Professional Restaurant Marketing
You built something great. Every month, fewer people find it.
Fractional marketing leadership for restaurants and hospitality brands. I build the systems that turn visibility into revenue.
Sound familiar?
You didn't get worse. You became invisible.
It's a systems problem, not a quality problem. While you focused on the kitchen, the prime real estate moved online. Every new restaurant chips away at your base until the calendar has holes — not because they're better, but because they're more visible.
Most restaurants grind on content while the fundamentals — SEO, conversion paths, and analytics — go ignored. Your digital storefront is in the mall basement instead of the main concourse.
What successful restaurant SEO looks like
Search becomes your most reliable source of new customers.
SEO isn't a line item. It's the infrastructure underneath everything else — your website, your Google presence, your reviews, your content. When it's built right, it works whether you're running ads that week or not.
You show up when someone searches "best [your cuisine] in [your city]."
Your Google Business Profile drives calls and directions daily — not monthly.
Your website converts visitors into reservations, catering inquiries, and event bookings.
You can see which search terms bring people through the door — and which don't.
Last month's content still brings in traffic this month. The work compounds.
The Partner
Stop buying cheap boots.
Buy cheap boots, replace them every year. Buy good boots, they last a decade. Restaurant marketing works the same way. You can keep cycling through quick fixes that don't compound, or invest in systems built to last.
- Your time, not your expertise
- No strategy behind the effort
- Posting without measuring
- No compounding returns
- Burns hours you need for operations
- Senior strategy and execution, one person
- Paid strategy you keep regardless
- Built for your restaurant, your goals
- You own every asset, account, and line of code
- Decisions backed by data you can see
- Senior at the pitch, junior does the work
- Retainer incentivizes activity over outcomes
- Generic playbook across industries
- You rent the marketing, own nothing
- Reporting you can't act on
How it works
Free, 30 minutes. I do a brief scan beforehand. You share your business, challenges, and goals. We both come away knowing if there's alignment — and I know enough about the gap to scope what comes next.
Paid, because it's real work. A comprehensive audit mapped against your goals — the fastest path from current state to future state. The deliverable is yours to keep whether you move forward with me or not.
Execution against the roadmap. What gets built and in what order comes from the strategy, not a template — targeting the biggest gaps between where you are and where you want to be.
The gap keeps closing. Monitor performance against your goals, adjust based on real data, find new opportunities as they surface. The systems compound over time.
Jason Leinart. Performance marketing for a private equity portfolio: 5 companies, 50+ locations, $2.4M in media budgets with full attribution and reporting. Before that, Marketing Director for Detroit Optimist Society, 7 restaurants and bars across Detroit.
Hospitality experience combined with performance marketing discipline, applied to independent operators. The person who diagnoses the problem builds the solution. No handoff. No telephone game.
Full backgroundWhat restaurant SEO actually involves
Four layers of search visibility, built in the right order
Most agencies sell "SEO" as one thing. It's not. It's four distinct disciplines that build on each other. I audit all four, then prioritize based on where your restaurant has the biggest gaps.
Technical SEO
The foundation everything else sits on. Site speed, mobile responsiveness, crawlability, schema markup, URL structure. If Google can't read your site properly, nothing else matters. Most restaurant websites have 20+ technical issues that silently kill rankings.
Local SEO + Google Business Profile
The Map Pack drives more restaurant traffic than organic results. GBP optimization, local citations, review velocity, category and attribute setup. When someone searches "best Thai near me," this is the layer that determines whether you show up.
On-Page SEO + Content Architecture
Every revenue stream needs its own search path. Catering, private dining, events, weekly specials — each one targets different queries. I build content architecture that matches how people actually search, not a single homepage trying to rank for everything.
AI + Generative Search Visibility
Google's AI Overviews and tools like ChatGPT are already answering "where should I eat" questions. Structured data, entity clarity, and authoritative content determine whether your restaurant gets recommended by AI — or gets skipped entirely. This layer is new. Most restaurants aren't thinking about it yet.
The Work
Chef Nam Catering: Building a brand from zero
Full-stack build. Zero to measurable growth in 6 months.
Chef Nam had built a catering business on reputation alone. No website, no search presence, no way to capture inquiries online. Every lead came through word of mouth. I did the market research, identified the opportunity, built the brand positioning, the website, paid search, social proof, and analytics — then stayed on to optimize.
At 6 months: organic traffic up, form inquiries generating consistently, and revenue on a compounding trajectory. The system keeps producing whether I touch it that week or not.
Ask me about Chef Nam's experience on a review call — or read the full case study for specifics.— Chef Nam, Chef Nam Catering
FAQs
Common questions about restaurant SEO
Everything you need to know before booking a call — clearly answered below.
Technical fixes — site speed, schema markup, broken links — can impact rankings within weeks. Content and local SEO typically take 3-6 months to compound. I set specific benchmarks at 30, 60, and 90 days so you can see progress before the big gains arrive.
Regular SEO gets your website ranking in organic results. Local SEO gets you into the Google Map Pack — the 3-listing box that appears for searches like 'best Thai food near me.' Most restaurant searches trigger the Map Pack, which means your Google Business Profile, reviews, and local citations matter as much as your website.
Not always. Some sites need a rebuild — if yours loads in 20 seconds, has no mobile responsiveness, or was built on a platform that blocks search engines, that's a foundation problem. But many restaurants have sites that just need technical cleanup, better content structure, and conversion paths added. The audit tells us which situation you're in.
The initial marketing infrastructure assessment is a paid engagement with a fixed price, scoped to your situation. Ongoing SEO work starts around $2K/month. Every dollar goes to specific deliverables — you'll know exactly what's being built and why.
You can do pieces of it — responding to reviews, keeping your Google Business Profile updated, posting content. But the technical foundation (site architecture, schema markup, keyword strategy, analytics) requires someone who does this full-time. Most restaurant owners who try DIY SEO spend hours on the wrong things because they don't have the data to know what matters.
Google uses review signals — quantity, recency, quality, and whether you respond — as a ranking factor for local search. Beyond rankings, every review response is a piece of indexed content. A restaurant generating 200+ responses per year is creating micro-documents that reinforce your location, cuisine type, and service keywords.
It's the listing that appears when someone searches your restaurant name or a local query. It shows your hours, photos, reviews, menu link, and location on Google Maps. For most restaurants, the GBP drives more calls and direction requests than the website does. Optimizing it is one of the highest-ROI things you can do.
If you can't answer 'which search terms bring people to my site' and 'how many of those visitors take an action,' your SEO isn't being measured — which means it isn't being managed. The free review includes a look at your current search visibility so you know where you stand before spending anything.
Couldn't find an answer you're looking for?
Contact Me
What does sustainable growth look like for your restaurant?
30 minutes. No pitch deck. I'll come prepared — I check your website, reviews, and competition before we talk. You tell me what your business looks like when it's working the way you know it should. I'll show you what's between here and there.
Book a Discovery Call