Pub SEO – 10 Tips to Boost Your Online Presence
Having a pub SEO plan can give your venue a competitive edge.
Every industry can grow significantly with the right kind of reach on Google and that’s why SEO is so important.
When you implement SEO for your pub then you will show at the top of Google. Both on their local pack feature, map, and organic search results.
Digital marketing sets a successful business apart, and pubs can do this in many ways.
Google is a vital part of your online presence, and search engine optimization enhances it.
This is the one factor that can help you reach customers and make it easy for them to find you.
What is Search Engine Optimization?
Search Engine Optimization, more commonly known as SEO, is aimed at getting your website to rank higher in Google searches. This involves strategically using commonly searched terms on Google.
For instance, when someone searches “Pubs near me”, the right kind of SEO can help your website or location be among the first links. This makes your website more likely to be visited, increasing online visibility.
Effective SEO optimization can help you improve your pub’s rating in online search results, making it easily accessible to potential customers.
Here are our top tips for your pub SEO efforts and how to rank on Google.
9 tips to optimize pub SEO:
1. Keyword analysis
2. Connect your business to Google Maps
3. Get citations and links
4. Post content frequently
5. Descriptive titles
6. Track the performance of your website
7. General terms related to pubs
8. Make your site mobile friendly
9. Social media
.10. Get PR for backlinks
1. Keyword analysis
If you have just created an online presence, you will need to work on identifying keywords that can be integrated with your location pointers.
While this may seem like an easy task, the main goal is to identify the primary keywords being utilized by your competitors along with the most commonly searched terms.
It can help if you identify terms that are popular in locations near you to draw in local crowds to your pub.
There are a number of online tools that allow you to look up keywords, related terms, and the long tail keywords people use to find the right pub.
You can make use of free tools online to find the keywords as well as their SEO ranking.
Location identifiers and markers added to these keywords can also enhance your SEO significantly.
Remember that these keywords will create a baseline for the core semantics in your website.
You can also use a number of online tools to discover the most commonly searched keywords and those that your competitors are using to improve their SEO.
2. Connect your business to Google Maps
When potential customers search for “Pubs near me”, they usually get a search engine result page that comes with a local pack.
This displays the map of places or pubs that match the query they have.
It also comes with a list that displays four organizations that match the search, along with their basic information like customer rating, address, contact number and a link to their website.
There is a very high possibility that users skip the results and choose to only refer to the map.
Therefore, you need to ensure that your pub is displayed there.
Register your pub in Google’s My Business, with information like name, address, phone number and anything else it might ask.
Choose a category of business. Double check all the data you have provided.
Google My Business is a great way to ensure that your business shows up on local searches.
It also allows pubs to create and edit your menus in the My Business listing. This allows potential customers to access your menu easily.
3. Get citations and links
With your keywords figured out, you can now focus on citation and link development.
This can play an important role in improving your overall reach online.
Citations are just a listing of the name, address, and phone numbers associated with your pub.
This can be done on any national directory or local directory.
You can also target directories meant solely for pubs and restaurants.
Make sure that the name, address, and phone number are the same in all directories. If you do not want to pay for a site that can track traffic and conversions, Google Analytics is a great tool.
Inbound links that are from other credible websites and blogs can boost your search rankings.
Building a good relationship online and offline with other businesses that offer complementary services is a great way to secure such links.
4. Post content frequently
Having your own website is very important if you have a pub.
However, the digital journey doesn’t end here.
A search engine optimized website is essential as this allows your website to be rated among the top searches.
One way to do this is by constantly posting content that is fresh and updated.
The content you put up should be both unique and relevant to your pub.
This could be particularly useful around holidays when you have themed nights and so on. Some ways to do this are:
Blog.
A blog with weekly or even bimonthly posts about the latest developments in your pub, some fun trivia or even some information about a signature brew or dish can significantly boost customer interest. This can also increase traffic to your website, thereby improving the SEO ranking.
Customer Reviews.
You can request your customers to review the restaurant, or you could hold events for influencers to publish on your website.
This could also provide a source of constant interaction with viewers. This is also a great sales tool that can attract more customers
Visual Appeal.
Build up visual appeal by sharing photos of the ambience, dishes, and drinks.
These can attract more traffic to your website, significantly boosting up your SEO ranking.
5. Descriptive titles
When any search engine displays results, it might choose to utilize titles.
This means that any search terms are matched with the most relevant titles.
Thus, a crisp and concise title can help you improve your SEO ranking.
When you decide on a title, always think about what you would search for if you were hunting for great pubs.
You can then tweak it to make it relevant to your pub.
Your title should also be crisp and to the point, making it an easy decision for viewers to visit your site.
6. Track the performance of your website
Monitoring the right Key Performance Indicators of your pub’s website is a great way to understand whether your SEO strategy is working or not.
These KPIs can act as an effective control system, helping you monitor and identify effective strategies so that you can let go of those that don’t work.
In the long term, this saves you time and money by focusing on things that are driving traffic to your website.
There are a few indicators that can give you a fair idea about how your website is performing. Key among them are:
– Organic traffic that determines the number of website visitors you get from organic search results. It denotes growth of the number of people visiting your website.
– Search rankings, which help you identify SEO success, as well as how you fare with respect to the competition.
– Search visibility that shows how often the domain is shown in results.
– Links and backlinks.
– The organic click through rate that shows the percentage of viewers who clicked your link in comparison to those who viewed the search results. Low CTR can lower your rankings.
– Branded traffic to understand how your pub is doing in terms of brand awareness among customers.
7. General terms related to pubs
If you are looking to increase local traffic, you should include terms that are related to going to a pub.
While this does not increase branding, it can help you cater to those customers who just want to catch a game at a pub for example.
This also works well for those pubs that are family owned, or not linked to any major chain.
You can start by targeting the name of the city or generally the area of your location.
There are a lot of free tools that help you identify them.
This is a good strategy because people use these terms like “Pubs in New York” when they need quick results.
In such cases, having a high ranked page improves the odds of them visiting your pub.
8. Make your site mobile friendly
When people search for pubs, they are often outdoors. They are probably using a mobile device to quickly look up a good pub nearby.
Therefore, having a mobile friendly website is extremely important.
A quick and functioning mobile site will ensure more clicks, thereby improving your SEO ranking. Some ways to do this are:
– Use a Responsive Design: This is a mobile version with the same URL and content as your desktop website. Since it is adapted for mobile users, it makes it quite convenient.
– Develop a Mobile Website: This is a much better option in terms of user experience. It has a URL and is made especially for smartphone and laptop users. However, this is not good for the SEO due to its change in URL.
Mobile sites appeal to your customers as well as search engines.
You can use free tools to track the SEO performance of your mobile site as well.
It will also help you with several search engines that propel mobile-first indexing. Thus, it prevents you from losing more than half your traffic.
9. Social media
Social media presence also matters when it comes to pub SEO.
Make sure you have lively pictures of your happy hours, new cocktails, and any signature dishes.
Regularly update your social media with these details and write interesting titles that capture attention.
This can help build a slow and steady base of patrons who look forward to events at your pub.
This can help you boost your online presence, bringing you one step closer to a foolproof SEO strategy.
10. Get PR for backlinks
We’ve touched on how important backlinks are for ranking on Google, but there are many ways of getting them.
Backlinks are important because it will increase the domain authority of your pub’s website, which is essentially your trust score with Google.
And Google likes backlinks where the website backlinking has a good domain authority.
If you get a backlink from a website with a domain authority of 90/100, it will be more effective than 100 websites with domain authorities of 10/100.
This is why getting PR is so powerful, because usually news websites and blogs have strong domain authorities.
How do you get backlinks via PR?
It’s not easy, but you need to come up with newsworthy stories and then use a PR distributor to get your press release out there.
It’s a bit like fishing, you need to put yourself out there and hope that a news site picks up your release.
But when they do it’s incredible for your SEO efforts.
Why SEO is crucial
Pub SEO is an important tool to manage your pub’s reach. The main advantages of this are listed below:
– Organic search is the main source of traffic to your website. This means that it is a critical component that helps spread the word about your pub. Thus, it has the potential to drive customers to your pub. Search engines contribute towards a pub’s visibility, making it a perfect platform to deploy your marketing skills.
– SEO can help build trust and credibility. Whether you own a local pub or a franchise of a large chain, SEO lays the foundation for trust. Having a clean website that provides great user experience is important, but it will only have the desired effect if your website is among the top options provided. This takes time to establish and build. In due time, with the right kind of SEO, your brand could become popular. However, this requires constant interaction with your potential customers. SEO offers you this opportunity.
– It helps you understand what your customers want. You can have meaningful insights into the shifts that happen in the market. This can be gauged through changes in search query data, SERP analysis, and even analytics. This tells you what you need to change to stay relevant before the trend has even caught on. In addition, customer reviews give you a fair idea about what your customers love and what they don’t. This tells you what you should continue doing and what you need to change in order to keep your customers coming back.
– SEO is vital when it comes to ensuring better engagement rates, traffic, and conversions. Local SEO is aimed at your specific location. It helps you enhance your reach among local pub-goers, and this can be a great way to advertise your pub at the regional level. This includes a number of user reviews on sites like Yelp. Good SEO will impact your customer base positively, allowing for real time research.
– SEO is a cheap and efficient method to get massive payoffs in the form of happy and regular customers. It builds a buzz around your pub, and patrons will look forward to new events, theme nights, and happy hours.
