On the first page of Google for "restaurants central london" there is not a single restaurant website. The ten organic results are Tripadvisor, Bon Vivant, the Covent Garden estate site, the MICHELIN Guide, First Table, The Good Food Guide, SquareMeal, a food stylist's blog, a Secret London post on Facebook and OpenTable. Above them, though, there is a local pack with three Google Business Profile listings: Fallow (4.7 stars, 13,000 reviews), Blacklock Covent Garden (4.7, 2,800) and Happy London (4.4, 10,000) (DataForSEO, Google UK, London, September 2026).
For a single restaurant, restaurant SEO is almost entirely local SEO: the work that gets your Google Business Profile into the local pack for "cuisine + city", "near me" and neighbourhood searches, backed by a small website that supports the listing (menu, booking, opening hours) and by a consistent presence on TheFork, OpenTable and Tripadvisor. Organic rankings for the website on "restaurant + city" come later, and only once the listing is already strong.
This is a revised version of an article we published a few years ago, rebuilt with data from two UK SERPs and four pizza businesses: Vasiniko, a small independent with a one-page website, and the chains Pizza Pilgrims, Rudy's and Pizza Union.
How hungry people search, according to Google
We scanned two typical searches from London, "restaurants central london" (8,100 searches a month) and "pizza london" (3,600 searches a month), and counted what is on the first page.
| SERP element | "restaurants central london" | "pizza london" |
|---|---|---|
| Google Business Profile listings (local pack) | 3 | 3 |
| Individual restaurant websites in the organic results | 0 | 3 (Detroit Pizza London, Pizza Union, Crazy Pizza) |
| Booking and review platforms | 3 (Tripadvisor, First Table, OpenTable) | 1 (Tripadvisor) |
| Publications, guides, blogs and social posts | 6 (Bon Vivant, MICHELIN Guide, The Good Food Guide, SquareMeal, Eye Swoon, Secret London) | 5 (Wrap Your Lips Around This, Hungry Soles, an Instagram creator, My Big Fat Halal Blog, CN Traveller) |
| AI Overview | no | yes |
| Ads at the top (desktop) | 0 | 0 |
Two things stand out. First: none of the three restaurant sites in the organic results on "pizza london" is in the local pack, and none of them is there for its content. Detroit Pizza London has a home page with an address and opening hours and a name that contains the query, Pizza Union's home page title says "Pizza Restaurants in London", and Crazy Pizza ranks with a "coming soon" page. We come back to this below. Second: most of the results for central London are list articles, and the "People also ask" questions are of the same kind ("What are the top 10 restaurants in central London?", "What is the hottest restaurant in London right now?"). Google has decided that someone looking for a restaurant in the centre wants a list.
The volumes confirm that real demand is about proximity and type of cuisine, not "restaurant + city + centre".
| Keyword | Searches/month | Average CPC |
|---|---|---|
| restaurants near me | 11,100,000 | £0.30 |
| pizza near me | 550,000 | £0.49 |
| restaurants london | 40,500 | £0.84 |
| restaurants manchester | 40,500 | £0.70 |
| bottomless brunch london | 27,100 | £0.46 |
| gluten free restaurants near me | 27,100 | £0.23 |
| brunch london | 22,200 | £0.40 |
| restaurants covent garden | 18,100 | £0.94 |
| japanese restaurant london | 12,100 | £0.95 |
| best pizza london | 9,900 | £0.47 |
| seafood restaurant london | 8,100 | £0.52 |
| restaurants edinburgh city centre | 8,100 | £0.57 |
| restaurants central london | 8,100 | £0.78 |
| wedding venues london | 6,600 | £1.53 |
| pizza london | 3,600 | £0.76 |
"Restaurants near me" is searched about 1,370 times as often as "restaurants central london". And the longer query is shrinking: "restaurants central london" went from 12,100 searches a month in autumn 2025 to 6,600 in spring and summer 2026, down 45%, while "restaurants near me" peaked at 13.6 million in August 2026. People type the area into the search bar less and less and let their phone tell Google where they are.
Further reading: how to read search intent from a SERP.
Your Google Business Profile is your main website
Vasiniko, an independent pizzeria on Burleigh Street in Covent Garden (with a second site near Trafalgar Square), shows this best. Its site has 289 organic keywords and an estimated 12,300 visits a month, and all of the 100 keywords in our sample land on the home page: in practice it is a one-page site. It ranks sixth for "pizza covent garden" (2,400 searches) and ninth for "best italian pizza in london" (9,900). But 93% of its estimated organic traffic comes from people searching its name: "vasiniko" alone gets 33,100 searches a month.
Those searches are not generated by the website. They come from the Google Business Profile: Vasiniko has 4.9 stars from 7,500 reviews and sits in the local pack for "pizza london", next to Fatto a Mano Covent Garden and Rudy's in Soho. People find it on Maps or in the local pack, then search the name to check the menu or the address. The site collects demand that the listing creates.
A caveat on the data: DataForSEO assigns national volumes to proximity queries, for example "pizza" (368,000 searches, Rudy's in position 9) or "pizza near me" (550,000, Rudy's in position 14). For a proximity search the ranking changes every few hundred metres, so those estimates show direction, not real traffic.
On the listing itself, the things we have seen move impressions in local projects are few and specific:
- the right primary category ("Pizza restaurant" rather than "Restaurant" if you sell pizza, "Seafood restaurant" if you sell fish) and secondary categories for occasions (brunch, bar, caterer);
- completed attributes: cuisine, price range, table service, delivery, outdoor seating, accessibility;
- the menu uploaded into the listing as items and prices, not as a photo of a printed card;
- the booking button connected to TheFork, OpenTable or your own system;
- new photos every week, taken by you and not only by customers;
- opening hours always up to date, bank holidays included: "restaurants open on christmas day near me" averages 1,000 searches a month but reached 5,400 in December 2025.
On reviews, a correction to our earlier article, which suggested giving a small voucher to anyone who left five stars. Google's policies prohibit offering money, discounts or other incentives in exchange for reviews, and the spam filters remove them in batches when they spot the pattern. What works is asking for the review at the table with a QR code, and replying to every review, including the two-star ones: the next customers read the replies.
Further reading: the complete guide to Google Business Profile.
What the website must do, and what it can skip
A restaurant website has three jobs: tell Google who you are and where you are, show the menu with prices, and take bookings. Everything else is optional.
The home page title is the single element that carries the most weight. Pizza Union wrote it with the formula "type of venue + city + distinguishing feature": "Pizza Union: Superfast Fire-Baked Pizza Restaurants in London". With that line the home page ranks for "pizza london" (3,600 searches, position 5), "london uk pizza" (position 2) and "kings cross pizza" (position 3) without a page for each. A title that only says "Home | Restaurant name" brings in none of these.
The menu belongs in HTML, with dishes and prices as text. A PDF ranks poorly, is hard to read on a phone and cannot be linked to the menu in your Google listing. If you have several sites or change the menu every season, use one menu page per site with the date of the last update at the top.
Schema.org Restaurant markup with address, opening hours, cuisine, price range and booking link keeps the site and the listing consistent: name, address and phone number must be identical, character for character, on the website, the listing, TheFork, OpenTable and Tripadvisor.
Booking must sit at the top of every page on mobile. On the restaurant sites we have analysed, the "Book" button nearly always opens the TheFork or OpenTable widget or a similar system: that is fine, as long as the click is tracked as a conversion. More on this in the measurement section.
The site does not need to be big. Vasiniko has one page; Pizza Union, with 994 organic keywords, gets all of its estimated traffic on one URL, the home page. The ten "story, philosophy, chef, team" pages that come with restaurant templates attract no searches, and those templates are often slow on mobile, which is where the 11.1 million monthly searches for "restaurants near me" come from.
Pages by area and occasion, not by city
The related searches for "pizza london" are "pizza london near me", "pizza london delivery", "pizza london soho", "best pizza in central london", "cheap pizza london" and "italian pizza london". Almost all of them add an area, a style, a price point or a service. None is a longer version of "pizza london".
For a single restaurant, a "restaurant in London" page is the wrong page: it competes with Tripadvisor and its tens of thousands of reviews, and with the lists in CN Traveller and The Good Food Guide. The right pages are the neighbourhood ("pizza in Soho": "pizza soho" gets 2,900 searches a month) and the occasion: "bottomless brunch london" gets 27,100 searches a month, "brunch london" 22,200, "japanese restaurant london" 12,100, "seafood restaurant london" 8,100, "private dining london" 2,900. A listing alone cannot cover these searches, because it has one primary category and cannot be "pizza restaurant" and "private dining venue" at the same time.
The practical rule: one page for each "what + where" or "what + when" combination your customers mention on the phone. Five or six pages, with real photos and the booking button. Not fifty pages generated for every neighbourhood: Google ignores those.
Further reading: how to do keyword research when volumes are small.
Chain or single restaurant: two different jobs
Pizza Pilgrims, Rudy's and Pizza Union are the three chains we analysed, and they show that for a chain SEO is a different job.
| Domain | Organic keywords | Estimated visits/month | Keywords in position 1 | Share of traffic from brand searches (sample of 100) | URLs receiving traffic |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| rudyspizza.co.uk | 2,925 | 159,220 | 377 | 80% | home + one page per location |
| pizzapilgrims.co.uk | 3,045 | 98,810 | 157 | 43% | home + one page per location |
| pizzaunion.com | 994 | 21,056 | 29 | 47% | home page only |
| vasinikopizza.co.uk | 289 | 12,303 | 11 | 93% | home page only |
Pizza Union has several London sites but one page. Searches for each location, "pizza union holborn" (9,900 searches a month), "pizza union aldgate" (8,100) and "pizza union spitalfields" (8,100), all land on the home page: someone looking for the Holborn branch wants that branch's opening hours and menu, and gets a general page to start again from.
Pizza Pilgrims and Rudy's made the opposite choice: one page per restaurant (/pizzerias/covent-garden/, /pizzerias/edinburgh/, /location/ancoats/, /location/portland-street/), and each one is first for its own search, from "pizza pilgrims covent garden" (12,100 searches) and "pizza pilgrims edinburgh" (9,900) to "rudys ancoats" (27,100) and "rudy's pizza napoletana portland street" (18,100). The location pages also pick up proximity queries: Rudy's Peter Street page in Manchester is third for "restaurant pizza near me" (14,800). For a chain, the SEO work is mostly this: a real local page for every site, linked to its own Google listing, not a list of addresses.
For the independent restaurant the picture is different again: Vasiniko's non-brand organic traffic is under 1,000 estimated visits a month. The single restaurant does not win on its website; it wins in the local pack, and the website catches the brand searches the listing generates. It has a listing to push up, not a site to grow.
Further reading: how company size changes SEO strategy.
A recipe blog brings traffic, not bookings
The most repeated piece of advice in restaurant marketing guides, our own earlier version included, is "start a blog with recipes". The data says what it is really worth.
In the UK, "pizza dough recipe" gets 60,500 searches a month with a CPC of £0.18. The first page belongs to a bakery (Mark's Bread), YouTube, a Facebook group, the Daily Express, Reddit, a recipe carousel with Sally's Baking Addiction, Jamie Oliver and BBC Food, and an AI Overview citing Jamie Oliver, BBC Food, BBC Good Food and taste.com.au. There is no restaurant. Pizza Pilgrims has a "pizza at home" page, and it ranks first only for "pizza pilgrims dough recipe" (110 searches), that is, for people who already know the brand.
When a restaurant does win this game, it looks like the Italian chain Rossopomodoro, which we analysed for the Italian version of this article: on Google Italy a single page, "how to make pizza at home", ranks fifth for "pizza" (673,000 searches a month) and brings over 40,000 estimated visits a month, almost half the domain's traffic. But 70% of its keywords are informational, and someone searching for pizza dough is about to switch on their own oven, not go out. For a chain with a national brand, that traffic builds awareness and is cheap to produce. For a neighbourhood pizzeria the same 40,000 visits would not fill a single cover, and the hours spent writing them are better spent on the listing.
If you want to write, write about things that lead to a table: the area page, the occasion page, a "gluten-free menu" ("gluten free restaurants near me" gets 27,100 searches a month) or a "kids' menu" if you really have one. Small searches, from people choosing where to go tonight.
Further reading: how to create SEO content without writing for the sake of it.
TheFork, Tripadvisor and magazine lists: get into them, don't try to beat them
In the two SERPs we analysed, 11 of the 19 organic positions are held by publications, guides, blogs and social posts (CN Traveller, the MICHELIN Guide, The Good Food Guide, SquareMeal, Bon Vivant, Secret London and food bloggers) and 4 by platforms (Tripadvisor twice, OpenTable, First Table). Above the organic results, Google adds a "find results on" carousel with Tripadvisor, OpenTable, DesignMyNight, SquareMeal, TheFork, Uber Eats and Just Eat. A restaurant will not outrank them with its own domain: Tripadvisor has tens of millions of pages and the publications have decades of links.
The realistic job is to be inside those pages. Lists such as CN Traveller's "The best pizza in London 2026: 31 tasty slices to try" or The Good Food Guide's London top 10 get updated; local food journalists respond to an opening, a new chef, a seasonal menu. This is digital PR, and in hospitality it is worth more than any bought link building: a link from a London food guide brings customers as well as authority.
On the platforms, your TheFork, OpenTable and Tripadvisor profiles need the same care as the Google listing: same photos, same menu, same opening hours. On "restaurants central london" Tripadvisor is the first organic result, and on "pizza london" it is second: anyone who lands there and does not find you, or finds a profile with two photos and a 2023 menu, goes to the competitor two lines below.
How to measure whether it works
Your website's position on "restaurants london" is the wrong number to watch. Tripadvisor wins that search, and the longer query with the area lost 45% of its volume in a year.
We track four numbers for restaurants: Google Business Profile impressions split between searches for your name and searches for your category (the ratio tells you whether you are growing with new customers or only with people who already know you), actions on the listing (calls, direction requests, website clicks, booking clicks), bookings tracked on the website as conversions in Google Analytics, and Search Console queries filtered for those that include an area or an occasion. One simple step: tag the website link in your listing with UTM parameters, as Blacklock Covent Garden does, so that visits from Google Maps show up separately in your analytics.
A warning about tracking, which in hospitality is nearly always broken. The "Book" button opens an external widget, and the conversion recorded is the click, not the booking. In other sectors we have found accounts counting technical events as results, such as the 1,487 "conversions" at €0.61 at Sunscape before we rebuilt the tracking. With TheFork or OpenTable, confirmed bookings are visible in their dashboard: compare them every month with clicks on the button, and that is your real conversion rate.
Further reading: which SEO KPIs to track and which to ignore.
SEO or Google Ads?
In neither of the two SERPs we scanned was there an ad at the top. Cost per click is among the lowest of the sectors we work in: £0.78 for "restaurants central london", £0.76 for "pizza london", £0.30 for "restaurants near me". For tonight's dinner Google Ads is rarely needed, because the local pack already answers for free.
Ads make sense where the listing cannot reach: catering ("catering london" 2,900 searches a month, CPC £2.81), private dining ("private dining london" 2,900, CPC £2.94), weddings and events ("wedding venues london" 6,600, CPC £1.53), delivery, an opening, the peak season in a tourist city. We go through the budget maths in Google Ads for restaurants. For a local business with two sites in the province of Mantua in Italy, Contesini Consulenze, local Search combined with Performance Max linked to the listing brought 299 enquiries in seven months at €7.20 each: it is the same model we would apply to a restaurant with a service to sell beyond dinner.
The same reasoning applies in Italian-speaking Switzerland, where we are based: "ristorante lugano" gets 1,900 searches a month on Google Italy alone (Swiss data has to be measured separately), and the SERP is built the same way, with a local pack and platforms.
Further reading: how to make SEO and Google Ads work together.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a website if I already have a Google listing and TheFork?
Yes, but a small one. Vasiniko gets an estimated 12,300 visits a month with a single page. Google uses the site to confirm the entity (name, address, phone, cuisine); you use it for the menu with prices, for bookings that do not carry a commission, and for the area and occasion pages the listing cannot cover.
How many reviews do I need to get into the local pack?
There is no threshold. In the local pack for "pizza london", Vasiniko with 7,500 reviews sits next to Fatto a Mano Covent Garden with 2,000: distance from the searcher, category and a steady flow of new reviews all count. Ten reviews a month, every month, weigh more than two hundred arriving in one week.
Is a PDF menu really a problem?
Yes, for three reasons: Google indexes it poorly, on a phone it opens in another app, and it cannot be linked to the menu section of your Google listing. An HTML page with dishes and prices as text solves all three, and takes five minutes to update.
Is SEO worth it for a restaurant in a small town?
That is where it pays off fastest. On "restaurants central london" you are up against the MICHELIN Guide and Tripadvisor; in a market town the local pack has three places and often only five or six restaurants with a well-kept listing. The same well-built listing that gets you onto the second page of Maps in London gets you into first position in a small town.
How much does SEO for a restaurant cost?
For a single restaurant the work is concentrated: the listing, a website of a few pages, consistency across platforms, some contact with the local press. We are talking about an initial project and a few hours a month, not an e-commerce retainer. We set out the orders of magnitude in how much SEO costs.
Further reading: the full picture of marketing channels for a restaurant.
Where to start
Open your Google Business Profile dashboard and look at the ratio between searches for your name and searches for your category over the last six months. If category searches are less than a third, the listing is not bringing in new customers: fixing the category, attributes, menu and photos is next week's job. Then search for your restaurant on Google from a phone, half a mile away, using the word your customers use ("pizza", "seafood", "brunch"), and see who is in the local pack instead of you. The rest of the strategy is built from that screen. If you would like us to look at it together, get in touch.
