SEO for Restaurants.

Nobody’s on your website. They’re deciding in Maps.

It’s twenty past six on a Friday and someone’s on the high street with their phone out, three places open within four minutes’ walk. They tap the first, swipe the photos, read two reviews, hunt for the menu, back out. Then the second. Ninety seconds, and none of it happens on a website.

That’s what most restaurant marketing gets wrong. Your Google listing isn’t a signpost pointing at your site. It is the shopfront. It’s where the photos, the review count and the “usually busy at this time” line do their work. In nearly every other trade the website does the heavy lifting. Restaurants are the exception.

Your menu is a PDF, and that’s the biggest single problem.

We see it on almost every restaurant site. The menu’s a PDF, or worse, a photograph of the printed sheet. Google can’t read dish names inside an image, and a phone can’t show an A4 PDF without pinching and zooming. So when somebody searches for a set lunch, or a Sunday roast with a vegetarian option that isn’t a nut loaf, there’s nothing on your site to land on. The chalkboard is lovely. The PDF of the chalkboard is costing you covers.

The fix isn’t clever. Every menu becomes a real page with dishes and prices as selectable text. Lunch, a la carte, Sunday, kids, wine, allergens. Keep the PDF for the printer if the kitchen wants it, but the version Google reads has to be the web one, and it has to change when the kitchen does. Last spring’s specials still sitting there do more harm than no menu page at all.

Photos and reviews are doing your selling whether you help or not.

Fresh pictures every week, and not only plates. The room when it’s full, the frontage so people recognise the door, the garden in June. Diners upload their own too, so the ones you’d rather people saw need to keep arriving. Then reply to reviews, all of them, quickly. A calm answer to a bad review sells harder than the star rating above it.

What we won’t do is help you buy reviews or quietly swap them for a free dessert. Fake and undisclosed incentivised reviews have been unlawful here since 6 April 2025 under the DMCC Act, with CMA penalties reaching 10% of global turnover. Google’s January 2025 undertakings to the CMA go further: a visible warning notice on your profile, new reviews deactivated, and for repeat offenders every review gone for six months or more. In a trade where the review count is the shopfront, that’s a poor swap for a plate of tiramisu.

Then make booking embarrassingly easy.

Plenty of the sites we get sent bury the booking behind a widget that crawls on 4G and then wants an account. The phone number isn’t tappable. The hours say closed because nobody touched the bank holiday. Whatever system you’re on, “book a table” needs to be one tap from the listing and present on every page, and the hours need to be right on Christmas Eve and the Tuesday you shut for a private party. Sounds like admin. It’s search.