What every restaurant website needs for search

Most restaurant websites are not broken. They are simply unreadable to search engines and mildly inconvenient on a phone — which, at the moment a guest is deciding between three options, amounts to the same thing.

One job is being understood: telling search engines what the restaurant is, where it is, what it serves and when it is open. The other is converting: getting an interested guest from arrival to a confirmed booking with as little friction as possible. Fixes for one do not automatically help the other.

Source: Google Search Central — Local business structured data

• A booking route visible without scrolling, on mobile, on every page
• Opening hours legible in seconds
• Prices where a guest expects them, not on request
• A phone number that dials on tap
• No modal covering the page before the guest has read anything

Private dining, group bookings, celebration menus and seasonal events attract a small volume of very high-value searches, and most restaurants answer them with a paragraph on the contact page. A dedicated page with capacity, layout, minimum spend, sample menus and an enquiry route can capture demand competitors are not addressing at all.

Speed matters, but a heavy hero video is rarely the reason a restaurant is invisible. Fix speed because guests abandon slow pages on mobile data outside your door — not because a score in a testing tool is red.

Google's own starter guidance is blunt about the basics: pages need descriptive titles, readable text content and links that can be crawled. Most restaurant sites fail on content that exists only inside images.

Source: Google Search Central — SEO Starter Guide — Baseline expectations for titles, text content and crawlable links.

Most restaurant searches happen on a phone, often on mobile data, frequently while the guest is standing outside somewhere else. A site that takes several seconds to show an address has already lost the decision.

Written by

Alex Opsenica

Founder, Moolah Media

Founder of Moolah Media, a specialist restaurant growth and local SEO agency based in Ireland, working directly with hospitality operators on search, Google Business Profile and bookings.

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