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Restaurant SEO

Restaurant SEO pricing in Ireland: what should you actually pay?

A plain read of what restaurant search work costs in Ireland, what drives the price up or down, and how to judge whether a proposal is worth the monthly fee.

Alex Opsenica, founder of Moolah Media

Alex Opsenica · Founder, Moolah Media

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3 min read
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Two proposals for the same restaurant can arrive at €250 and €1,200 a month, and both can be honest. The difference is almost never talent. It is scope: how many locations, how competitive the catchment, whether the website can be changed, and whether anyone is actually doing work each month or simply sending a report.

Key takeaway

Judge a quote by what is done monthly, who does it, and what is measured — not by the headline number. A cheap retainer that produces one automated report costs more than a higher fee that moves discovery demand.

What changes the price

The variables that actually move a restaurant SEO fee

Number of locations

Why it changes the cost
Each venue needs its own profile, location page, review habit and reporting
Direction
Up, roughly per site

Competitiveness of the catchment

Why it changes the cost
Dublin 2 dining terms need sustained work; a town centre often does not
Direction
Up in dense markets

Website access

Why it changes the cost
If nobody can edit the site, technical and content work stalls or gets rebuilt
Direction
Up when access is poor

Starting condition

Why it changes the cost
An unverified or duplicate-riddled profile needs remediation before growth
Direction
Up in month one to three

Content depth

Why it changes the cost
Occasion, private dining and menu pages take writing and photography
Direction
Up with volume

Reporting depth

Why it changes the cost
Grid-based local tracking and booking-side measurement cost more than a dashboard export
Direction
Up modestly

What a monthly fee should include

A restaurant retainer is not a subscription to a tool. It should describe named work carried out each month, and a way to check it happened.

Ask a proposal to state these explicitly

  • Which work is done monthly, and which is one-off setup
  • Who does the work, and whether any of it is subcontracted
  • How local visibility is measured — a single position, or a grid across the catchment
  • Whether Business Profile and Search Console data are both reported
  • What happens to the work and the accounts if you leave
  • The contract length and notice period
  • Whether the fee excludes VAT
  • What is explicitly not included — ads, social, photography, website hosting
  • Whether AI assistants such as ChatGPT and Google AI Mode are tracked, how often, and across how many questions

Worth avoiding

Be wary of guaranteed rankings, guaranteed cover numbers, or any pricing tied to promised positions. Nobody controls Google's results, and a guarantee usually signals a low-effort target set the agency knows it will hit anyway. The same applies to AI: no one can guarantee that ChatGPT or any other assistant will recommend your restaurant.

What Moolah charges, and why

Our own pricing is published rather than quoted privately, because the main question an operator has is whether the scope matches the fee. Moolah Local is €445 a month for the local search foundation. Moolah Growth is €695 a month for active competition on Maps, search, booking platforms and AI assistants. Moolah Growth+ is €895 a month where a venue also needs a monthly content programme. Restaurant groups start at €1,495 a month because multi-site work scales with the number of profiles and location pages. Prices exclude VAT where applicable.

Example · hypothetical

Why the same restaurant can sit in two tiers

A single-site restaurant with an accurate profile, an editable website and a steady review habit can hold position on the foundation tier. The same restaurant opening a private dining room, entering a competitive district and needing new occasion pages has more work to do each month — and belongs a tier up until that work is finished.

Cheap, mid and expensive — what each usually buys

What different price bands typically deliver

Under €250/month

Typically includes
Profile monitoring, occasional posts, an automated report
Typical risk
Little real work; visibility drifts once competitors act

€400–€800/month

Typically includes
Managed profile, website and content changes, tracked local visibility, monthly review
Typical risk
Scope creep if the site or photography is not resourced

€1,000+/month

Typically includes
Multi-site or highly competitive work, deeper content and technical programmes
Typical risk
Paying group-level fees for a single-site problem

These bands describe the Irish independent and small-group restaurant market as we encounter it. They are an observation from proposals and handovers we see, not a published industry dataset — treat them as orientation rather than a benchmark.

Moolah Growth+ sits above the middle band because it adds a monthly content programme and AI search work on top of active search growth.

How to judge value after three months

  1. Non-brand discovery: are people who did not search your name finding you more often?
  2. Local pack presence across the catchment, not one position from the dining room
  3. Profile actions: calls, direction requests, booking-link clicks
  4. Website performance for pages that carry commercial intent — menu, private dining, bookings
  5. Your own diary: enquiries and covers in the day-parts the work targeted, read as correlation

Source: Google Business Profile Help — Business Profile performance — The free report that shows discovery versus direct searches and guest actions.

Source: Google Search Central — SEO Starter Guide — Google's own baseline guidance on what SEO work should and should not involve.

See this in practice

When the local market fell, this restaurant grew covers.

Chef-led landmark restaurant · name withheld · Dublin city centre

+33%Covers, year on year · recorded in OpenTable

Covers grew 33% year on year while a 75-venue OpenTable benchmark for the same area fell 9% — a 42 percentage-point spread.

See how movement was reported in a real engagement

Common questions

How much does restaurant SEO cost in Ireland?

For a single independent restaurant, managed monthly work typically sits between roughly €400 and €800 excluding VAT, with groups and highly competitive city-centre venues higher. Anything far below that usually buys monitoring rather than work. Work that adds a monthly content programme or AI search tracking, groups and highly competitive city-centre venues sit higher.

Is a one-off project cheaper than a retainer?

A one-off fix is cheaper and sometimes correct — for example a profile clean-up and a menu page rebuild. It stops paying when competitors keep working, so it suits venues that already hold their position.

How long before it pays for itself?

Profile accuracy fixes can show within weeks. Content, review habit and authority work usually read clearly over three to six months. Anyone promising results in weeks across all of it is describing the easy part only.

Should restaurants spend on SEO or Google Ads first?

They answer different demand. Ads buy immediate presence for specific searches and stop when the budget stops; search work compounds and covers the map surface ads reach differently. A venue with an inaccurate profile should fix that before buying traffic to it.

Do the prices include VAT?

No. Prices are quoted excluding VAT where applicable.

Working on this yourself? Packages and pricing.

Want to know what your restaurant actually needs before you pay for anything?

A free visibility audit tells you which of these problems you have — and which tier of work, if any, is justified.

Get Your Free Visibility Audit

Written by

Alex Opsenica, founder of Moolah Media

Alex Opsenica

Founder, Moolah Media

Founder of Moolah Media, a founder-led restaurant marketing specialist based in Ireland, working with restaurants worldwide on websites, SEO and Google Maps, and Google Ads. Around 20 years in hospitality, including hands-on restaurant management.

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