SEO for local restaurants and keyword research

Hello fellow BHW's,

I've currently taken a client on board within the food and restaurant industry. One of the first stages I'm trying to complete is Keyword research. I noticed that certain keywords such as "Restaurants in london" has mostly been taken up by review sites such as Tripadvisor, Justeat and other review sites on the first page of Google. Has anyone done keyword research for a restaurants before and could give me tips when doing keyword research for this type of industry. Thanks in advance

I have not, but related searches at the bottom of the google search page and google keyword planner can help.

I feel sorry for your client.

I'm in the restaurant software business so not very much (not at all actually) affected by these online crocks, but I can tell you that all the top SE spots for restaurant and hotel related keywords are out of reach for common people like you and me. Very Sorry.

Google and Bing both have sold themselves to these fckersites.

P.S.:
May be, begin asking questions of our BST SEO services sellers. Very few of them can top rank almost any keyword and as hard as PDL type kws. But be careful in finding the very best among them...

I just messaged you moderate competition keyword. PM me if you need to discuss it further.

tried a restaurant keyword research for India but not upto mark..

According to my suggestion better you can take long tail keyword. ie., best restaurant in london
Take more than 3 pharse keyword.
Since they are most trusted sites, so that are targeted for many keywords like hotels, restaurants so on.
By doing a local optimization we can give a good competition to these sites.

If you need more information about "how to optimize the restaurant sites" send me a PM.

Why not offering your client a reputation management package?
Posting reviews on websites like Tripadvisor, Urbanspoon etc is definitely generating some pretty good leads for any business.

I do not have any clients in that industry nor have I even looked at it but my searches are not restaurants in XYZ city when we want to eat out... we search Seafood in City Name... I have to think that Cuisine in City Name is searched more than generic restaurants in city name... just a guess though and perhaps worth looking at for you that are in that niche.

BassTrackerBoats said:

I do not have any clients in that industry nor have I even looked at it but my searches are not restaurants in XYZ city when we want to eat out... we search Seafood in City Name... I have to think that Cuisine in City Name is searched more than generic restaurants in city name... just a guess though and perhaps worth looking at for you that are in that niche.

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I agree entirely. When searching for a pizza or taco place you don't look for restaurants. You're pretty specific. If your client has a specific menue try working with that.

Reviews and such would also provide good leads as stated above.

I don't see the problem here actually why would you target sites were reviews dominate, try long tailed keywords even if it has low traffic and high competition, if your in this scenario success depends on your seo service and your cooperation with them

Didn't read the other responses here but local listings is the way to go. TripAdvisor and all those guys won't appear on the Maps section, and it's way easier to optimize for than SEO. And go after more targeted keywords, like "handmade pizza restaurant london" or shit like that. Long tail. You'll never compete on "restaurants London."

Hi guys sorry I haven't been able to respond to the great help that's on here as I've been overwhelmed by other projects. I did actually manage to find some keywords that review sites haven't been listed for which is great. Using tools like semRush helped in this scenario and then going through the suggested competitors and looking at their keywords helped me to make forward decisions in which keywords I could target along with "long tailed keywords".

Again guys thanks for all the help here. This is why BHW is the best

You need local SEO help. You can try out some of the awesome Local SEO tools such as MOZ Local, White Spark or Bright Local.

Hi,

Just my two cents worth, as a marketer for a restaurant for sometime, I can tell you that chasing keywords is a waste of effort. I did a reasonable amount of work on Google Places page so that people in the local area would see us if they search for say Italian restaurant. The website I built using Themeforest theme ended up after 4 years with quite a bit of traffic naturally. You can check it out here...bellasperth (use the most common extension. It shows from mar 13, but the name has changed a number of times since the original bellafontes site). It is closed now, but I'm keeping the website running for as long as I can as it has a PR4, so I dumped a pop up window saying the restaurant is closed, hoping I can milk links from there for a while. You can see it has quite a lot of content, especially as all the menu items have a separate page. I have never built links to the page, although soem of the local sporting clubs have probably linked to it. The PR comes mainly from the amount of content I think.

The best marketing for restaurants comes from the workd of mouth, I was heavy into email capture, social media integration (FB). By far and away the best marketing tool was through voucher system. The rest comes from reminding people via email and social media that your still there favourite restaurant. The voucher system we implemented had a return rate of about 15%.

The website did about 100+ views a day, quite a bit of direct traffic from vouchers.

So recap,
1. Use as much content on site as you can
2. Build out Google Places or business or whatever they call it
3. Offer reputation management, they'll need it
4. Capture emails and use customer photos of Social Media (tagging)
5. Guerilla Marketing the shite outta it!

Google keyword planner is best for keyword research. And if you want to use paid tool then you can use Market Samurai for keyword research.

Try to narrow your search down, such as traditional/Indian/Mexican restaurant London, makes the traffic better and also easier to rank for

All restaurants have any specialized recipes, so you add that name with your target keyword. Its may be differentiate your keyword and get traffic.

Long tails, google places, social media. Get the long tails and google places dealt with (shouldn't be too hard) than build them a strong social media presence if they don't already have one.

Register their business with Google. Then see if you can get people to give them good reviews. That's key. Then pound other review sites and social links IMHO.