Starter steps to excellent restaurant online visibility

The importance of having a strong online presence in this digital age of the restaurant industry cannot be overstated. More and more people are turning to the internet to find restaurants via search engines, social media, and platforms like Yelp. This trend will only continue and is likely to accelerate. So, having strong online visibility can help your restaurant not get lost in the crowd, especially if you’re in a competitive or crowded marketplace.

The goal of having a strong online presence is simple: Make it easy for potential customers to find you. There are many ways to increase a restaurant’s online visibility—let’s get into it.

The importance of a strong online presence

Having a competitive online practice can make an enormous difference in the success of your business. But just how enormous? Take Google for example, still by far the most-used search engine out there. The first result of a Google search has an average click-through rate of 27.6%. That’s pretty darn high. But there’s more: The #1 organic result (meaning not sponsored or an advertisement) is 10 times more likely to get a click than the #10 result. That means that, even if you’re on the first page of Google, getting to #1 is a really big deal.

The art of rising in the search results is search engine optimization (SEO). Your Google search results depend largely on your restaurant website, which we’ll cover more later, along with local SEO tactics.

The competition for a #1 spot on Google can be fierce, especially for competitive terms. “Italian restaurants in Houston” (population 2.3 million) is an enormously valuable #1 spot to have and difficult to get and keep, while “Italian restaurants in Iraan, Texas” (population 1,055) is nowhere near as difficult. Getting that #1 spot can make your business wildly successful.

The same can be said for being highly ranked on review sites like Yelp. Review platforms can perform well on Google in lieu of an SEO-based strategy, and can lead customers to learn more about your restaurant from other customers. A slew of positive reviews can take your business to the next level just like a good search result can.

Social media is increasingly driving new customers to restaurants, and that’s not going to change either. Having a strong social media presence is also mandatory (we know—you didn’t set out to be making Instagram videos as a restaurant owner! But we’ll help).

Beginning with the basics

If you’re just starting out with a restaurant, you’ll want to cover the basics first:

1. Claim your Google My Business. When you search for a business, that’s the bit that pops up in Google that shows the business listing as well as contact information, the website, hours, customer reviews, your location on Google Maps, and photos.
2. Claim your Google Business Profile. Go to business.google.com and set up an account. This will allow you to increase your online visibility, improve local SEO, respond to online reviews and answer questions, and track your online performance with analytics.
3. Claim your Yelp Business Page. Just like Google, your Yelp page can be an enormous benefit to your business. You can customize your profile with descriptions, your location and phone number, photos, your website, and more. Businesses with those things averaged 7.6x more page views per month than those without, so don’t skip that part. Yelp has a huge userbase with a broad demographic, 32 million unique visitors per month, and a 9x bigger reach than OpenTable.*
4. Build your restaurant website. It doesn’t need to be super fancy to begin with, since websites can evolve over time. At the very least, even if your content in text and photos is minimal, it needs to be high-quality. Make sure your menu is easy to find so customers know what menu items you offer and how much they cost.
5. Set up social media accounts. The most important social media platforms for restaurants to cover are Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook. Make sure your restaurant branding and contact info are consistent across all platforms.

Tips for building a restaurant website

How much time, effort, and money you spend building your restaurant website will depend entirely on your specific needs. Websites can get expensive, but in a competitive market—in a large city, for example—a clean, simple website can be a huge benefit for local search, as described above.

Some keys to making a solid restaurant website:

1. Conduct keyword research around your cuisine and town and make sure to use those keywords in your descriptive text. If you’re running a blog, write articles based around keywords. There are many tools to help with keyword research, like Screaming Frog, which has a free version. There are far more powerful tools like Ahrefs or Semrush if you really want to get in the SEO strategy weeds, but they’re not cheap and have a steep learning curve.
2. Make sure your images are high quality and, if they’re food, give the name of the dish, a description, and the price. Consider adding a gallery section of images of your food and location.
3. Put your restaurant menu in an easy-to-find spot since that’s what many customers are looking for.
4. Place your contact info in an equally easy-to-find spot, including your phone number, address, opening hours, email, and a “contact us” button. This is especially important if you’re doing deliveries. 
5. Ensure your copy matches your restaurant’s brand or personality. If you’ve created that personality, that may not be too hard. But if you struggle with writing, outsourcing to a copywriter is always an option.
6. Update your website with special offers, events, or anything else that’s new—and make sure it’s visible on the front page.
7. Your website must be mobile-friendly. People will visit your site on their smartphones. This is a requirement for any website now.
8. If you’re offering online ordering, you’ll want a robust system that won’t crash. This is a big reason why people tolerate the high fees of delivery app integration—no need to tinker around with it yourself and risk missing orders!
9. If you have no experience building a website, you’ll likely want to hire a freelancer. You can build websites via templates on Squarespace or Wix, but a WordPress-based site is cheaper in the long run and often does better at SEO given all the plugins available.
10. If you have no clue about websites and find working with them confusing and scary, you may want to outsource your website’s creation and maintenance entirely.

Tips for handling social media

A good rule of thumb for social media is this: Post engaging content often. What exactly “often” is depends on the platform, as does “engaging content.”

Instagram ideas

Instagram is a visual-forward social media platform (as you probably know), which means it’s ideal for restaurants to highlight the visual aspects of their establishment. This can mean pictures or short videos (reels) of your food, your staff working, customers enjoying their food, your establishment itself, a funny anecdote, or anything to garner appeal. If you can make someone hungry, make someone laugh, or make someone feel warm and wholesome, you’re doing it right. Keep it positive and post multiple times a week if not daily.

TikTok tips

TikTok is similarly a visual-forward app that focuses on short videos. The same rules that apply to Instagram apply to TikTok as well, though TikTok tends to have a younger audience. That means you can get away with a bit more irreverence and silliness, like banter between staff or behind-the-scenes action that shows what working in a kitchen really looks like (as long as your kitchen looks nice and clean, which we hope it does). In other words, don’t be afraid to show your fun side. Like Instagram, TikTok should be updated multiple times a week, daily, or even more, as it’s an extremely fast-moving platform.

Facebook facts

Facebook moves slower than both Instagram and TikTok, and generally has an older audience. So, posts can be weekly or somewhat more, and should focus more on events, specials, or meals. Facebook advertising can work to get eyeballs on your business but it can also be hit or miss. A valuable aspect of Facebook that some businesses overlook, however, is local groups. Almost every town and city has multiple local Facebook groups, so joining those and being active in conversation is an excellent way to engage in the community as a local business run by real people.

Above all, be sure to talk to your potential customers, whether it’s via comments or direct messages. It adds a personal touch to your social media and helps people feel a connection in an era where people feel increasingly disconnected. Making yourself and your brand as personable and friendly as possible (or professional, if you’re in the higher-end of the restaurant industry) is a great way to win hearts.

Working with influencers

Social media influencers can be a major ally if done right. This type of arrangement has evolved significantly over the last several years, and influencers can be very expensive. For reference, influencers have the most…well, influence on Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook.

In the past, finding a local influencer could become more of a friendship relationship, where the influencer got free meals or other perks. But now that influencing has become a full-time gig, the game has changed. A local influencer that has thousands or tens of thousands of followers gives you a significant ROI. Look for hashtags relevant to your area and the food you serve to find one. Then slide into their DMs and ask them about their rates (engagement rates + pay rates).

Handling reviews

Online reviews are part of the restaurant world these days. Reviews can be found anywhere: on social media platforms, on Google, on online review sites like Yelp, and pretty much anywhere people can write words. Your job isn’t to sniff out reviews on places you don’t monitor, but you must keep a close eye on customer feedback across the main platforms.

Good restaurant reviews are wonderful. And some less-than-stellar reviews are inevitable, no matter what kind of tight ship you run. Good reviews are easy to handle: You thank the customer for their review and for their kind words. It doesn’t have to be much—even a sentence will do. Acknowledging your customers will make them appreciate you.

Bad reviews aren’t super difficult to handle either. If it’s a legitimate bad review, i.e., the food was prepared incorrectly, the service was bad, or something else went wrong, then you’ll need to run through the three steps of a full apology:

1. Acknowledge the problem and the legitimacy of the complaint
2. Promise to improve in the future
3. Offer to make it right (perhaps by comping a meal or offering something equivalent to the damage done)

With that done, people will see you’re a person whose ego doesn’t go before their business and they’ll be likely to return. Many times a negative review has turned a new customer into a regular simply by the way the review was handled.

A Yelping hand

If you’re reading this, you’re probably aware you’re on Yelp’s website. But did you know just how much Yelp Guest Manager can help with your online visibility?

Let’s start with what it does: Yelp Guest Manager handles all your front-of-house needs. Reservations, waitlists, table management, data aggregation, online ordering, third-party-app syncing, and a lot more. We could certainly tell you more, but we’d rather show you—so reach out to us for a free demo.

As to the visibility: Yelp Guest manager is intended to work with your Yelp page to help boost traffic as much as possible. And it does! Restaurants that start using Guest Manager experience up to 2X the traffic on their Yelp Business Page.** Throw Yelp ads into the mix and you get more magic: Guest Manager restaurants that add Yelp Ads experience up to an 8% monthly lift in diner bookings through Yelp.***