Boost Local Search: SEO Tips for Restaurants

Today, customers can engage with your restaurant brand through countless digital channels. From traditional search to social media to AI tools, there are more ways than ever for a customer to find a brand as part of their customer journey.

For restaurant locations, showing up with the right information at the right time can mean the difference between a customer choosing your location over the competition. In fact, 91% of customers say it's important for brand information to be accurate when making a purchase decision, and 64% are likely to choose a different brand if they encounter incorrect or missing information.* But as a marketer, keeping your brand's information updated and accurate across all these touchpoints is a massive undertaking.

Ready to help your restaurant locations stand out more effectively? Here's what marketers need to do to win in the "new era" of SEO.

The first key to SEO success is boosting your brand's signal to search engines through a robust digital presence.

This requires updating your brand's information - including location hours, address, phone number, and menus - across an extended network of publishers. Taking these actions boosts your relevancy, accuracy, and consistency (among other factors).

An effective listings strategy needs to focus on more than the "big 5" major sites like Google, Facebook, Bing, Apple Maps, and Yelp. Why? Search engines reference information across a wide range of sites - even the smaller ones. When information is consistent across a diverse network of publishers, there is increased confidence that the information is correct. If your brand isn't consistently showing up across sites, or if your competitor is doing it better, that can impact your results and how you rank in search.

To test this theory, we conducted a first-of-its-kind study to see if managing information across a broader network boosts your signal, and therefore performance, on Google.

Yext analyzed over 620,000 global locations across 15 industries and discovered individual locations see up to 186% more website clicks from their Google Business Profile when they sync to at least 75% of the publishers in the Yext network.

The research included 69K global restaurant locations — and the results held up. When restaurant brands managed information across more publishers, like OpenTable and Zomato, they saw 65% more website clicks from Google.

Wondering if the number of locations you manage matters? If you're a large enterprise brand with thousands of locations, it might feel unfair to compare your performance to that of a restaurant with 30 locations — and vice versa. So, we split up the study based on restaurant size.

We found that, regardless of business size, syncing information to a wider network of publishers has a strong correlation on performance from Google.

The second key to SEO success is increasing the depth of your information to surface beyond traditional search. The impact of managing information across publishers goes beyond website clicks - it also affects how (and if) your brand appears in search generative experiences.

AI models like Google Gemini and ChatGPT source their information about local businesses from a variety of different places, too – including both big and small publisher websites. How do we know? Learn more in our blog post where we asked each major AI model, "Where do you get your local business information from?"

But search generative experiences do add a new layer of complexity to your SEO strategy. Consider a simple search query like "tacos near me." When you ask that same question to both Google Search and Gemini (Google's AI model powering AI Overviews), you'll see a different, more detailed answer from Gemini.

This shift shows why providing more detailed information online (beyond name, address, phone number) is so important in generative search. Here, Gemini is (likely) pulling from many location listings as well as customer reviews to generate an answer in full-sentence form. And with 67% of people saying they already use generative search and AI tools,* the importance of managing how these models find and surface information will only grow.

To succeed, your restaurant brand first needs to be present across as many publishers as possible.

When it comes to optimizing your restaurant listings for SEO, it's clear that having robust, recent, and consistent information across the widest network of publishers is a winning strategy.

With the largest publisher network of direct API integrations, Yext is uniquely able to provide restaurants with access to the largest and most comprehensive publisher network rate – something that other vendors that rely heavily on data aggregators are not able to do.

Interested in learning more? Check out how Yext Listings can help your restaurant locations show up everywhere customers search.

*The asterisked data results from an online survey of 2,312 adults, 18+, who purchased something online within the past year. The survey was fielded by Researchscape from June 14 to 25, 2024. Respondents were from 5 different countries. Check back next month for the full published report.