Restaurant SEO
Restaurant Local SEO: How to Get Found in Your City
Local SEO is everything that helps your restaurant appear when someone nearby looks for a place to eat — on Google Maps, in the local results of Search, and more and more in AI assistants. Google says local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence. You cannot change your distance, but you can make the restaurant clearly relevant and better known: complete and consistent details, a menu search engines can read, a website that matches your Google profile, and genuine reviews.
Relevance, distance and prominence
| Factor | What Google says it means | What you can do |
|---|---|---|
| Relevance | How well a profile matches what someone is searching for | Complete details, the right category, a readable menu |
| Distance | How far the business is from the person searching | Nothing — except making sure your address is exact |
| Prominence | How well known the business is | Genuine reviews, and an accurate, active profile |
Google states that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.
Get the basics right
- A complete Google Business Profile, with the right category, hours and special hours.
- The same name, address and phone number everywhere: your profile, your website, your menu, your social profiles and any directory you are in.
- A page for the restaurant with your address and hours written as text, not only inside an image.
Step by step: a guide to your restaurant's Google Business Profile.
Make the menu readable
People search for dishes — ramen, a vegan brunch, a fish restaurant — and a menu published as a photo or a PDF gives search engines little to match. A menu published as text on a web page, with dish names and descriptions, can be read like any other page.
Structured data helps as well. Google's documentation for local business structured data lists the name and the address as required, and recommends properties such as the coordinates, the menu address, the opening hours, the cuisine served and a telephone number.
More on why: QR menu vs PDF menu.
Pages that match how people search
- Mention your neighbourhood and nearby landmarks naturally on the About page, where they are true.
- If guests come from abroad, publish the menu and the page in their languages, with links between the language versions.
- Avoid near-identical pages for every nearby town; one good page for the place you actually are is worth more.
For visitors from abroad: how to run a multilingual restaurant menu.
Reviews and reputation
Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help a business's local ranking. Ask guests for honest reviews, reply to them, and never buy or reward reviews — that is against Google's policies.
Measure
- Check how often people find and contact you through your profile, using the figures Google shows you there.
- Look at the searches that bring visitors to your own website, for example in Google Search Console.
- Re-read your profile, your website and your menu every few months, side by side, for anything that no longer matches.
Local SEO with Thmenu
Every Thmenu restaurant gets pages on menu.thmenu.com built from one restaurant profile: the live menu as text, and an About page with the hours, the address with directions, the phone number and photos. The pages carry schema.org Restaurant data with the menu, the opening hours and the address, their own titles and descriptions, a canonical address and links to every language version. If you choose to be listed, the restaurant also appears in the Thmenu directory and to AI assistants.
See the restaurant website Thmenu builds from your menu.
Sources
- Google Business Profile Help — Tips to improve your local ranking on Google (accessed 21 October 2026)
- Google Search Central — Local Business (LocalBusiness) structured data (accessed 21 October 2026)