count the way you hope. And nobody outside Google knows exactly how much visitor behaviour weighs. One thing is certain: somebody who clicks back to the results after two seconds is ordering somewhere else tonight.

The words your guests type in

Almost nobody searches for the name of your restaurant. People who know your name already know you. The guests you do not have yet type what they want to eat and where they are standing: pizza in Deventer, sushi delivery Utrecht Oost, best shoarma near me.

Keyword research sounds like a profession. For a restaurant it is usually one line: cuisine or dish, plus town or neighbourhood. Start with the dishes you genuinely do well and that people know by name. A word you want to rank for but nobody types earns you nothing.

Here is how to check you are on the right track. Type your dish plus your town into Google and watch what the search box completes for you. Those suggestions come from what people really type. Then look at the related searches at the foot of the page. If your site is already in Google, Search Console will show you the words you are being shown for right now, and there are usually more of them than you expected.

Pick one keyword per page and use it like a human being. Ten repetitions of ‘best pizza in Deventer’ in one paragraph reads like spam, and it performs like spam too.

Page titles and headings: where those words belong

The page title is the most important sentence on your site. It is the blue line in the search results and, at the same time, the strongest hint you give Google about what the page is about. On most restaurant sites it still says ‘Home’, or nothing but the name of the restaurant.

Put your cuisine or your best known dish in it, then your town, then your name. Keep it under about sixty characters, because Google cuts the sentence off after that. Give every page its own title: two pages with the same title ask Google to choose, and it may choose the wrong one.

Under that title comes the heading your guest actually reads. One big heading per page, saying the same thing in plain words. Under it, subheadings that break the page into pieces so somebody on a phone can skim. Headings are not decoration: they are the signposts Google reads to work out how your page is put together.

The description under the blue link does not decide your position. It does decide whether somebody clicks you or the restaurant below you. Write it as an invitation: what you sell, where you deliver, and why ordering straight from you is the smarter move.

Your menu is your most important page

After your homepage, your menu is the most visited page on your site. It is also the page where most restaurants give their search traffic away, because the menu sits there as a PDF or as a photograph of the printed card.

To Google that is an empty page. Every word you could have been found for, every dish, every description, every variant, is locked inside a picture. For your guest it is just as annoying. A PDF loads slowly on a mobile connection and the type is too small, so they pinch and drag until they give up and go to the delivery app, where the menu is simply readable. After commission, that order leaves you with noticeably less.

So put your menu on your site as text. Dishes in categories, with a heading above each category. One sentence under every dish saying what is in it. Those sentences are not decoration: they hold exactly the words people search for, from ‘spicy’ to ‘vegan’ to the name of your sauce.

List the prices the way your guest sees them on the bill, so including VAT: nine per cent on food and soft drinks, twenty-one per cent on alcohol. And make sure they are the same prices as in your ordering system. Two menus that disagree cost you more trust than a beautiful PDF will ever earn.

Speed, and the phone where it all happens

Speed counts twice. Google uses it as a ranking factor, and your guest uses it as a reason to leave. Somebody lying hungry on the sofa does not wait. They go back to the results, and the restaurant below you takes the order.

On restaurant sites, slowness almost always comes from the same three places. Photos put online straight from the camera, megabytes apiece. A video that starts playing by itself at the top of the page. And a pile of plug-ins and tracking scripts installed for some reason years ago and never cleared out.

• Resize photos to the size they are actually displayed at, and save them in a modern file format.
• Let images further down the page load only once somebody scrolls to them.
• Keep it to one video at most, and do not let it start on its own.
• Throw out plug-ins, fonts and tracking scripts you no longer use.

Measuring costs nothing. Put your address into Google PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile tab, not the desktop one. Then run the real test: pick up your own phone, turn off the wifi and open your site. If you still see nothing after two seconds, you know enough.

Check the rest on that same phone. Buttons big enough for a thumb. Text you can read without zooming in. An order button that travels with you as you scroll. And your menu, your opening hours and your order button one tap away from every page.

Structure: more than one page, and the links between them

A site made of one long page is pleasant to maintain and weak at ranking. You give Google one page to place, while the restaurant down the road has eight. Every page is a separate entrance, with its own title and its own keyword.

• A homepage that says in one sentence what you sell and where.
• A menu as text, in categories.
• An ordering page on your own domain.
• A page about the restaurant: who cooks, since when, why these dishes.
• A contact page with address, opening hours, phone number and directions.
• A page per town or neighbourhood you deliver to, if you deliver.

Give those pages readable addresses. yourrestaurant.nl/menu says something, yourrestaurant.nl/?page_id=42 says nothing. Lower case, hyphens between the words, and never change an address once it is in Google.

Then tie them together. Homepage to menu, menu to ordering, a dish to the place you order it, your story back to the menu. Internal links tell Google which of your pages matter, and they keep your visitor on the site. Say where the link goes inside the link itself: ‘see the menu’ rather than ‘click here’. And keep the navigation short, six items is plenty.

Finally, fill in the alt text on every photo, the sentence describing what is in the picture. ‘Margherita pizza from our wood oven’ helps Google, and it helps somebody having your site read aloud. ‘IMG_4471’ helps nobody.

Three mistakes that flatten your search traffic

These three are so common that between them they are most of the problem. Nobody ever told you they were wrong, which is fair enough: you are a cook, not a marketer.

1. Your order button points at another domain

You did the work to get somebody onto your site. They tap order and a second later they are on Thuisbezorgd or Uber Eats. Google sees a visitor arrive and leave immediately, and the order lands on the platform’s side of the ledger, not yours. On top of that you pay commission on a guest you found yourself. Keep ordering on your own domain, the way every other online shop does.

2. Too many images, and images that are too heavy

A site full of big photographs with a video across the top looks superb on a large screen. On a mobile connection on the train it is a white rectangle. Pick a few good photos per page instead of twenty average ones, resize them, and measure again.

3. Text you copied from somewhere else

Descriptions lifted from your supplier’s app or from your delivery platform sit on a hundred other sites. So does the same paragraph repeated across your pages for three different villages. Google then has no reason to show your version rather than theirs. Two sentences of your own per dish and per town are enough, and they have the advantage of being true.

What to do on Monday

This is not a six month programme. Take your phone and an hour, and work through these seven points.

1. Search for your dish plus your town and see where you sit, and who sits above you.
2. Read your homepage title in the browser tab. Are your dish and your town in it?
3. Give every page its own title and one main heading of its own.
4. Put your menu on the site as text, with one sentence per dish.
5. Run your site through PageSpeed Insights on mobile and shrink your three heaviest photos.
6. Check that your order button stays on your own domain.
7. Add a link from every page to your menu and to ordering.

Then count on weeks rather than days. Google comes by when it suits Google, and positions move slowly. What separates this from most marketing is that you only have to do it properly once. A good title and a readable menu keep working while you are in the kitchen.