SEO Marketing & Advertising for Restaurant Owners, Caterers & Food Business Owners

Search Engine Optimization or better known as SEO often intimidates entrepreneurs. Because let’s admit it, the term sounds too fancy, complex, and technical. However, I assure you that with the application of the right strategies and tips - SEO is highly manageable. So if you’re one of those food business owners who view SEO as daunting, you better read on! Because we prepared numerous SEO Marketing & Advertising hacks to help you grow your business online. 

I’ve been hosting Instagram Lives for a while now, and last time, I had the privilege to interview Matt Post - the co-founder of SEM Dynamics. He’s an online SEO expert who developed an e-commerce website with only $150 and grew it to a seven-figure company by only utilizing SEO tactics. Yes, SEO is THAT powerful! Check out the important points of our action-packed discussion below. 

Here’s what SEO means

According to Matt, “SEO is kind of a culmination of a lot of different practices, and the end result is getting traffic from search engines.” And it’s true, SEO is a process you do to improve the overall quality of your website traffic so that you can rank better on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs). That way, more people can find your brand and access your products/services. 

That’s why it’s not surprising that many successful restaurant and catering business owners invest in SEO experts to run &maintain their websites. SEO plays a critical role in growing a brand since it correlates with branding, advertising, and most significantly - marketing. 

3 SEO-friendly Tips to Rank your WEBSITE on Top of SERPs 

1. Always include your NAP. Putting your Name, Address, and Phone number on your website is a MUST. This tip sounds like a no-brainer, but this is undoubtedly a big deal. Without these basic details, your client cannot reach out to you. So make sure that such information is available on your website.

Matt points out. If you have one location, it's best to put it in the footer, across the website, just as a general user experience. That's great, and also it kind of, it signifies to Google, "Hey, this is the right address." And it will help bring up your map pack ranking.

2. Set up unique service pages with proper title tags and content. Unique service pages are huge, guys. So if you have wedding catering services, make sure you have one page that talks about wedding catering services in your town or the town you are going after nearby, correct? Because at this point, Google will look at that. Make sure you use specific, clear title tags. Avoid keyword stuffing at all costs. It’ll adversely affect your ranking. Instead, think as if you’re your customer - what are the keywords you’ll search for on the search engines?   

In terms of content, there are plenty of good tools you can use. If you're trying to find content, if you want to come up with unique content and figure out what to write, there's a handful of sites that can help you out. One good one is called Surfer SEO. That helps plan content out. They do an excellent job of offering suggestions.

Pro-Tip: Post the photos you’re featuring on your website on image-sharing platforms such as Pinterest, Reddit, and Imgur. And within those, you can link back the image to the original source, your web page, which will help rank organically the image.

3. ‘Mark up’ reviews correctly on your page. It would show in the Google search engine results. Even though you may be in fourth place or fifth place, or sixth place, but when you scroll down, it'll show five stars. How will you do that? By adding the ratings to the service page. 

Matt said it’s called Schema Markup. If you have WordPress, there are Schema plugins. And there are a few other plugins out there. And this it is called, it's service Schema. You’re providing a service, and this is the rating that people have given you, and so I would take, if you have ratings on your Yelp page or your Google My Business page, you have to put them in manually. And then they'll show up on your website and give you an aggregated rating, and an aggregated rating can show up on your listing.