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Restaurant SEO

What should a restaurant SEO agency actually do?

A specification you can hold a proposal against: what should happen in month one, what should happen every month, what should be reported, and what should never be promised.

Alex Opsenica, founder of Moolah Media

Alex Opsenica · Founder, Moolah Media

4 min read
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Most restaurant SEO proposals describe outcomes, not work. "Improve your rankings" and "grow your online presence" are not deliverables. This is what the work looks like when it is real, written so you can compare any proposal against it — including ours.

Key takeaway

Ask for the named work carried out each month, who does it, and how it is verified. If a proposal cannot answer those three questions in plain language, the retainer is monitoring, not marketing.

Month one: establish the truth

The first month is diagnosis and remediation, not campaigns. Nothing further is worth doing while the basic record of the business is wrong.

Month-one deliverables

  • Business Profile audit: verification state, categories, hours, attributes, menu, ordering and booking links
  • Duplicate and unclaimed listing clean-up
  • Baseline local visibility across the catchment on a grid, not a single search
  • Website technical review: mobile rendering, indexation, crawl blocks, menu accessibility
  • Search Console and Business Profile Performance access, with a recorded baseline
  • Review position: current rating, volume, response rate and response latency
  • Competitor read: who currently holds the map pack for the terms that matter, and why
  • A prioritised plan that says what will be done, in what order, and what is out of scope

Every month: work that leaves a trace

What monthly restaurant SEO work should consist of

Business Profile

Monthly work
Accuracy checks, seasonal hours, photos, posts, questions answered
How you verify it happened
Profile edit history and the Performance report

Website

Monthly work
Page changes for real intents — menu, occasion, location, bookings
How you verify it happened
A change log with dates and URLs

Content

Monthly work
Pieces that answer guest questions, not filler
How you verify it happened
Published URLs, not a word count

Reviews

Monthly work
Response coverage and latency, escalation of policy-violating reviews
How you verify it happened
Response rate and time-to-respond

Measurement

Monthly work
Grid visibility, discovery searches, profile actions, commercial page performance
How you verify it happened
A monthly report you can read in five minutes

Google publishes its own baseline of what legitimate SEO work involves, and it is worth reading before commissioning anyone.

Source: Google Search Central — SEO Starter Guide — Google's baseline description of the work, including what to expect from an SEO provider.

Source: Google Business Profile Help — How to improve local ranking — Relevance, distance and prominence — the factors any local programme should be addressing.

What should be reported — and how

  1. Local pack coverage across the catchment, shown as a grid over time rather than one flattering position
  2. Discovery versus direct searches, so you can see whether new people are finding you
  3. Profile actions: calls, direction requests, booking-link clicks
  4. Search Console performance for commercial pages — menu, private dining, bookings
  5. Work completed this month, with links
  6. What is planned next, and why

Worth avoiding

A report that shows only "keywords in the top 10" and a traffic line is a dashboard export. It tells you nothing about whether guests found you or whether anyone did any work.

Red flags

  • Guaranteed rankings or guaranteed covers — nobody controls Google's results
  • No named person doing the work, or undisclosed subcontracting
  • Ownership of your Business Profile, website or analytics accounts held by the agency
  • Twelve-month contracts with no exit and no notice period
  • Monthly blog posts as the entire deliverable
  • Local visibility measured from one search, taken from inside the restaurant
  • Fees quoted without stating VAT treatment

Who should own what

Every account the programme touches should belong to the restaurant, with the agency added as a manager or user. That is not a matter of trust — it is what makes a handover painless if the relationship ends, and it is how Google's own access model is designed to work.

Account ownership a restaurant should insist on

Google Business Profile

Owner
The restaurant, on a business email
Agency access
Manager

Website hosting and domain

Owner
The restaurant
Agency access
Editor or developer access

Google Search Console

Owner
The restaurant
Agency access
Full or restricted user

Google Analytics / Tag Manager

Owner
The restaurant
Agency access
Editor

Booking platform

Owner
The restaurant
Agency access
Usually none needed

Source: Google Business Profile Help — Add or remove profile owners and managers — The difference between owners and managers, and how access is granted.

What the first 90 days should look like

  1. Weeks one to four: audit, access, baseline measurement and the accuracy fixes that unblock everything else
  2. Weeks five to eight: the highest-priority page and profile work from the plan — usually menu, booking path, categories and the occasion pages guests actually search for
  3. Weeks nine to twelve: the first review of what moved, what did not, and what the plan changes as a result

By day ninety you should be able to point at specific completed work, a baseline you can compare against, and a plan that has been adjusted by evidence. You should not expect the full commercial result yet — content and prominence work usually takes longer to read clearly — but you should never be unsure what was done.

What should never be promised

Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO is blunt: no one can guarantee a number one ranking. A credible proposal describes the work, the measurement and the honest range of outcomes. It does not promise positions, covers, revenue multiples or timelines it does not control.

  • A guaranteed position, in Maps or organic results
  • A guaranteed number of bookings, covers or calls
  • "Priority relationships" with Google — no agency has one that affects rankings
  • Review volume targets met by any route other than asking real guests
  • Results "in days" for anything beyond correcting inaccurate information

Questions to put to any agency, including us

Seven questions for the first meeting

  • What exactly will you do in month one, and what will I see at the end of it?
  • Who does the work — by name — and is any of it subcontracted?
  • How do you measure local visibility across my catchment, not just from my address?
  • Which accounts will you own, and which will I own?
  • What is explicitly out of scope, and what costs extra?
  • What is the notice period, and what do I receive if I leave?
  • Can you show me a real report from an engagement, with the client's details removed?

A good agency will answer all seven without hesitation, and will welcome being compared against this page. If the answers are vague, the work probably will be too.

For what this work typically costs in Ireland and what sits behind each price band, see the pricing article rather than guessing from a quote.

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 work and movement were reported in a real engagement

See this in practice

The complete day-one audit next to the month-eighteen result.

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

15 → 44Domain Authority · recorded in Moz Domain Authority

Domain Authority 15 to 44, zero managed citations to 107, an unclaimed profile to 766K views — eight categories measured twice.

See a day-one audit published beside the month-eighteen result

Common questions

How long should a restaurant SEO contract be?

Long enough for the work to read — usually three to six months minimum — with a clear notice period after that. Twelve months with no exit is a commercial term, not a technical necessity.

Should the agency own my Google Business Profile?

No. You should remain the primary owner and grant manager access. Ownership sitting with an agency is the single most common source of painful handovers.

Is a restaurant specialist better than a general agency?

Not automatically, but the work is different enough that a generalist often defaults to blogging and links while the profile, menu and review surfaces — where restaurant demand is decided — go untouched.

What should I ask for in the first meeting?

The named monthly work, who performs it, how local visibility is measured, what happens to the accounts if you leave, and what is explicitly excluded.

How soon should I expect results?

Accuracy fixes on the profile can read within weeks. Content, review habit and authority work usually take three to six months to show clearly. Anyone promising all of it quickly is describing only the easy part.

Working on this yourself? Packages and pricing.

Comparing proposals?

A free visibility audit gives you an independent read of what your restaurant actually needs — useful whoever you end up hiring.

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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