Local SEO, for people with a kitchen to run.

Google says local ranking comes down to relevance, distance and prominence, and that framing is genuinely useful because it tells you where to spend. Distance is fixed unless you move premises. Relevance is category and content, and it is nearly free to fix. Prominence is reviews, mentions and links, and it is slow but compounding. Most restaurants spend on the one they cannot change and neglect the two they can.

Every place your details appear should show them the same way. Suite numbers written two ways, an old landline on a directory nobody maintains, or a former trading name still live on a listing site all muddy the signal. Work through the obvious ones: Google, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Facebook, Instagram, your delivery platform listings, and any local directory that ranks for your town. Fix them once and diarise a check every six months.

If you run more than one site, each needs its own page with its own address, hours, menu and embedded map. A single contact page listing three branches will not rank for any of them properly. Speed matters more here than almost anywhere else on your site, because local searches are overwhelmingly mobile and often on patchy signal. A menu that arrives as a slow PDF is the most common own goal in the trade.

Local searches are specific and boring: whether you deliver to a particular estate, whether you do gluten free, whether you are open on a bank holiday, whether you take bookings for eight. Every one of those is a question you can answer plainly on your own site, and the answer is a page or a section that will pick up traffic for years. Write the ones you get asked on the phone. You already know what they are.

Bought links, mass directory submissions and anything promising a fixed position in the map pack. There is no mechanism to guarantee a map position and the people selling one are describing an ad. Blog posts written to a keyword with nothing to say do not rank any more either. The honest summary of local SEO for a restaurant is that six unglamorous things done properly beat any retainer, and after that the returns come from reviews and time.