In order for a restaurant to succeed, SEO is a key tool to use. Building successful restaurant business is similar to building a strong house. It will require enough time and effort for a successful project. A strong website will require a good keyword analysis, competition analysis and quality building of the links. Here are 5 quick and dirty tips on how you can increase your local SEO efforts from Restaurant Engine.
1. Claim Your Google Plus Page
Do a quick search for your restaurant from Google Maps to see if Google has already catalogued your restaurant. If you find a Google plus listing for your restaurant, click on ‘Manage This Page’ on the bottom right of the page.
2. Fill Out Google Plus Page Completely And Accurately
Once you have claimed or created your Google plus page you will want to make sure all of the information is completely filled out and there are no duplicate listings. If you find duplicate listings that you do not own, you will want to report them using the instructions found on Google’s support.
3. Claim + Complete Local Business Directory (Citation) Listings
Claiming and removing duplicate business directory listings sends signals to search engines, helping them increase the degree of certainty they have about your business’ contact information and categorization.
4. Do Keyword Research
Use the Google Adwords Keyword Tool to learn how people are searching. Try entering 5-10 queries you think would be used to find a restaurant in your category and region.
5. Optimize Your Homepage For A Specific Keyword
When search engines crawl and store your website, they don’t see everything the same way we do. Instead of seeing pretty pages and stunning slideshows, search engines see raw HTML.
Local SEO Tips When Using Google Places
Making some common mistakes when filling out your profile form can have unfavorable consequences on your local SEO campaign, so take time to do it correctly. Here are a few tips from SEO News.
- In the Category field, be specific as to what your business is. If it’s a restaurant, put down “restaurant” instead of “hospitality.” Do not stuff keywords into the Category field, using, for example “restaurant Barbados.”
- Use a geographically marked phone number instead of a 1-800 phone number and avoid using PO boxes as your address.
- Regarding your business name, address, phone number and website, make these consistent throughout every placement you have on the web.
- Try to fill out as many of the form fields as possible. There may be information that Google asks for – such as email address, menu, optional attributes/additional details – but this helps Google’s system get a better understanding of your business.
- Google Places allows you to add or remove photos and videos of your business. Make sure that the photos that appear in your Place Page are complimentary to you. You can also post live updates to your page.
- Inform people of special sales and promotions or offer coupons. Take advantage of this feature to keep clients coming back to you.
Boosting Your Business Using SEO
To further help boost SEO for your local business, here is a helpful list of ten online tools from PR Web.
- Daily Deals like Groupon and LivingSocial provide an immediate incentive for consumers.
- Email Marketing tools such as Constant Contact and Vertical Response give business the opportunity to send out emails to different lists with highly targeted messages.
- Facebook Pages can be inexpensive, but time consuming. But they greatly help to improve customer loyalty.
- Google Plus is a newer social media platform, but it is growing faster than any other.
- Lead Generation Sites like ServiceMagic and Angie’s List are reputable sites that consumers trust.
- LinkedIn is great for B2B prospecting. It is a professional platform that works like Facebook, but with gets rid of the games in favor of more networking.
- Pinterest is a visual way of advertising, allowing companies to post images that can inform or entertain and, if done properly get shared amongst users to enhance the organization’s reach.
- Q&A Sites such as Yahoo Answers and Quora allow local companies to build their reputation as an authority on a subject and provide quality links and traffic to the company website.
- Review Sites such as Yahoo and Google Local are essential to online reputation management for local businesses.
- Twitter is a micro-blogging option. Posts are 140 characters or less, but can be a great way to link to blogs, specials, and make announcements for the company.
The above SEO tips and tricks are easy and free to apply for the restaurant. The only setback is that they take time for the restaurant owner to complete, but it is well worth it.