Boost Local Search: SEO Tips for Restaurants

Today, customers can — and do — engage with your restaurant brand through countless digital channels. They're still reading Google reviews and checking out recommendations in apps like Yelp and OpenTable. But, more and more, customers search for restaurants on social media and prompt AI tools for new dining experiences.

Now, there are more ways than ever for a customer to find a brand during their customer journey. As a marketer, surfacing across all of them — with updated and accurate brand information — is a massive job.

And it's crucial. For restaurants, showing up with the right information at the right time can make a customer choose your location over a competitor. In fact, 91% of customers say it's important for brand information to be accurate when they're deciding where to shop, stay, and eat. Meanwhile, 64% choose a different brand if their search reveals incorrect or missing information.

Here's what marketers need to do to stand out and drive revenue in this new era of local SEO.

The first key to SEO success is boosting your brand's signal to search engines through a robust digital presence.

This requires updating your brand's information - including location hours, address, and phone number, and menus - across an extended network of publishers. Taking these actions boosts your relevancy, accuracy, and consistency (among other factors).

An effective listings strategy needs to focus on more than the "big 5" major sites like Google, Facebook, Bing, Apple Maps, and Yelp. Why? Search engines reference information across a wide range of sites - even the smaller ones. When information is consistent across a diverse network of publishers, there is increased confidence that the information is correct. If your brand isn't consistently showing up across sites, or if your competitor is doing it better, that can impact your results and how you rank in search.

To test this theory, we conducted a first-of-its-kind study to see if managing information across a broader network boosts your signal, and therefore performance, on Google.

Yext analyzed over 620,000 global locations across 15 industries and discovered individual locations see up to 186% more website clicks from their Google Business Profile when they sync to at least 75% of the publishers in the Yext network.

The research included 69K global restaurant locations — and the results held up. When restaurant brands managed information across more publishers, like OpenTable and Zomato, they saw 65% more website clicks from Google.

Wondering if the number of locations you manage matters? If you're a large enterprise brand with thousands of locations, it might feel unfair to compare your performance to that of a restaurant with 30 locations — and vice versa. So, we split up the study based on restaurant size.

We found that, regardless of business size, syncing information to a wider network of publishers has a strong correlation on performance from Google.

The second key to SEO success is increasing the depth of your information so that it can surface beyond traditional search. The impact of managing information across publishers goes beyond website clicks - it also affects how (and if) your brand appears in search generative experiences.

AI models like Google Gemini and ChatGPT source their information about local businesses from a variety of different places, too – including both big and small publisher websites. How do we know? Learn more in our blog post. where we asked each major AI model, "Where do you get your local business information from?"

But search generative experiences do add a new layer of complexity to your SEO strategy. Consider a simple search query like "tacos near me." When you ask that same question to both Google Search and Gemini (Google's AI model powering AI Overviews), you'll see a different, more detailed answer from Gemini.

This shift shows why providing more detailed information online (beyond name, address, and phone number) is so important in generative search. Here, Gemini is (likely) pulling from many location listings as well as customer reviews to generate an answer in full-sentence form. And with 67% of people saying they already use generative search and AI tools,* the importance of managing how these models find and surface information will only grow.

To succeed, your restaurant brand first needs to be present across as many publishers as possible.

The third key to SEO success is an active, engaged, well-managed local social media presence. Customers from every generation are engaged with social media. As social media natives emerge as the next generation of customers, social is increasingly important for localized brands.

Why? 81% of Gen Z, 69% of Millennials, and 56% of Gen X trust brands with an active social presence. Similarly, 51% of all customers use social as a search engine, including local searches. Of course, posts featuring menus, seasonal offers, events, and user-generated content (UGC) boost local relevance in traditional search. Now, they have a growing impact on customers using AI search tools, too.

AI search tools and "traditional" algorithms are increasingly referencing social content — especially for restaurant brands. After all, restaurants have content with strong visual appeal that's super easy to share as posts, reels, and TikTok videos. How Yext helps: With tools to manage social profiles alongside listings, brands can create and distribute consistent, location-specific content — streamlining localized marketing while improving local discovery.

When it comes to optimizing your restaurant listings for SEO, publishing robust, recent, and consistent information acrossthe widest network of social platforms and listings management is a winning strategy.

With the largest network of direct-to-publisher API integrations, Yext gives restaurant brands clear, differentiated advantages. Other vendors who rely heavily on data aggregators simply cannot create the same level of visibility for their customers. Yext also manages social profiles alongside listings. Brands can share location-specific content consistently — simplifying local marketing while improving discovery.

Interested in learning more? Check out how Yext Listings can help your restaurant locations show up everywhere customers search. Or grab our Local Social Media Planner template, perfect for brand teams supporting hundreds, even thousands of restaurant locations.