Restaurant and Hotel SEO: which pages should your website have?

November 13, 2020

Let’s talk about your restaurant, bed and breakfast or hotel SEO.

When you create your website for your restaurant, hotel or bed and breakfast, there’s one thing very important to think about: SEO. Search Engine Optimization.

One incredibly efficient and important way to optimize your website for SEO is through your content, and with that, the sitemap: which pages do you put on your website, which keyword(s) is each page targeting and how are the different pages linked together?

Hence, in today’s post, I want to tackle the following question: which pages should you put on your website to score well on Google?

Score with your restaurant, bed and breakfast or hotel SEO by creating the right pages

Every hospitality brand has a few specific pages in common that need to be available on the website, and should be shown in your navigation menu. These include:

The homepage
The ‘about us’ page
The ‘menu’ or ‘rooms/accommodation’ page (or both, basically: your facilities page)
The ‘reservations/bookings’ page

Often, your website should also include a contact page. If you decide not to include this page then you need to make sure your contact details are available in the header, footer and on the reservations/bookings page.

However, there are many more pages you could include. This does not mean they have to be in the navigation menu at the top of your website.

Now you may wonder ‘why would I possibly hide pages from my menu?’

The answer’s simple: you might create pages just for Google and just to enhance your overall website search ability. You could, for example, create 5 pages about why people should visit you, targeting very specific audiences.

Hotel SEO Services — Create pages just for Google – hidden from your normal menu

Please… An example?

Okay, let’s imagine you own an Italian restaurant in Adelaide (I just randomly picked a city in Australia). Then obviously you want your website to be ranking for the keywords ‘Italian restaurant Adelaide’. But such a ‘big’ keyword is going to lead to quite a bit of competition, often primarily from food and travel blogs, or local newspapers.

So you might try and figure out which other keywords people are pairing with ‘Italian Adelaide’ and ‘Restaurant Adelaide’. You could also branch off a little and see if you can score on specific occasional events. Like ‘Christmas dinner Adelaide’, ‘birthday dinner Adelaide’, ‘romantic dinner Adelaide’, ‘restaurant Adelaide vegetarian’ and so on. A tool to find these keywords would be Ubersuggest by Neil Patel. We use the paid version of this tool at Tremento for our restaurant and hotel SEO services.

Of course, there is one important rule here: only target keywords that are relevant to your business. Never make a page or post just for the sake of ranking higher in Google: make sure you actually offer the ‘solution’ to what people are searching for. Otherwise, they’ll just bounce off your website immediately.

How do you create a page for these keywords?

We call these ‘keyword targeted’ pages a ‘landing page’: the page people land on from a link or specific source. Imagine your Italian restaurant ticks off all these boxes:

Suitable for groups
Perfect place for romantic lunch
Lunch catering for business events
Kids menu available
Healthy dinner options

Then you could make a page for each of those categories. You write the content, then optimize it for search (SEO), add relevant images and optimize their alt tags as well, and so on. You basically go through all the ideas Yoast SEO or RankMath gives you and make the page as good as you possibly can.

Do this for each page and add good internal links, so people can hop from this landing page to your booking/reservations page, about us page and menu page. Make sure there are call to actions included into the page as well as outbound links (links to other websites).

What’s the use of this?

Well, that’s easy! By creating these pages and then going after backlinks to these specific pages, you can start ranking in Google.

Yes, Italian Restaurant Adelaide gets 4400 searches per month and it’d be amazing to rank in that top 3. But… the competition there is fierce. However, if you scored for all the smaller keywords, also called, long-tail keywords, you’d also get a lot of traffic. Just add up the numbers!

Not only that: this is specified traffic, meaning that if you offer the right solution to their search, people might be very likely to book at yours!

What about writing restaurant or hotel SEO content?

Writing for SEO can be quite difficult. My first tip is to always just write like you want to. Don’t think about optimizing your text for search until the general outline is done.

Personally, I try to get in a writing-state-of-mind and go with the flow as I write my articles. It’s only once the article is done and uploaded to my WordPress back-end, that I’ll start optimizing it.

I’ll then use RankMath to improve the article so that it’s easy for those sneaky little Google bots to inspect my blog post. And guess what: it seems to work. Tremento has been ranking on the first page of Google for a variety of keywords. A good example would be our ‘healthy restaurant names’ article.

Why RankMath and not Yoast SEO?

Good question! Yoast is probably the most recommended SEO tool and I have absolutely nothing against it. The only reason we switched to RankMath is because it offers a few features which you can’t get with Yoast unless you are on their premium plan.

For my clients, however, I recommend Yoast sometimes because it gives you the chance to also install the Yoast Local SEO tool. And this can be incredibly valuable for restaurant, cafe, hotel SEO (and likewise hospitality brands).

Yoast Local SEO is a paid tool, which we install for you when you buy one of our restaurant, café, resort or hotel SEO packages.

SEO can be frustrating and confusing at times

I just can’t get my website to show up in Google

There’s a ton that needs to be done to rank in Google. I’d love to say restaurant or hotel SEO is simple – and maybe on paper it is – but the actual execution of it is quite complex. It’s not necessarily difficult, but it takes SO much time.

Creating high-value content
Optimizing that content for search with the right HTML tags and so on
Finding the right images and optimizing them too (alt tags, compression of the images)
Keeping the website speed up (important!)
Creating good internal links
Creating the sitemap and submitting it
Obtaining valuable backlinks
Aaaaand so on!

Many hospitality brand owners won’t be able to put in the time needed to get good results.

That’s why we offer monthly SEO packages at Tremento. SEO is not cheap, but the results are of extremely high value. When you do social media advertising, you might reach a lot of people all at once: but as soon as you stop paying, those results are gone.

Money invested in SEO is a long-term investment. SEO is an ongoing investment, yes – because Google changes all the time and new competition pops up constantly – but it’s an investment in your own online property. It’s money invested in your website, not on Facebook or Instagram.

What’s Tremento’s recommendation to reach more people and get more guests?

We recommend the following steps:

First, you need to make sure you have strong branding in place
Next, you need an efficient and beautiful website that tells your story
Then, you need a good social media strategy with consistent posts to drive organic traffic to your website
And then, you need a strong SEO game so you can rank in Google and get organic traffic via that route
And only then, should you invest in paid advertising.

We will never be the ones to say that ‘paid advertising is a waste of money’: it’s not, and we do a whole lot of it for our clients as well as for ourselves. However, the other elements named above should be prioritized.

We bet that the restaurants showing up on the first page of Google in your locality (outside of TripAdvisor and likewise websites) are often quite busy. They have authority and will be found no matter the current situation. They will get visitors to their website, no matter if the costs of ads go up or if they forget to post on their social channels.

How to master your restaurant, bed and breakfast or hotel SEO:

Our honest recommendation? Work with us. Restaurant, café or hotel SEO: it takes so much time. And your time is better spent on your business. You shouldn’t be working ‘in’ your business. You want your brand to grow. You need your coffee shop, restaurant, hotel or BnB to get found. And we can help you to achieve just that.