Real SEO for Restaurants Goes Beyond What ChatGPT Does

Some restaurant owners think SEO is just another way to plaster their menus on Google, kind of like throwing pasta at a wall and hoping a few strands stick. Add the belief that ChatGPT can magically do SEO for you, and suddenly, you’ve cooked a recipe for disappointment.

Here’s the unseasoned truth. ChatGPT is clever, but it cannot manage SEO for you, not even close.

And posting content without tracking results? That’s like adding jalapeno powder without tasting it first, fiery regret guaranteed.

If you actually understand how SEO works, you can tie it directly to your real business goals (translation: revenue, not vanity likes). That way, you won’t waste money or over your marketing strategy to a chatbot that doesn’t even understand your business’s unique history.

How Restaurant Goals Shape SEO

Optimising a restaurant in search engines can take many forms. Some places thrive on a process called Local SEO (hello, Google Maps searches like “burrito near Senayan”).

While others depend on a stronger website that drives weekday reservations, not weekends only. ChatGPT doesn’t fully understand that SEO isn’t one-size-fits-all, because it lacks knowledge of your business model.

Take these two burrito businesses I sampled:

1. One is a truck-container parked outside a stadium. No seats (except those multi-trap garden benches), just fast bites.
2. The other is a full-service Mexican restaurant with salsa music and decor that screams the Maria Mercedes soap opera reruns, complete with kids running around with guacamole stains on their shirts.

Did you see their differences?

• The container perhaps wants to boost takeaway orders. Its SEO goal should focus on improved clicks from Google Maps. It relies heavily on hungry customers who are typing ‘burritos’ around Senayan while jogging home or are hungry and need fast food.
• The sit-down restaurant, on the other hand, wants families who’ll return year after year. Then its SEO goal might be to increase clicks on the ‘Reserve Now’ button. This is because a diner who cooks once, is far more likely to book again.

ChatGPT hasn’t been able to set these nuanced goals. If you type in ChatGPT something like, “I want my burrito business to attract family-type customers. What kind of SEO will you do?”, then ChatGPT is more likely to spit out something like targeting family-related burrito keywords and partnering with mom bloggers.

However, this chatbot has not been updated to reflect that SEO today is more about:

• making sure tools like Gemini can understand your site when someone searches “best burrito for children in Senayan”
• showing your site when people search using their own voice on cellphones

Keeping Goals Tasty with the STAR Framework

Determining a goal for SEO will make the optimisation process more efficient and help the restaurant achieve its business goal. A friend of mine, Deasy Nathalia, once dropped a gem in an SEO webinar: the STAR framework. It stands for Specific, Trackable, Aligned, and Realistic. Skip one, then the whole dish falls flat.

For example, the burrito container above wants more weekday sales by SEO. When you ask ChatGPT to do it, it will probably drown you in questions it can’t answer: How are your sales trending? What revenue target to you have? What’s your location? Who are your competitors? etc. It needs to gather plenty of information to determine your actual SEO goal.

This is where hiring digital marketers (a.k humans with taste buds) beats robots every time. They’ll dig into:

• who actually craves for your food
• how much the potential sales from these cravers
• how much content you should generate (or just improve) to market your business and convince those cravers
• how long it’ll realistically take before your SEO effort pays off
• etc.

After these pro marketers learn all of the data, they will help set a goal, which probably sounds like this: “By doing SEO, we make an effort to increase weekday reservations from 120 to 150 orders within 6 months, being cited by AI tools as family family-friendly Mexican food spot at Senayan, tracked via Google Analytics and Ahrefs.“

That’s Specific. It’s Trackable with Analytics. It’s Aligned with the business that needs to increase reservations. And a 6-month duration is Realistic.

ChatGPT, meanwhile, probably cannot do most of this because it simply lacks a deep understanding of each business in the world.

Different Contents for Each Restaurant

The fun part is, content isn’t copy-paste, even if you and your competitors are both selling burritos.

For the burrito container, contents could be:

• “Food to try after running in Senayan” (for targeting people who work out in Senayan Stadium)
• “How a burrito will solve the midnight hunger better than instant noodles” (for targeting hungry people who need food delivery)
• “Easy place to get fish burritos in Senayan” (for highlighting the speciality product of the business at an affordable price).

However, a sit-down restaurant requires different content, more like:

• “Things to do for family time” (for a family that needs a moment to reconnect)
• “burrito choices for children” (for mothers whose kids only prefer chicken nuggets)
• “family-friendly Mexican restaurant in Senayan” (for citizen around Senayan who want to eat Mexican food with their family).

Notice the difference? A container truck is for instant cravers. The restaurant is for memory makers.

ChatGPT often suggest keywords with high search volumes, though those don’t always bring in customers. You want conversational keywords that your actual audience types, even if only 100 people search for them each month. Those 100 might become your loyal diners.

Tracking KPIs That Actually Matter

Yes, as a business, restaurants needs KPIs, but not a whole buffet of them. However, each restaurant has different KPIs due to its unique business trends.

ChatGPT will suggest various KPI types, depending on how you phrase the prompt. Don’t be confused, you don’t need 20 of them taped to your fridge. (Eh, you don’t tape KPIs to your fridge, do you?)

You can stick to two or three KPIs that your team can realistically follow, like:

• Local Pack presence (visibility)
• Average Engagement Time per Active User (for measuring engagement)
• click Event on your customised reservation page (as a measure of revenue)

Alternatively, if your establishment is still new, I will establish your early KPIs, include Impressions, to gauge the visibility of your business. However, I will also create a scroll Event to prove that the SEO effort has made engagement by people for your restaurant.

Just remember: traffic alone isn’t counted as revenue. What matters is traffic that clicks the enticing buttons, such as ‘Order Now’ or ‘Reserve Today’.

So ChatGPT can brainstorm, but it is still not able to do SEO for a restaurant. It cannot set your goals, your local market, or your hungry customers.

SEO is about serving the right content to the right people at the right time. Like plating burritos that you want them hot, not half-baked. That’s where your good SEO partner steps in.

Hungry for more insights about SEO for the FnB business? Let’s keep this convo cooking on my LinkedIn.

Vicky Laurentina

I am a blogger who love making content about planning and optimizing contents. Follow me in my Linked In and Instagram below.