SEO Checklist for restaurants

Recently, we have been working with more and more restaurants that are looking for ways to increase business. With competition, recession and the rising cost of doing business, these restaurants are looking for easy ways to get "butts in the seats".

Since the #1 place that customers use to research or search for restaurants are search engines, we focus on getting our customers on the first page of all the major search engines, Google, Youtube, Yahoo! and Bing (Yes, at the time of this post, YouTube.com is the second largest search engine). Take a look around at all of the 3rd party directories that focus on restaurants. Yelp, Urbanspoon... the list is huge. These companies make a living at talking about food and restaurants. Our point is that the internet is THE place people go to look restaurants and places to eat. That is why restaurant owners are looking for SEO services to help increase traffic of their restaurant website.

So, where do we start for restaurant SEO? Here are some Free tips:

1. Get Local: Create very detailed "Local" Places pages on Bing, Yahoo and Google. If you do not know what places pages are, give me a call, I will show you.

2. Tune your website. Your website must showcase the things your restaurant does best. Pick 5 things. The ribs, the steak, the Orange Chicken... whatever. Pick the 5 things and create a TON of digital media around it. Descriptions, pictures (high quality pictures), ingredients. 

3. SEO: Once you have some compelling content on your website, turn to the true SEO. Make sure the title of each of your pages reflect the content of the page. The page must contain the Keywords you think people are going to be searching for. Make sure the URL of the page matches the title or content of the page. There should be HEADING text on your page that also supports the above information. So: Content, Title, Heading, URL... got it? Also, all of your pictures should have ALT text. Look it up, use it.

4. Backlinking: Here comes the hard work. Creating back links. Go to each of the 3rd party directories and make sure that your restaurant has an accurate listing and (most importantly) has links back to pages of your website. Make sure that you use http:// in front of your www.whatever.com. Sometimes sites will not hyperlink unless there is an HTTP.

5. Social Media: Facebook is a great source of traffic for some websites and restaurants. Most social media outlets want you to keep as much data as possible within their application or website. This is bad. What happens if Facebook or Twitter change their privacy settings? Or what happens when they decide to start charging people for their service? The point is that the only thing we really control is our own websites. That is why it is important to have all of your social media outlets referring people BACK TO YOUR WEBSITE. For instance, on of our clients has a very successful campaign where they post information to their website, they then post a very small piece of that information to their social media outlets (Facebook and Twitter) with a link BACK to the full amount of information on their website. They then have us post the same link on all of our "third party" locations which includes blogs, associations, and other local outlets. We then send out a email blast to their email list (which btw, on their website there is an easy way for their viewers to include provide their email address) with some small amount of details about the event or special, with a link back to where?  Their website. This the kind of service we provide our clients. Just knowing this process is not enough, the time, consistency, content, and many other factors are taken into consideration why we execute these campaigns.

Overall strategy should be this: your website is the core of your marketing business. Everything else feeds into your website. Social media, email campaigns, backlinks.