The best keywords for restaurants to increase
their visibility online

When thinking of ways to market your restaurant online, local SEO for restaurants should be top of mind.

Local SEO is the process of improving your business’ search engine visibility for local searches, such as people looking for a Chinese takeaway restaurant in their area.

One of the main ways to achieve that is to find the best keywords for restaurants like yours, and use them on your website, social media, Google Business profile, and so on.

Below, we’ll accelerate the process by providing you with a list of SEO keywords for restaurants that you can use and adapt to your cuisine and location to attract more local customers.

How do I find the perfect keywords for my restaurant?

Let’s say you’re running an Italian restaurant and one of your keywords is “pizza.” When someone searches for “pizza”, you might think that they’re going to find your content.

Well… not quite. In many cases, they might just want to search for a recipe, images, or learn more about the history of pizza.

If you want your keyword to lead customers to your restaurant, you have to be specific.

So, in our example here, optimizing your content with the word “pizza” won’t be enough to get orders. You have to focus on long-tail keywords such as “pizza delivery in Brooklyn, New York.”

That way, your restaurant website will become relevant to people in your area. When they search for your type of cuisine, your restaurant will pop up.

So be specific and relevant. This will bring you many more sales and website conversions.

How to get a restaurant website optimized for specific, relevant keywords

One of any restaurant website’s best practices is to include relevant keywords that will boost visibility. You can do that by generating an SEO-optimized website in minutes:

• 1. Sign up for our free online ordering system.
• 2. Fill out your restaurant profile by following our intuitive setup wizard.
• 3. Navigate to Setup -> Publishing -> Sales optimized website.
• 4. Check Yes, then Next.
• 5. This will generate a website that is already optimized with the best keywords for restaurants based on the information you inputted when setting up your account. You can click on “View & edit website” to customize it as you wish using drag-and-drop.

We walk you through the entire process in this handy step-by-step video tutorial:

A comprehensive restaurant keywords list

The keywords should reflect your restaurant and the services that you offer, which leads you to combinations of:

• Your restaurant name
• Your cuisines
• Your location
• The takeaway service
• The delivery service

To make our discussion easier to follow, let’s take another practical example.

Say we have a restaurant called Yummy Inn, in Whitchurch, UK that serves Chinese food.

If our website generator can take care of the content for your restaurant website, that doesn’t mean you won’t need relevant keywords for the rest of your online platforms, such as Google Business profile or TripAdvisor.

Here are the main categories of keywords that should be a part of the SEO plan for your restaurant.

Brand keywords

Unless your restaurant is completely new, brand keywords are the easiest to tackle.

Using our mockup example, here’s how the keywords would look like:

• Yummy Inn
• Yummy Inn Whitchurch
• Yummy Inn Whitchurch menu
• Yummy Inn food
• Yummy Inn menu
• Yummy Inn restaurant
• Yummy Inn restaurant Whitchurch
• Yummy Inn restaurant menu
• Yummy Inn takeaway
• Yummy Inn delivery
• Yummy Inn Chinese takeaway
• Yummy Inn Chinese
• Yummy Inn Chinese Whitchurch
• Yummy Inn Chinese food
• Yummy Inn Chinese menu
• Yummy Inn Chinese restaurant
• Yummy Inn Chinese restaurant Whitchurch
• Yummy Inn Chinese restaurant menu

Keywords on takeaway

To target customers who would like to order food for takeaway, but are not looking specifically for your restaurant, there are two groups of keywords you can tackle.

The first one is more specific (cuisine-oriented):

• Chinese takeaway Whitchurch
• Chinese takeaway restaurant
• Chinese takeaway food
• Chinese takeaway

The second one is broader:

• takeaway Whitchurch
• takeaway food
• takeaway restaurant
• takeaway place

Someone looking for takeaway might not necessarily want to try your cuisine type.

There is also another important point to make here: it’s very common for people to include the location in their searches.

But if you are in a big city, a keyword like Chinese takeaway New York doesn’t really makes sense. You cannot possibly cover the entire NYC, nor expect someone to drive 10 miles to pick up their takeaway.

So, your area needs to be broken down into several keywords, like this:

• Chinese takeaway Central Park
• Chinese takeaway Lenox Hill
• Chinese takeaway Upper West Side
• Chinese takeaway Lincoln Square
• Chinese takeaway Harlem
• Chinese takeaway Upper Manhattan
• Chinese takeaway Bloomingdale

Keywords for food delivery

Again, you have the two groups, with or without the cuisine. For more impact, go with the ones including your cuisine:

• Chinese food delivery Whitchurch
• Chinese food delivery near
• Chinese food delivery

Just like above, don’t forget to add a keyword for each area that you cover with delivery.

There are tons of small variations for these keywords, like:

• Chinese food delivery near me
• Chinese food delivery near me open now
• Chinese food near me that delivers

And many more.

And now for the second group of less specific keywords:

• food delivery Whitchurch
• food delivery restaurant
• food delivery place
• takeaway food delivery
• restaurant that delivers
• place that delivers
• best restaurant that delivers
• restaurant delivery Whitchurch
• takeaway delivery restaurant
• takeaway delivery place
• food delivery near

Finding the best keywords for restaurants: A wrap-up

Wondering how would you improve restaurant search results is perfectly normal in this very competitive industry where all your competitors are probably online.

The key is to use the best keywords for restaurants with your cuisine, location, and services, not just on your website, but on external online platforms as well.

That way, more potential customers will discover your restaurant on Google and decide to pay you a visit or place an order online.