Dine-in or take away? 60% (Take away) - 40% (Dine In). After accessing over 100 online and offline Food and Restaurant businesses, we’ve got figures that say, “A new generation of technology is getting implemented for online marketing to differentiate the way businesses work”. For a restaurant business, whether take away or dine-in, online marketing is turning out to be a boom. Food and beverage eCommerce revenue for the year 2022 is projected to be around $26 billion. Although there was a brief halt in the industry in the last two years, but things are working out to make their way back to normal. Also, the worldwide adoption of e-commerce and technological trends is emerging at an unforeseen pace.

Do Local SEO Strategies Work?

When we talk about the Local SEO Strategies for Food and Restaurant Business, we think of a compatible website and favorable social media presence. Picture this- Whenever you search for pizza, you get Domino’s Pizza or Pizza Hut on the top, why? Because they have optimized their online presence to target vicinity, i.e., they have leveraged local SEO to improve their local reach. Top food brands - Dominos.com, McDonald’s.com, Starbucks.com, and Subway.com are using Local SEO optimally. The websites and social media platforms of these brands are oozing with interacting and user-friendly content. The implementation of Local SEO has been done purposefully to improve organic results. And apparently, we get attracted by them. Remember, online exposure strengthens your brand credibility.

5 Most Effective Local SEO Strategies for Food and Restaurant Business

Local SEO optimizes your digital presence for particular vicinity to make your business discoverable locally.

Set Up Your Local Listings

Local listing on local directories like Google My Business can help you drive substantial web traffic, calls, and direction requests. Through GMB, your potential customers find your business first. For this, a small amount of optimization will do. Ever searched “shakes near me”? This is how the local search on GMB works. As soon as your search this, a listing featuring local business will appear at the top of SERP. This works wonders for mobile users. If you want to create a GMB listing, here is your go-to guide. Optimize your GMB by creating a short description of your services, the ambiance, offering, menu, website, etc. Add your basic details to it- NAP, to get contacted. Add the maximum information possible to get your listing to the top of the search engine. If you don’t have a website, you can get it ready by reaching out to professionals. You can track this by implementing UTM variables to the URL link of your website. You can do a URL tag using Google URL Builder. Jot down the source of your search engine traffic, medium, and your campaign identifier.

Create Content Using Local Keywords

Be its website content, blog post, ad copy or a sales page, keyword integration is an indispensable part of your strategy. For local SEO, try adding local keywords to reach the local audience. Keywords like “Italian Food Restaurant in Bangalore” help you target a specific location. And keywords like “Italian Food Restaurant near me” help your target audience in the vicinity. Worried about how to discover keywords for your brand? Get some words that relate to food or cuisines. Try making them of 4-5 words by adding location or other local phrases to it (i.e. restaurants with live music in Delhi or Vegetarian-Friendly Restaurants in Noida). Focus on using long-tail keywords as they get maximum searches and are easy to rank. This will allow the readers to correlate with whatever they read through to get an indulging grasp. Knowing that you are situated locally will instigate them to reach out to you through call or by visiting your place. “Local SEO copywriting” will help you achieve what you are trying to achieve with your content. Use tools like Grammarly to fix grammatical issues and reading flaws.

Circulate Maximum Content

Content can drive maximum traffic to you. Create blogs, Videos, Infographics, How-to guides, Or Downloadable Content to inspire readers. Shareable and valuable content circulates at a rapidly fast pace. “Best cooking practices”, “how to chop food properly”, and “how to make delicious dishes” are some of the topics to search.

• Provide tips and tricks
• Disclose your specialty
• Show them how you are better than others

Engage with Customers on Social Media

Social media doesn’t contribute directly to the SEO ranking, but indirectly it improves traffic to the website and so its credibility. A powerful touchpoint in the user journey, social media work effectively. A strong social media presence can bring your organic traffic with powerful content and build your SEO pillars for more relevance and authority. Find your audience, and get them to influence others.

• Post content that readers can relate to.
• Use images and captions authentically.
• Respond to every new follower to gain their trust.

The correlation of multiple marketing channels can only strengthen your marketing strategy for the ultimate benefit.

Apply Basic On-Page SEO Best Practices

To give you a brief, on-page optimization is fixing all the technical issues in a website to make it search engine and user-friendly. This will simplify the indexing process and will let the search engine know that you actually exist and you offer what you say. Starting will on-page optimization is not easy; you will have to make various classifications. Focus on two important things to start:

1. robots.txt
2. XML sitemap

Set up Google Search Console to discover and fix errors. On-page optimization is a collection of activities. For unique and keyword-specific pages, optimize the URLs, content, title tags, Meta description tags, image alt attributes, and headings, etc. Implement the Schema.org library for restaurants by using the right CMS, or you can get it done by professional web developers in a renowned SEO company in Delhi NCR. It’s not easy to make your Food and Restaurant Business flourish if you are not up-to-date with the trends. Implementing these 5 Local SEO Strategies will boost your business reach locally and will make you evolve amongst your competitors.