Restaurant SEO: more covers, fewer app fees

The order and reserve buttons on your profile decide where a hungry diner ends up. In Google's food ordering settings you can add a link to your own ordering page, mark a preferred provider separately for pickup and for delivery, and hide providers you no longer want shown. That means you can still sell through delivery apps while steering pickup orders to your own system. We review which providers appear, add your own links and make sure the order button on your website goes to the same place. Reservation links get the same treatment, pointing to the booking system you choose. We tag those links so your reports show which orders and bookings came from Google. See how to track Business Profile visits with UTMs.

Diners search for dishes and diets: "best ramen downtown", "gluten free pizza", "vegan brunch", "oyster happy hour". We put your menu on your site as real text, with dish names, short descriptions and dietary notes, and keep it in sync with the menu on your Business Profile. Signature dishes and the things you are known for get their own pages, with the story behind them and good photos. Seasonal menus get a page that goes live before the season, so it has time to be found. Prices are optional, though diners like a rough idea of what they will spend.

A lot of restaurant demand is about the occasion rather than the food: "private dining room", "birthday dinner", "rehearsal dinner venue", "restaurant for large groups", "Mother's Day brunch", "office lunch catering". These searches often lead to the biggest checks you take. We build a page for each occasion you want more of, with capacities, sample menus, photos of the room set up for events, minimum spend terms if you have them and a short inquiry form that goes straight to your events manager. Holiday pages go up early, because those tables book ahead. We track inquiries from these pages separately, so you can see exactly what they bring in over a season.

Stars and recent reviews shape both Map Pack rankings and the diner's choice. We help you ask for Google reviews in ways that fit service, such as a card with the check, a QR code by the door or a follow up after online orders, and keep it within the FTC's 2024 rule on fake reviews, which bans buying reviews and offering incentives conditioned on positive ones. A free dessert for a five star review crosses that line. We help you reply quickly and in your own voice: thank the regulars, take complaints seriously and offline, and fix the things that keep coming up. Our comparison of Yelp and Google reviews explains where each platform fits.

Restaurants earn links differently from most businesses. The ones that count are local food writers and city magazines, neighborhood blogs, "best of" lists, the farms, breweries and suppliers you buy from, food festivals and charity events you take part in, and the local business district. A new chef, a menu change or an anniversary is a story worth pitching. We keep your name, address, phone number and hours consistent across directories and apps, because mismatched hours send diners to a locked door. More on local SEO.

Diners now ask ChatGPT and Google's AI for the best tacos in a neighborhood or a quiet place for a date. Google says its AI features use the same foundation as search: indexed pages eligible for snippets, with no special markup needed. ChatGPT search relies on OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot being able to reach your site. Your menu text, occasion pages, reviews and local press are what those answers draw on, which is why the work above doubles as AI search work. We track a fixed set of diner prompts each month and send dated screenshots showing whether you are named.