Restaurant Website SEO Checklist

Restaurant SEO is mostly about being findable at 7pm

Most restaurant searches are immediate-intent. Someone is hungry, they're near the restaurant, and they need to confirm the menu, hours, and reservation availability in under 30 seconds. The site that loads fast and answers those three questions wins. The site with a beautiful Flash-era hero video loses.

This checklist is what we run on restaurant sites in the order it should be fixed. Most restaurant sites get 4 of 6 things wrong — fixing them is some of the highest-leverage SEO work in any local vertical.

1. Menu schema (the biggest miss)

Google has surfaced restaurant menus directly in search results since 2019 via the Menu Schema.org type. Most restaurant sites use it for nothing — the menu is a PDF or a JavaScript-rendered widget that Google can't parse.

The fix:

• Render the menu in HTML, not as a PDF or image.
• Use Restaurant schema with a hasMenu property pointing to a structured Menu entity.
• Each menu section gets a MenuSection; each item gets a MenuItem with name, description, and offers.price.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Restaurant",
  "name": "Tuscany Bistro",
  "hasMenu": {
    "@type": "Menu",
    "hasMenuSection": [{
      "@type": "MenuSection",
      "name": "Pasta",
      "hasMenuItem": [{
        "@type": "MenuItem",
        "name": "Carbonara",
        "description": "Spaghetti with pancetta, egg, pecorino, black pepper",