How diners search, and what they look at
Three patterns. Nearby and hungry: “restaurants near me”, “best momo in Kathmandu”, decided from the map pack on the strength of photos and rating. Occasion-led: “rooftop restaurant for birthday”, “restaurant for anniversary dinner”, “cafe with wifi to work”, where the search names a situation rather than a cuisine. And named: your own restaurant, searched by people who already heard about you and want the menu, the hours and the phone number.
The named search is the one most sites handle worst, because the menu is a PDF or an image that Google cannot read and a phone cannot zoom into comfortably. Fixing that alone changes the enquiry rate. My SEO services treat the menu as the most important page on a restaurant site, because it is the one everybody opens.
What changes for a restaurant or cafe
- Photos do the selling. Google shows them before your words. Food, interior, exterior so people find the door, updated regularly rather than once at opening.
- The menu must be HTML text, with prices, not a PDF or a JPEG. That is what gets indexed, read aloud by assistants and matched against dish searches.
- Occasion pages beat cuisine pages. A page about your rooftop for celebrations captures a search that a page titled “Continental Food” never will.
- Hours accuracy is a conversion issue. Wrong festival hours produce a wasted trip and a one-star review, which costs more than any ranking.
- Reviews and replies carry more weight here than almost any other category, and diners read the replies to negative ones closely.
- Delivery platforms compete with you. Foodmandu and similar aggregators often outrank restaurants for their own dishes. You will not beat them everywhere, but you can own your name, your occasions and your neighbourhood.
How I run a restaurant SEO engagement
- Profile and photo audit. Categories, cuisine attributes, dine-in and delivery settings, hours including festivals, and whether the photo set actually shows the food and the entrance.
- Menu rebuild as text. Every dish and price in HTML, structured so dishes are individually findable, with schema where it helps.
- Occasion and neighbourhood pages for the situations people search: groups, celebrations, work-friendly, family, late night, whichever you actually serve well.
- Review process the floor staff can run: when to ask, what link to use, who replies and how quickly.
- Mobile speed pass. A restaurant site is opened on mobile data outside your door; three seconds is the budget.
- Reporting on calls, direction requests and menu page views, which are the numbers that correlate with covers.
What I see most often in restaurant sites
- A PDF or image menu, which is invisible to search and painful on a phone.
- A homepage built around a slideshow, with the address and phone number below three screens of scrolling.
- The Business Profile left on a generic category with no cuisine attributes set.
- Photos from opening night, three years old, while the interior has changed.
- No occasion pages, so every celebration search goes to a competitor who wrote one.
Full stack for this industry
Restaurants get the most from search plus paid social, because the decision is visual and often impulsive. Alongside this page, Facebook and Instagram Ads for restaurants and cafes covers the offer, event and neighbourhood-radius campaigns that fill quiet nights. Local search work is shared with local SEO and the Business Profile service; for a group with several outlets, see multi-location SEO.