To locate restaurants in their area, either to visit or to place an order, food clients rely heavily nowadays on Google searches. Making sure the restaurant’s website is on the search engine's top results is one of the most effective ways to boost website traffic and draw in more customers. But how does a restaurant owner know what to improve to get a better ranking in search engine’s results page?

Within the online ordering system’s restaurant admin panel there is the Website Scanner automated tool that analyzes the restaurant’s website to see how well prepared it is for online success. The Scanner is located in the Marketing Tools section.

Depending on results, this tool provides restaurant owners with recommendations on how they can improve their website.
 

Note: for the suggestions below, restaurant owners will need to work with the web developer or agency that has built their website, and they can directly send the recommendations via email through an option found in the system .

Which aspects of the restaurant website are reviewed by the Website Scanner?

The Website Scanner verifies essential SEO (search engine optimization) and design elements to get a good visibility in the search engines page results. If some parameters are found lacking, it displays a set of recommendations to improve them. These suggestions are also meant to ensure a better experience for the restaurant’s clients that visit the website to order online. 
Read further to find out what restaurant owners might be recommended to work on:

Optimize/organize website content
A reliable way to considerably increase traffic to the restaurant website is to make the website visible in search engine results pages. Well organized content ensures that these search engines are able to read it. Organize the text information in title tags, meta descriptions and regular paragraphs that include the restaurant’s name and city. Make sure to group the visual information (photos) in galleries.

Boost the visitor to order conversion
For better conversion results, it is recommended that the restaurant’s website visitors have the ordering and/or reservation widgets in sight at all times while navigating the website. It can be added to the header, footer and center of the page, or placed on a sticky bar. Moreover, add the widgets on as many other website pages as possible. This way, when the visitor has seen enough information to start ordering, they can easily find and open the menu widget. 

Improve the website’s loading speed
Verify and make sure the restaurant website loads rapidly. This is checked with Google Page Speed Test and the results are displayed in brief like this: 

Slow website loading times, especially on mobile devices, can put food clients off from browsing the menu or even ordering through the restaurant website. The Scanner provides details on the restaurant website's performance and lists whether any action is required in order to improve its loading speed. 

Get a real domain name
To reduce their costs, some restaurants use subdomains (i.e. pronto-ny.websitebuilder.com) from their website builder instead of real domains. Having a real domain name (for example pronto-ny.com) significantly helps ranking better in search engines. Just as the users who look for restaurants online, these search engines prefer real brand names or keywords related to the restaurant business. What’s more, it gives confidence in the restaurant’s website and help boost its branding.

Check the website security
A safe and technically sound restaurant website is one of the ways of gaining the trust of food clients. Some browsers will warn or even prevent visitors from opening websites that don’t have an SSL certificate. Having a valid SSL certificate, content delivered through secure connections and proper redirect to HTTPS  not only helps search engines ranking, but also creates a safer online experience for the food clients. 

Structure the website’s content according to Schema.org
Add Schema.org for opening hours, restaurant address, latitude / longitude and menu link. It improves the way search engines read and represent your page in search engines results pages. The developer or agency who has built the website will likely be familiar with this concept. 

Add links to social media pages and local restaurant listings
Add links in the restaurant website to the Facebook business page, TripAdvisor page and Yelp listing, or to any other social media profiles the restaurant has. Linking to trusted social profiles can improve the restaurant’s online credibility, increases the chances of its name showing up in search results and make the restaurant website more discoverable on organic searches by increasing its visibility. 

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For the restaurant website, online success means more sales opportunities and, consequently, more orders coming in. To make that possible, restaurant owners should first become aware of what they can optimize to make their website visible and user-friendly. A good place to start is to use the Website Scanner and then they can easily unlock the sales potential of their own restaurant website or their sales optimized website.