SEO audits for restaurants and cafes
Restaurants have a specific and very fixable problem: the menu is a picture. Everything a search engine would want to read is locked inside an image or a PDF.
What we found
Across 584 restaurant and cafe websites the average score was 76.2, well below the professional services categories. The distribution is wide: a few excellent sites, and a long tail of single-page sites built by a booking or delivery platform.
Thin content was the second most common fault, which is unusual. It is almost always the same cause: the menu exists only as a photograph or a PDF, so a page that looks full to a human is nearly empty to a crawler.
Missing H1 headings were third. Template restaurant sites frequently open with a full-width hero image and no heading text at all.
Most common faults in this industry
- Title tag length
- Thin content
- No H1 heading
How to pitch it
- Show them their own menu page with images disabled. It is the fastest way to explain why 'wood fired pizza' does not bring up their restaurant.
- Menu text as real HTML is the single highest-value fix in this vertical, and it helps with dietary searches such as gluten free and vegan that a picture cannot match.
- Restaurant structured data supports rich results for cuisine, price range and opening hours, which occupy noticeably more space in a result page.
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