Grow and promote your
restaurant online

Google processes about 63,000 search queries every single second.

The people searching on Google are high intent users; they're looking for answers to their questions and products to buy.

Think about your own restaurant searches.

You're looking up places in your area, because you want to go out and eat, you're just trying to figure out where.

So it's in your business's best interest to meet these users where they are, and that means showing up on their search results page.

And a strong SEO, or search engine optimization strategy, can get you there.

In this lesson, I'll teach you how to create the right plan for your business.

Together, we'll optimize your site pages, create a custom strategy, and talk through essential practices for getting your site found locally.

So let's dig in.

To optimize your pages for Google, first, it's important to know how it all works.

So Google ranks sites based on hundreds of factors.

By crawling or scanning your site, it analyzes the relevance and quality of your pages, then it matches them to search queries.

In the first course of this series, I created a site for my fictional restaurant called Za'atar, and I'll use it again here.

To rank it higher on search results, there are a few things I considered when I created my site.

First, throughout my site, I always made sure I was writing for people and their intent.

That's about identifying my potential customers' intentions by getting inside their heads and figuring out what they want and what they're trying to do.

For example, I want to focus less on my customer Julie being 45, married and living in San Francisco, and focus more on the fact that Julie might be looking to celebrate a milestone or go out on a dinner date.

So I'll create pages that talk about my event space or my prix fixe date night menu for two.

It's also why my About page highlights my fresh ingredients and social atmosphere.

High-quality content like this helps Google connect my website to people searching for things like fresh food or places to meet friends in San Francisco.

And I also want to consider my intended action.

And for me, that's getting customers to place online orders.

You can tell just by looking at my homepage.

I have this order online CTA right up at the top, and here in the header.

This helps both search engines and my customers understand the goal of my page.

Plus, it's a better user experience for my customers.

Poke around other restaurants' sites.

You'll see that some prioritize ordering online, others go for reservations. It all depends on your goals.

The next thing I did to boost my SEO ranking was that I included relevant keywords in my titles and headings, and that includes a range of keywords and types of keywords.

So for example, I started with some high intent broad keywords like "restaurants in San Francisco," "market-to-table restaurants," and "best dinner in San Francisco." They're keywords that are pretty general and competitive, but also have a lot of people searching for them.

I can see how popular they are by going into Google Trends.

Then, I'll include the ones that perform best on my site.

Next, I added some more niche words like "romantic restaurants in downtown San Francisco," or "best Mediterranean food in San Francisco." Less people are searching for these specific terms, but the ones that are know exactly what they're looking for.

And last, I want to include some branded keywords like "Za'atar," and my location, reservations and menu.

These keywords help establish my branding.

That's also why I added my restaurant's NAP, or name, address and phone number, to the footer of every page on my website.

It helps Google understand more about my business.

Now another way I made my site more SEO friendly is that I kept my food menu on one single page without any hyperlinks.

PDF menus work too. For mine, I built my menu inside my site to make it easy for Google to scan.

And finally, I'm always keeping an eye on my metadata.

That includes title tags, meta descriptions, alt text, basically all that behind the scenes data that helps search engines understand what's on my site.

If you want to learn how to do that manually, check out our two part SEO course, where we really get into all those details.

But for now, I'll show you a solution that exists right on your dashboard.

Just go to Marketing and SEO, and then click Get Found on Google.

Then I'll put in my business name here.

And since I have a physical location, I'll fill out my address, which will help with my local SEO.

Then I'll type in some of those keywords I want to use.

Now, as I'm doing this, I want to make sure I include a variety to cover all my bases, and I don't have to add my site name or location since the system already knows it.

When I'm done, I'll get a checklist to set up my site's SEO, custom-built for the static pages on my site.

I can click any one of these categories to learn why it's important and get a step-by-step guide telling me how to improve it on my site.

As a restaurant that's catering to people in my area, it's really important that I focus on my local SEO, especially since 46 percent of Google searches are now locally focused.

So I'll add my restaurant to all of the relevant directories and review sites, like Yellow Pages, Yelp, Foursquare and TripAdvisor.

That'll not just expose me to the new potential customers, but it'll also help establish my authority and improve my SEO ranking.

And I also want my business to show up as its own profile on Google, right at the top of search results, with all my information.

To do that, I'll go from my Dashboard to Google My Business.

Then I'll fill out my business name.

If yours shows up, you can just click Verify and Manage.

But since mine doesn't, I'll create a new profile and add in all my details.

Once I'm all done, Google will verify it and give my restaurant its own profile, that will show up whenever anyone searches for it.

And that's a run through of how to improve your SEO ranking and get found locally on Google with strategies catered specifically to restaurants.

And again, if you want to take a deeper dive into SEO, check out our full course in our course catalog.

Just remember, SEO is not a one and done process.

It's ongoing. So monitor it and customize a plan that works best for you.

Also give it time. You won't get on the first page of Google Search overnight.

In the meantime, focus on putting out high-quality content, it's one of the best ways to gain traction on Google.

And to get even more exposure for your restaurant, stick around for the next lesson on a topic a lot of you restaurant owners are asking about — online marketing.

You asked, so we're answering.