Category: Restaurant SEO

What are the top 5 benefits of SEO?

When I say that it’s the best practice, I mean it. It’s the best way to increase your search traffic while advertising your business.

Here are the best benefits of SEO. Let’s get into it!

1. SEO = Increased Rankings

Search engine optimization helps your site rank higher in search results. This is an obvious one but it’s the most important. Your site’s rankings, if you measure it, will correlate with the traffic that you get from search engines. Higher rankings, more traffic, and more conversions = greater revenue.

So it’s key to remember that SEO is not just about rankings or getting more traffic to your website. In the end, it’s about ROI. How much more actual profit can you create through SEO?

Every industry is going to be different, but from what we’ve seen, having top-ranking positions in Google can make or break a business.

2. SEO = Relationships

SEO is a way to build relationships. Your business will be more successful if you invest in creating a strong impact on your audience when they’ve come to your website. Offer your website visits and prospects a fluid website experience and great content that answers real questions they may have or that can direct them to the solutions they need.

The problem, the thing that most people talk about with SEO is not the impact on rankings, it’s the impact on sales. People forget to tell you that what matters is how you can nurture your existing relationships. SEO is a way to build relationships.

Businesses that focus only on getting new business are headed toward disaster. As long as you do good work, your most profitable prospects are those who have already done business with you. So remember to focus on how you can nurture your existing relationships.

This will help leverage your SEO strategies over the longterm.

3. SEO = Commitment

SEO is a commitment. To do SEO properly, you must have a product/service that people want. What are the benefits of your product and service? Make sure these are clearly communicated on your website.

Simplify your message and make it clear exactly what you offer. Put on some slick graphics and audio assets to create a genuinely helpful visitor experience.

In return, you’ll get legitimate, trustworthy traffic.

4. SEO = Visibility

SEO increases visibility in search. SEO will help you get more organic traffic to your website and can be a low-cost method that can generate leads for your business.

5. SEO = ROI

SEO has the highest ROI of any marketing or advertising avenue available to businesses today. Now, that number may be different for different industries and situations, however, for most local businesses good search engine rankings would have the biggest impact on their business than any other avenue.

The ROI you get from SEO can be remarkable.

You have to think of SEO more like real estate and less like TV commercials.

Think about the last TV commercial you saw. Do you remember it? Probably not. Now, think about where you were at the last TV commercial you saw.

The last TV commercial I saw was while I was watching something with my wife last night. I was relaxing and have no idea what the commercial was about. It didn’t matter either. I wasn’t going to call a business at 10 pm while I was relaxing.

Now, I want you to think about the last service or product that you needed to buy. What was it and where were you?

For me it was yesterday. My wife asked me to pick up some dinner. So I picked up my phone and I searched for sushi and I went to the sushi restaurant that is closest to my house.

The latter is how SEO works for your business. Instead of interrupting your prospects with ads that they are 97% not interested in, you’re positioning your business in a place that makes it easy for your prospects to find when they’re looking for what you’re offering.

So instead of trying to “convince” them to buy whatever your selling. You’re simply located in a place, like the sushi restaurant, that is close and now has become the most convenient choice.

All because your business was the first that they saw in Google when they were searching for your products and services.

Close It Out

So if you’re looking to transform your business. Then SEO is the way to go and hopefully a few of these tips will help you out along the way!

A Guide On How To Perform An SEO Site Audit

The world of SEO is always changing and this means that specific strategies no longer work and there are always new ones. As a result, it is extremely important that you do an SEO audit on all of your sites, on a regular basis. This will ensure that they are properly optimized for the current search engine landscape.

Also, by regularly auditing your sites, you will ensure they remain healthy and keep on getting organic traffic.

So, with that said, we’ll now get started on how to do a site audit.

The first thing you should do is a site crawl and it should take a couple of minutes for the crawl to finish. There are many tools that you can use for this such as Screaming Frog, Semrush, Ahrefs, DeepCrawl, etc.

These crawlers will crawl through your entire site and find problems such as page title issues, bad keywords, broken links, duplicate content, images that haven’t been compressed, bad redirects and much more. Once you have identified all of the issues, then you can start working on them.

After they’ve all been fixed, you can do the crawl again to make sure there aren’t any other issues you may have missed.

Next, you will need to check your on-page SEO.

You should look at all the pages and posts on your site and check all of the URLs, page titles and headers. This is done to check for any duplications which may cause keyword cannibalization.

If you notice that you have more than one page dedicated to a specific topic or keyword, then you should combine the information into one page and delete the other one.

Of course, you should delete the one that is not ranking or is ranking lower. Also, make sure you remember to put a 301 redirect in place so that anyone visiting the old URL will get automatically forwarded to the new one.

Additionally, you should take some time to go through your entire keyword blueprint and ensure that your pages are ranking for their correct keywords. You should also check to see if there are any keywords that you’re ranking for that you didn’t specify in your keyword blueprint. This can be easily done on Ahrefs or Semrush where you simply enter the page URL and look for the organic keywords it is ranking for. You may find lots of long-tail keywords that you’re on the second or third page for that you didn’t optimize the page for. As a result, you can easily improve your rankings by including those keywords on your page and building a few links with those keyword specific anchors. This will help you to get more organic traffic with relatively little work.

Another important aspect of any SEO audit is checking the speed of the site and its overall uptime. There are many site monitoring tools you can use for this.

In particular, when looking at site speed, you should strive to speed up the site as much as possible. This is necessary since site speed is a Google ranking factor and the faster your site is, the higher Google will rank it. Also, website users are much smarter than they were before and if your site is slow, they will simply go back and click on another website. This will lead to lower traffic numbers, conversion rates, and sales.

Next, you will need to do an audit on your backlinks. This is extremely important since you will not only get the backlinks that you build yourself but ones that were gained organically.

Also, you will probably get a lot of spam or even malicious backlinks and you need to identify these and disavow them. These can easily be identified if they are on “bad” sites, foreign language sites or where you see over-optimized anchor texts done through a negative SEO link building campaign.

Once you have disavowed the bad backlinks, you should look carefully at the ratio of your own backlinks. If there are too many target anchors or too many strong sites, you should aim to create more pillow links to ensure your backlink profile remains healthy and natural looking.

To wrap things up, we have just covered how you can perform an SEO site audit. It is best to schedule a site audit at least once every 3 months so that you can continuously maintain the health of your site and ensure that you remain in Google’s good graces.

What Is Search Engine Optimization?

Do you want to know – what is search engine optimization? How does it work for small businesses? If yes, read below and watch the videos to really find out.

The advent of the web has changed the way we live. From shopping to socializing, everything can now be carried out on the net. Business organizations have realized this fact and are marking their web presence by setting up a website.

However, a majority of businesses encounter a big failure due to stiff competition online. In such a situation, it would be handy for a locally-operated business to employ local search engine optimization (SEO) to enhance the chances of gaining prospects online. So what is SEO and what is local SEO?

What is SEO?

It’s an online marketing strategy aimed at improving the rankings of a website in search engines for targeted keywords. To do that, you’ve to employ effective on-page and off-page strategies (detailed below) that will enhance your site’s rankings in search results. As well as making your site search engine-friendly, you should make the site user-friendly with easy navigation, organized content, eye-catchy graphics, and enticing product offerings.

How does SEO work?

When you optimize your site (through on-page and off-page SEO) for particular keywords, your site gets higher rankings by search engines. Whenever users perform a search query in search engines, your site stands a good chance of coming up in search results. If users click on your site’s link, they’ll be directed to your site.

What is local SEO?

In local SEO, small business owners optimize their site for local customers who happen to be their targeted prospects. Let’s say that you’re selling pens in Washington and wish to target local customers. Here, you’ll have to optimize your website for customers in Washington through on-page as well as off-page optimization.

On-page optimization

To do so, you should place keywords such as affordable pens Washington or quality pens in Washington within your website content. Plus, you’ll have to optimize the title tag of your web content and add optimum images to entice users to browse through your site. Whenever users will perform search queries using keywords outlined on your site, there are high chances that your website will come up in search results.

Off-page optimization

Aside from on-page optimization, employ off-page optimization. This includes promoting your site all over the net via marketing forums, press release sites, and article directories. By getting back-links from numerous platforms, your site’s rankings are likely to increase in search engine results.

Try to get as many quality links as possible. The higher the number of links, the better the ranking of your site will be. Also, numerous links will steer a constant flow of traffic from various sources.

Local listings in Google maps are another important component of local SEO that shouldn’t be overlooked. Just verify the address of your business on Google maps, and you’re done. The best thing about a Google listing is it lets you get top rankings in Google maps quickly.

In addition to this, use local pay per click campaigns and social media strategy to steer local customers to your site. Since a majority of people use social sites for socializing and interacting, you get an opportunity to get in touch with prospective customers quickly. By promoting your products on social sites, you can gain tons of targeted customers.

All these SEO efforts will help you gain a regular flow of targeted prospects to your site. Once visitors get to your website, you may motivate them to make a purchase through engaging content and useful products. That happens to be your main aim of hosting a site online.

In case you’re not handy with local SEO techniques, you may hire SEO services to do the job. An ideal SEO service will optimize your website for local search results so that your site gets regular visits by local prospects. Although you’ll have to pay the SEO agency for its expertise, its charges are worth the benefits you derive.

Concluding words

Employing local SEO is something that can’t be overlooked in this competitive business era. So don’t be left aside in the competition. Get familiar with – What is search engine optimization? Learn the components of local SEO and employ them effectively or hire an SEO agency to drive customers to your site repeatedly.

Important SEO Tips For Restaurants

woman standing by her restaurant door

Running a restaurant is a wonderful decision but can quickly become a marketing nightmare without appropriate decision-making. Before building a full-fledged marketing plan, it’s important to understand the power of search engine optimization (SEO). This is one of the strongest and most reliable digital marketing techniques in the world and can yield tremendous results over time.

For those looking to rank on major search engines, it’s time to understand what works and what doesn’t as a restaurant owner.

1) Use Local SEO Strategies

Local SEO is the name of the game for restaurant owners.

In general, your average customer is going to be from around town. Therefore, it doesn’t make sense to target someone sitting halfway across the planet!

With a highly organized local SEO plan, it becomes easier to generate leads from the area. For example, you should look to target local keywords (i.e. best restaurant in X city) as a way to draw people in. These keywords are great because they’re often easier to rank for as well. You don’t have as much competition if the keyword is reserved for your city.

Along with finding the right keywords, it’s also smart to claim your Google My Business listing as soon as possible. This listing shows up on the right side whenever someone types your restaurant’s name in Google. The listing can have all relevant information such as your address, name, phone number, and more.

2) Encourage Reviews on Your Google Listing

Think about how customers react while deciding on a restaurant to visit. They often head to Google, type in the name, and go through customer reviews before making up their mind. If that’s the case, why not encourage positive reviews on your Google My Business listing? This is one of the best ways to gain traction and build a solid SEO campaign.

A highly ranking restaurant is going to do well in sealing the deal as soon as new leads come through. You will have less “selling” to do when the reviews say it all.

This has to be kept in mind and encouraged when it is time to move forward with a restaurant-friendly SEO campaign. If the reviews aren’t good, you are going to be fighting an uphill battle for months.

3) Build Strong Social Media Accounts

All restaurants should have active and engaging social media accounts. These accounts are a must in the modern-age with more and more potential leads using these platforms on a daily basis.

In fact, studies show many people spend most of their time on platforms such as Facebook or Instagram compared to any other media-friendly option. This means it’s important to engage with them through a targeted and active social media account.

Along with these accounts, it’s also important to link them to each other and to your website. This ensures people are able to get to your website if they ever want to take a look at the menu or what you’re all about.

4) Remain Mobile-Friendly

A website that isn’t mobile-friendly will get dinged by Google’s algorithm. Studies have shown there’s a significant emphasis on being mobile-friendly and any website that doesn’t pass Google’s test gets pushed down the rankings. You want to make sure the website’s theme is mobile-friendly and works well on all types of devices. This is the bare minimum as a restaurant owner.

5) Get Your Foundation Right

Do the basics right before moving forward with your SEO campaign.

For example, you want to make sure the website runs well, doesn’t have spelling mistakes, and uses the right keywords. This is the least a business can do as they look to move forward with an SEO plan.

6) Stay Patient

Restaurant owners have to think about the long-term while building a brand-new SEO campaign. It’s not going to happen in a matter of minutes and that shouldn’t be your goal.

Instead, it’s smarter to emphasize a methodical approach where something new happens with each passing day.

For example, one day you can update the website and another day can be reserved for new blog posts. This is all about designing an all-encompassing marketing strategy that yields great results.

If you stay patient, the rewards are going to come in the form of targeted leads.

Final Thoughts

SEO can be a challenging battle for restaurant owners with so many things to juggle at once. While a restaurant owner should be focusing on tangible qualities such as their food and staffing, it’s also important to build a proper SEO campaign.

Over the years, some of the most popular restaurants in the world have harnessed high SEO rankings into thousands of new customers. This is the power of SEO and what it can do for a restaurant.

Take the time to build a unique SEO campaign that’s ideal for your restaurant and its needs.