Local SEO Playbook for Restaurants

Guests decide from your Google listing

Plenty of guests never reach your website. They see your Google result, check the hours, and tap to order or call from there.

Google says it ranks local results on relevance, distance, and prominence. You can't move the building. You can make the listing match what people search for, and you can give Google more reasons to trust it.

Wrong hours hurt the most. Someone drives over, finds the door locked, and leaves a review about it. You lose the order, probably the guest, and a little of your rating in one visit.

Fill in every field Google gives a restaurant

Open your Google Business Profile on a phone and look at it the way a guest would. Then open the edit screen and work down the fields below.

Business name: the name on your sign and nothing else. Adding "Best Tacos Downtown" to it breaks Google's guidelines and can get the profile suspended.

Primary category: what guests type, like "Taco restaurant", rather than how you'd pitch the concept. Add additional categories only when they're true, such as "Takeout restaurant" or "Caterer".

Description: Google gives you 750 characters. Lead with the dishes you're known for and the neighborhood you serve.

Phone: a number someone picks up during service. A line that rings out sends the guest back to the search results.

Website: that location's own page, not a homepage shared by every store.

Order and menu links: the order button goes to your own ordering page, and the menu link goes to a text menu rather than a PDF.

Attributes guests filter on: dine-in, takeout, delivery, outdoor seating, vegetarian options, and a wheelchair accessible entrance.

Photos: recent shots of real dishes, the dining room, and the front door, so a first-time guest knows which entrance is yours.

Menu prices on the listing match what you charge today.

Set hours for every service you run

Regular hours say when the doors open. Google also has a More hours section with entries like Takeout, Delivery, Kitchen, Breakfast, and Happy hours. If the kitchen closes at 9 and the bar pours until 11, enter both.

Special hours cover holidays and one-off closures. Enter them a week before each holiday. On the morning of July 4, a guest sees what you typed in, not what you meant to type.

Google sometimes edits a listing on its own, based on suggestions from people who use Maps. When that happens, the profile flags the change for you to review. Accept it if it's right. If it's wrong, reject it, correct the field, and look again the next day.

An edit can also sit under review for a few days. Don't keep resubmitting it. Make sure your website shows the same hours, so nothing Google finds contradicts the change.

Post something every week

A profile that hasn't changed in months looks closed to a guest scrolling past. A weekly post and a fresh photo show you're open and paying attention.

Posts don't need to be clever. This week's special, a photo from morning prep, or next Monday's early close is enough.

Google offers three kinds of post: an update, an offer, and an event. An offer fits a weekday lunch deal. An event fits a trivia night with a date on it.

Budget ten minutes a week. Across a year that's 52 posts and 520 minutes, or under nine hours of work.

Reply to every review and ask for more

Reviews count toward prominence, and guests read them before they read your menu. Reply to each one, good or bad, within a few days.

One bad review hurts less than it feels like. Say you hold 4.3 stars across 80 reviews, which is 344 stars in total. Add a one-star review and the math becomes 345 stars over 81 reviews, which averages about 4.26.

Climbing takes volume. Getting from 4.3 to 4.5 needs 32 new five-star reviews and no low ones: 344 plus 160 is 504, and 504 divided by 112 is exactly 4.5.

So ask while the guest is happy. A line on the receipt or a card in the pickup bag does the job. Never trade a discount for a review, because Google's policies ban it.

When you answer a complaint, name the problem and say what you changed. Then invite them back. Keep refunds and personal details out of the public reply.

Use the same name, address, and phone everywhere

Google isn't the only map guests use. Apple Maps takes its details from Apple Business Connect, and Yelp and Facebook keep their own copies of your hours.

When those copies disagree, guests call to ask, or they skip you. Write your name, address, and phone number once, exactly as they appear on your sign. Paste that same text into every listing.

Small differences add up. "Suite 4" on one listing and "#4" on another can look like two separate places to a guest skimming results.

Check each listing after any change to hours or phone. Yelp in particular can take up to two weeks to show an edit, so change it first.

Give each location its own page that takes orders

Each location gets a page with its neighborhood, city, address, and hours, and the order button in view without scrolling. Sending everyone to one homepage makes a local guest hunt for the right store.

Put the menu on that page as text, not a PDF. Google can read a text menu, and a guest on a slow connection can too.

Add markup (often called schema) so Google reads your details reliably. The schema.org type for this is Restaurant, with fields such as name, address, telephone, openingHoursSpecification, servesCuisine, priceRange, and hasMenu.

Dishes go under Menu, MenuSection, and MenuItem. Each item carries an Offer that holds its price.

Run the page through Google's Rich Results Test or the Schema Markup Validator after every menu change. Google's rules say markup must match what the page shows, so a stale price hidden in the code still counts against you.

Three locations means three pages, three listings, and three order links. Each listing's website field points to its own page.

Let Appetier run the weekly check

Appetier gives every menu item its own page. Each brand also gets its own sitemap and restaurant listing markup, and a brand that opts out of search stays out.

Once you connect Google, a weekly check fixes hours, links, and categories that stopped matching. The same check fixes hours, links, and address on Apple Maps, Yelp, and your Facebook Page.

Every Google review gets a reply in your brand's voice. Reviews of three stars or fewer, and any about allergy, illness, staff, or legal matters, always go to you.

The free website audit checks where your order button goes, how fast the site loads on a phone, and what Google shows. It takes about a minute and reports scores. From the report, you can ask for a private preview of your restaurant on Appetier.