Local SEO for restaurants: eight things to sort out today

What local SEO is, and how Google chooses

Local SEO is not your whole website. It is that block with a map and usually three businesses at the top of the page when somebody types ‘pizza near me’ or ‘shoarma Rotterdam’, plus your listing in Google Maps. That block runs on its own rules, separate from the pages you had built.

Ordinary SEO ranks a page. Local SEO ranks a business. Ordinary SEO is work inside your site, local SEO is work outside it: in your Google Business Profile and everywhere else your address and hours are stored. This article stays with the profile, the map pack and your details.

There is a pleasant side to it. You are not competing with every restaurant in the country, only with the places near enough to the searcher to be shown at all. That is a short list, and a short list is one you can climb.

Relevance, distance and prominence

Google picks on three things at once: how well you match the search, how far you are from the searcher, and how well known and trustworthy you look online.

Distance is fixed. The other two are entirely yours, and most of that work sits on one screen. The eight things that move them are numbered in the headings below, in the order you are best off tackling them. The first four together cost you half an afternoon.

One and two: claim your profile and fill in every field

There is a good chance a listing for you already exists, built from third-party data, with hours somebody else suggested. Claiming costs nothing. You verify the business the way Google offers you: a short video from your own address, a phone call, or a postcard.

Then you complete it. Not halfway. A profile without a phone number or without hours sends the guest one door along.

Pay particular attention to hours. Enter collection and delivery times separately if they differ from your kitchen hours. And add public holidays before they arrive: King’s Day, the Christmas days, the week you are away yourself.

Enter your special hours for the next three months this afternoon. Ten minutes of work, and it saves you a guest standing at a locked door.

Three and four: categories and a description in plain words

Your primary category carries more weight than anything else you fill in yourself. Pick the most specific one that is still true: ‘Pizzeria’ surfaces for different searches than ‘Restaurant’. If you are unsure, look at the category used by the places ranking above you.

Secondary categories cover whatever else you do: delivery restaurant, lunchroom, catering service. Do not add ten that are only half true. A place calling itself an ice cream parlour and a cocktail bar without being either becomes slightly relevant for everything and genuinely relevant for nothing.

Then the description. Most places have ‘cosy restaurant with an extensive menu’ sitting there. That earns nothing. Write down what you cook and where you stand, in the words your guests use.

Put your district, your part of town or the station you sit next to in there. People type ‘shoarma Rotterdam Noord’ and ‘pizza delivery Haarlem’. Nobody types ‘extensive menu’.

Rewrite your description today in two sentences. First sentence: what you cook and where you are. Second sentence: why somebody orders from you tonight rather than two doors down.

Five: your dishes in the profile, and a button that points at you

Your profile lets you list individual dishes, with a name, a short description and a price. Do it, because dish names are keywords. Somebody typing ‘kapsalon near me’ or ‘bibimbap delivery’ can only reach you if that word appears somewhere in your listing.

More important still is where your buttons point. Google lets you enter a website and an ordering link. In plenty of listings that ordering link goes to Thuisbezorgd or Uber Eats. You brought the guest to Google yourself, then paid commission on an order that was already yours.

Point the link at your own ordering page instead. An order arriving there costs you no commission, and that guest’s number and address stay with you. If you work with Portano, that is the link that belongs there.

Check those three links this afternoon. Tap them on your phone rather than your laptop, because that is where your guest is too.

Six: photos that look like you took them

On a phone your photo is the first thing anyone sees of you, before your name has been read. A profile with three dark photos from a previous season loses to the profile beside it with thirty from this summer, even when your food is better.

Shoot in daylight, without filters. The aim is not to make the food look better than it is, but that somebody recognises your frontage while standing in front of it and can see what they will get.

• Your frontage in daylight, from the other side of the street.
• The room on an ordinary evening, with people in it.
• Your five best-selling dishes, on their own, shot from above.
• The collection hatch or the counter, so people know where to go.
• Your team, with names if they are happy with that.

Keep adding to them. A profile where nothing has changed in two years looks like a place that has closed. Use the posts in your profile as well: a new menu, a seasonal dish, the week the kitchen is shut.

Seven: ask for reviews and answer all of them

Reviews are the part of prominence you can actually move. Google reads the number, the average and the rate at which they arrive. The next guest reads what they say.

Asking only works at the right moment: when somebody has just told you it was good. Not by email three days later, out of nowhere.

• A QR code on the bill, on the takeaway bag or beside the till.
• One line in the confirmation email after an order through your own page.
• The short review link from your business profile, in your bio and your newsletter.
• Floor staff and drivers who simply ask, in their own words.

Do not buy them and do not give anything in return. It breaks Google’s rules and it can cost you your reviews or your whole profile.

Answer everything, the unpleasant ones included. You are not writing that reply for the complainer, you are writing it for the next person who reads it. Short, no defensiveness, with what you are doing about it. The same stock sentence twenty times over is worse than no reply.

Answer the oldest unanswered review today. After that, a quarter of an hour a week.

Eight: the same details in every place

Your name, your address and your phone number sit in more places than you think, and they only have to differ in one of them to cost you. Marketers call this NAP; in the Netherlands people say NAW-gegevens. Exactly the same line everywhere.

Why it matters comes down to trust. If Google sees two versions of your opening hours it cannot tell which is true, and when in doubt it demotes the business it is least sure about. A guest ringing an old number simply does not turn up.

Write down once what it looks like. With or without ‘Restaurant’ in front. ‘str.’ or the full ‘straat’. Your number with or without spaces. From now on that document is the truth, and anyone filling in a form for you works from it.

Search your own name plus your town tonight and work through the first two pages of results. Everything that differs goes on a list.

What comes after: your neighbourhood, and why social media is last

The eight points above are the basics, and most of the places on your street have not completed them. If you want to go further, it is about listings you do not fill in yourself, because those are the ones that weigh on prominence.

Think of the regional paper, the neighbourhood paper, food blogs from your city, the council’s events calendar, the traders’ association website. Turn up at the street festival, sponsor the youth team, cook for a local cause. Every mention carrying your name and address counts.

Social media sits at the bottom on purpose. It does not lift you in the map pack directly. What it does do is make people search for you by name, which is a different and perfectly good kind of traffic. Start on it once those eight points are in place, not before.

Measuring whether it works

Your business profile has a performance overview of its own. It shows how often you were shown, which search terms brought people to you, and what they did next: called, asked for directions, or clicked through to your site.

Look particularly at the kind of search. People searching your name already knew you. People searching ‘pizza near me’ did not. Growth in that second group is precisely what local SEO buys you.

Compare with the same month last year, not with last week. And compare with yourself, not with a target number from a blog. The weather, the school holidays and a dug-up street move these figures more than your work does.

To connect it to revenue, add a recognisable tag to the website link in your profile. Your own ordering page can then show how many orders came out of Google.

Start this afternoon by claiming the profile, or checking that your hours are still right. Tomorrow the categories and the description. The rest of the week the links, the photos, and that one unanswered review.