Local Restaurant SEO To Improving Visibility Through Reviews

Search Engine Optimization is often tough to become successful when dealing with hyper-local businesses. For starters, many of these companies’ websites are not designed or maintained directly by the business themselves – frequently, these small to mid sized organizations enlist the services of an Internet Yellow Pages (IYP) company to create and manage their website. While they may have access to change content in these cases, it is common for IYPs to only allow access to certain fields within a site, and not the entire HTML/CSS back-end.

Complicating things further is the lack of a true geographic focus with many of these businesses. Say, for example, a family restaurant is located in Schererville, Indiana. In the restaurant ownerships’ eyes, they probably feel that they serve Northwest Indiana – or potentially even the “greater Chicagoland area”. Both are technically true, but do accurately represent their core geographic target, which would be “Schererville, Indiana” and local surrounding areas. Has your family ever driven 45 minutes to eat dinner? It’s not very likely; therefore, “Northwest Indiana” is too broad of a target.

For instances such as my example above, a great way to promote the hyper-local geographical target of SMBs can be through sites that allow reviews, such as those offered to consumers on such sites as Yelp, OpenTable, and Yahoo. The first step in managing the restaurant off-site SEO is to submit information to these larger aggregate sites, or take ownership of profiles that already exist. This will allow you to ensure that information appearing on these sites, such as website link, phone number, and address, are correct in each instance.

To continue on with my example, let’s look at a local restaurant in Northwest Indiana, Teibel’s Family Restaurant. If you were to search the company’s name on Google, for instance, you would see a myriad of listings for the restaurant, both from larger review sites such as the ones I mentioned above, and less-known data aggregate communities. Though as SEOs, we know that searching for a brand name isn’t the best indicator of website prominence, the point here is that these sites are helping to contribute to the overall Internet profile of Teibel’s itself. As evidence, Teibel’s website has a PR of 4 – not too bad for a local restaurant in Northwest Indiana.

Reviews are often a touchy subject in the industry, namely for two reasons- potential for fraud (i.e. fake reviews), and also because of the potential for negative reviews to hurt a brand image. While I think the former is justified, and the latter can be true, if a business such as a restaurant is receiving a majority of legitimate negative reviews, all of the SEO in the world probably isn’t going to help them that much anyway.