Bar SEO – 9 Tips to Boost Your Bar’s Online Presence

 

 

Bar SEO is the process of optimizing your bar’s website and listing so it appears at the top of the search results on search engines.

“Among hundreds of competitors out there, how can I set my bar aside?”

We’re sure this thought must have crossed every bar owner’s mind.

The answer is simple – there are many ways to boost the footfall in your bar. Of all these, one of the most effective ways is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO).

Having a systematic, organized bar SEO plan can take you miles ahead of your compatriots in terms of attention, footfall, and revenue.

The whole aim of SEO is to improve the visibility of your bar on Google.

When prospective customers search for popular bars near them, your bar will pop up right at the top of the search results.

Also, your website would rank higher in Google searches.

9 tips to optimize your bar SEO:

 

1. Why is SEO so important?
2. Keyword analysis
3. Link your business to Google Maps
4. Post content regularly
5. Track the website performance
6. A mobile friendly site
7. Have an incredible social media presence
8. Get backlinks
9. Optimize your local SEO

 

1. Why is SEO so important?

 

Search Engine Optimisation will help boost the organic traffic to your website.

It is the best form on inbound marketing because your customers are actively looking for your bar to visit.

The best and most effective way of ensuring a consistently increasing footfall is to work on boosting the organic traffic.

It helps improve your visibility and beats algorithms to always ensure your ranking stays at the top.

With SEO, you can enhance your visibility, helping you successfully implement your marketing strategies.

 

 

SEO also helps build the credibility of your brand.

SEO strategies may take time to show results, but once you start ranking its magic, there’s no turning back.

With proper SEO tactics, you can ensure your business has all the exposure it deserves.

Overtime, with the right SEO strategies, you will watch your brand grow and become popular.

Even when your bar becomes popular, remember you must continue directing efforts towards the SEO strategies – as this would help you maintain your brand’s improved level.

It also helps you understand what your customers want.

There are numerous factors which can affect your SEO rankings and customer expectations is one of them.

To know this well, you need to ensure you focus on customer reviews – they would give you a good gist of what customers like, don’t like, and expect of your bar.

This in turn would help you work towards bettering your brand, which again would help in boosting your visibility and reach.

 

 

Most importantly, SEO is a cost-effective way to boost your marketing.

With a simple understanding of what SEO is and how it works, you can even work towards creating strategies without professional help.

It helps you create the required buzz around your brand, without splurging thousands of dollars.
And of course, the returns of a well-implemented SEO strategy are unmatchable.

As a business owner, you’re ready to do all it takes to ensure your bar flourishes – so why not start off with a good, well-researched Search Engine Optimisation strategy?

SEO is a game of keywords and backlinks – you nail the keywords, and you’ll notice results slowly and steadily.

The usage of these keywords has to be strategic (and not scattered) to be effective and impactful. You also need backlinks from other websites that have a good DA score, but more on that later.

Let’s first have a look at how you boost your bar SEO and get your rank right at the top using keywords.

 

2. Keyword analysis

 

Creating an online presence is merely the first step in the digital marketing world.

After this, you have to immediately start working on your keyword game.

For starters, identify the keywords that are relevant to your location. For example, analyze the most searched keywords in your locality.

It may be a “top retro bar near me” or a simple “cool bar near me”.

This seems to be an easy task, right?

 

 

But along with identifying commonly used keywords, you also have to find out the keywords capitalised by your competitors.

Identifying these terms would immediately help you draw local crowds to your pub.

The right keywords would translate into higher footfall in no time.

How can you find the perfect keywords for your bar? Well, there are many tools available out there that have now made your job easy.

These tools help you nail the keywords, related terms, and long tail keywords that people commonly use to find a new theme. Our favourite tool for good keyword research is UberSuggest.

 

 

These tools are free and help you find not only keywords, but your competitions SEO rankings as well.

Both the aspects, along with location identifiers are great rank boosters.

You can also opt to use multiple online tools to discover commonly used keywords – using multiple tools would help you cover all your bases well.

 

3. Link your business to Google Maps

 

Google Maps is the go-to tool everyone uses when it comes to finding places near them.

So, when a potential customer searches ‘Bars near me’, Google Maps will immediately list bars on the basis of the customer’s location.

Along with the maps, Google will also come up with a list of bars in the specified location.

This list would come with all the essential details – the address, distance from the customer’s current location, contact number, customer ratings as well as the link to the bar’s website.

Most users tend to skip the list and choose to browse through the map directly.

 

 

This makes it essential for you to ensure that your bar is linked to Google Maps, so that customers know your bar exists.

For this, you have to register your bar in Google’s My Business, with all the requisite information such as name, address, contact details, website and other such details.

Signing up with Google My Business is the best way to ensure your bar shows up right at the top in local searches.

Google My Business is very user friendly, and allows businesses to edit, make additions, and delete details from their listings as well.

It also gives you the option of putting out your menu out there, so that potential customers can have a glimpse before deciding to step into your bar.

 

4. Post content regularly

 

Businesses post content regularly because that’s the only way to ensure their ranking stays where it is.

If you stop posting content, your ranking, no matter how high it is, will slip downwards. And that’s something you don’t want to happen.

Create a content calendar and ensure you stick to it.

You can pick days on which you will post content – these can be specific days of the week.

You can also include festivals or other special occasions and weave content around them.

Do make sure your content is fresh and unique, and not something every other pub would generally post.
Hiring a dedicated marketing and content team would do wonders.

The sole task of this team would be to come up with attractive content – content that would be loved by all your existing as well as potential customers.

 

 

The content you post should be relevant to your bar, while maintaining its uniqueness.

Some of the ways to keep churning out content for your website is to write a blog.

A monthly, bimonthly blog would do wonders to maintain your ranking. It would also help to boost your visibility and traffic, increasing chances of conversion of leads.

Sharing impressive images and videos from your pub is a nice way to catch the attention of the masses.

Visually appealing content is currently ruling the digital marketing world and would definitely work in favour of your bar marking too.

Along with a blog, you can also request your customers to review your pub on your website.

There’s nothing like word-of-mouth publicity, considering that people heavily rely on reviews to choose the places they visit.

Reviews are a great way to keep up with customer interaction, helping you attract more customers to your bar.

 

5. Track the website performance

 

You’re putting in all this effort to boost your rankings – but is it actually showing results?

That’s something we need to keep track of the results your website shows after implementing an SEO strategy.

The Key Performance Indicators of your website would make tracking super easy. All you have to do is monitor the SEO strategies you’ve implemented.

When you track the performance, you also understand which strategies are working in your favour and which one’s aren’t.

You can then set aside those that aren’t yielding any results and keep directing your efforts towards strategies that work best.

 

 

This would help you save time and money, and of course effort.

You would know which areas require more effort and which are doing just fine.

Some of the best ways to monitor the performance of your website is to check the number of organic visitors.

This is the best way that denotes the growth of the number of people visiting your website.

Secondly, search rankings would help you identify SEO success, while giving you comparative figures as to how your SEO is working as compared to their competitors.

Organic click through rate also shows the number of people who click on the link, as compared to those who merely viewed the search results without any action.

A low CTR is an indicator that your SEO strategies aren’t working the way they should – which means you’d have to investigate what needs to be changed.

 

6. A mobile friendly site

 

Let’s be honest, no one really pulls out their laptops to search for places they want to visit while on the go.

The smartphone is what we all use and will continue to use as it is convenient and delivers quick results as well. This makes it important for you, as a bar owner, to have a mobile-friendly website.

Do ensure your site does not lag on smartphones.

It’s a huge downside and will indeed drive away potential customers from visiting your bar.

A simple, attractive, quick and user-friendly website is what you need to ensure people can access it from anywhere, from any device.

 

 

A functional website would help increase your clicks, thus boosting your SEO rankings.
Using a responsive website design is important.

This would help retain the same content as you have on the desktop version of your website on your mobile website as well. More specifically, opt for developing a mobile friendly website from the beginning.

This would ensure hassle-free access to all your potential customers.

Mobile-friendly websites appeal to customers and work wonders for your rankings too.

You can also track the SEO performance of the mobile website with the help of different tools to know the exact customer base trying to access your business via smartphones.

 

7. Have an incredible social media presence

 

Social media is very important when it comes to SEO.

As you focus on your website content, do ensure to put in ample effort in your social media platforms as well.

As a bar owner, you need to have a social media presence on all platforms. Whether it is Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook or Twitter, you need to curate content that is compatible with all these platforms.
Remember, different social media apps thrive on different types of content.

 

 

For example, Instagram is all about eye-catching, measuring images that would make someone want to visit your bar right away.

On the other hand, crisp, catchy content is what Twitter is all about. Knowing the requirements of each platform and the type of audience they have are important factors to keep in mind as you create content for your social media sites.

Along with this you need to make sure you have a content calendar planned for your social media sites as well.

Posting regularly is key to staying in the game. Do ensure to accompany your posts with relevant and accurate hashtags as well. This would help boost your reach.

 

8. Get backlinks

 

Backlinks are the final piece of the puzzle for good bar SEO.

As well as keywords, Google uses backlinks to measure whether they should rank your website or not.

By getting backlinks from other websites this essentially tells Google that you are worth ranking because other sites are talking about you.

The quality of the backlinks is also important.

 

 

Google doesn’t rank you if you get thousands of backlinks from thousands of spammy looking websites.

Google like decent sites and they use the website’s DA score to measure this.

Every website has a DA score out of 100. If you get a backlink from a website with a high DA score then Google prefers this to hundreds of backlinks from low DA scored websites.

So as a bar you need to find websites that are relevant to your bar with a high DA score. If they backlink to you then it will push your website to the top of Google in no time.

 

9. Optimize your local SEO

 

Local SEO is crucial for bars, as it helps potential customers find your business when they search for “bars near me” or similar terms.

To optimize your local SEO, ensure your business is listed on Google My Business and other local directories.

Verify your listing and provide accurate information, including your business name, address, phone number (NAP), website, hours of operation, and photos.

 

 

Encourage customers to leave reviews on your Google My Business listing, as positive reviews can significantly boost your local rankings.

Additionally, optimize your website’s content for local search by including relevant keywords like your city, neighborhood, or specific landmarks.

Consider creating pages dedicated to local events, happy hours, or neighborhood specials to attract more local customers.

By focusing on local SEO, you can increase your visibility in search engine results pages and drive foot traffic to your bar.

 

Summing up

 

Now that we’ve told you the best bar SEO tips, it is time for you to work on them!

We hope the tips are helpful for you to create an amazing, successful SEO strategy for your bar.