Web presence is essential in today’s online marketing and search engine optimization directly links potential customers to your business. Restaurant owners should invest in local search engine optimization in order to target a relevant audience in your area.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has long come with the stigma that it manipulates search engines to boost the likelihood of unnecessary websites to appear first. However, as CEO of Vudu Marketing and widely published expert in the field of SEO, Sam McRoberts puts it, “SEO, at its heart, is the process of making websites more accessible and understandable to search engines. It shouldn’t be, and really doesn’t need to be, manipulative.”

Investing in SEO can make it easier for potential diners to find your restaurant, but a proper understanding of the process is essential before you decide to invest in this service.

What You Should Know Before Investing in Local SEO

How frequently your restaurant turns up in search engines results pages (SERPs) delivers limited results unless you have targeted a specific audience. Local SEO lets search engines such as Google know your location in order to present your business to a relevant audience. Forbes offers some strategies for small businesses wanting to invest in local SEO:

• §Create local places pages.
• §Optimize and properly categorize your page.
• §Create accurate business citations. Make sure that the name, address, and phone information is correct and consistent among all of your listings.
• §Share online reviews on the search engine screen to help customers decide to click your link.
• §Post quality photos to your website. People looking for local businesses want to see pictures of both the inside and outside of your business.
• §Optimize your website. Not only should you post your restaurant’s address and phone number on your website, you should also include regional keywords and write content that is specific to your local area.

Optimize Your Website for More Online Traffic

Marketing Exchange compares search engines to a virtual librarian constantly filing your web pages, blog posts, images, and videos in a cyberspace library. Keywords are a critical aspect of SEO, and local SEO is no different.

Start optimizing your website by researching and selecting good regional keywords to include in your web content. Your restaurant has keyword research tools and analyzers at its disposal to find each of the combinations used with a particular keyword. Jon Rognerrud of Entrepreneur explains how your restaurant can utilize this information: “If you find that your keyword receives a lot of visitors – from 20,000 to 30,000 visitors a month for exact matching terms as a minimum – these are the keywords you may want to consider as part of your keyword optimization strategy.” In addition, keep these guidelines in mind:

• §Keywords need to be relevant to your restaurant.
• §There must be a reasonable number of people searching for this term.
• §Select keywords with low levels of competition.
• §Your keyword should have a good $ value – people searching this term should be potential diners, not just browsers.

Once you’ve determined your ideal keywords, optimize your web copy for search engines. Rewrite and revise the copy so that your keywords make up as much as 2 to 5 percent of the overall content. Optimizing your content in this way is one more good strategy to help generate more traffic to your site.