TECHNICAL SEO AUDIT
Menus locked inside a PDF, booking widgets that swallow the page.
DINNER IS DECIDED ON APHONE, IN THE MAP, BYSOMEONE ALREADY HUNGRY.
Reported in covers booked, not impressions.
Covers, commission, and what a quiet Tuesday costs you.
Everything tested on 4G, outside, one-handed.
Plain monthly numbers. No dashboard homework.
Menus locked inside a PDF, booking widgets that swallow the page.
Three results on the map. That is the whole fight most nights.
More reviews, answered within a day, the bad ones included.
People search the dish, not the restaurant. Put it in text.
Own the five streets around you before you chase the city.
A table booked on your own site costs you nothing per cover.
New photography on a schedule, because the listing is judged on it.
One page per site, so your own branches stop competing.
Links from local press, food writers and the city guides people read.
Your menu opens in under two seconds on the pavement outside.
Guards your listing against edits, fake reviews and scrapers.
Covers dropped and nobody knows why. We find out this week.
MORE
TABLES BOOKED
FULL ON A
TUESDAY
LESS PAID
IN COMMISSION
Map pack, menu and reviews first, website second, because that is the order a hungry person actually looks at them in.
The search happens minutes before the meal, on a phone, from somewhere close by, and it usually ends in the map rather than on a website. So the work sits in your Google Business Profile, your photos, your reviews and your opening hours long before it reaches your homepage. Rank fourth on the map and you may as well not be there.
Google cannot taste anything. It counts what it can read: your hours, your photos, your reviews, your menu if it is written in text, and who links to you. Every one of those is fixable, and none of them has anything to do with the kitchen. That is the good news, once it stops stinging.
No. Only Google removes reviews, and only when they break a rule. What moves the rating is volume and answers: enough new reviews that an old one stops setting the tone, and a reply to the bad ones that reads like a person wrote it. A wall of perfect fives is its own warning sign anyway, and diners know it.
Yes, more than almost anything else on the site. Nobody searches for your restaurant by name when they do not know it yet. They search for the dish, and a dish inside a PDF is invisible. Put the menu on the page as text, with prices, and you become findable for a few hundred searches you were never in.
One page per restaurant, each with its own address, hours, photos and menu, and written differently enough that Google does not read them as one page repeated four times. Run them all off a single location page and your own branches compete with each other for the same map result.
Access to your site, analytics and Search Console, control of the Google Business Profile, and your covers split by channel: walk-in, your own site, the reservation platforms, the delivery apps. That last split is the one that shows what an hour of this work is worth to you.
SEO field notes, growth breakdowns, web strategy, and operator-first ideas from Laid Back Llama®. No fluff. No spam. Just useful moves.
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Actionable ideas to improve visibility, trust, and growth.