A restaurant SEO agency should be judged on covers, not sessions. So we agree the map pack positions, the review targets and the direct order share up front, write them into the contract, and refund you if we miss them.
The stakes
Someone opens their phone, types “best brunch near me” or “sushi near me”, and looks at three things: the map, the star rating, the photos.
Nobody scrolls to page two while they are hungry.
The room two blocks over is not cooking better than you are. Its Google Business Profile has the right primary category, current hours, a menu Google can read, and enough recent reviews to look alive. Yours has last summer’s hours and a menu trapped in a PDF. So search sends the table there, and the covers you did fill came through DoorDash at commissions that commonly run 15 to 30 percent.
Every month
Correct categories, holiday hours, ordering and reservation links pointed at your systems rather than an aggregator, photos, posts, and entries for the dishes guests search by name. Name, address and phone data matched across Apple Maps, Bing, Yelp, TripAdvisor and OpenTable, plus citation cleanup where your old suite number still lives.
Crawl and indexation, site architecture, Core Web Vitals and mobile speed, because a guest standing outside in the rain will not wait six seconds for your homepage. Restaurant, Menu, OpeningHours and Review schema, so engines read your menu as data instead of a picture.
A menu page in real text, dish pages for items with demand behind them, one location page per address, and pages for the occasions that book tables: private dining, group reservations, catering, happy hour, late night.
Request flows your host stand will actually use, a response cadence for management, and review velocity tracked across Google, Yelp and TripAdvisor.
Map pack position per keyword and location, direction requests, calls, reservations, direct online orders, and the commission you kept by taking those orders yourself.
The map pack
Three things decide the local pack: proximity, how relevant your profile looks, and how prominent your restaurant is across the web. Proximity you cannot change. The other two are the job.
So SEO for restaurants means owning the phrasing guests use. “Restaurants near me” is the headline term, but the money sits in “late night food near me”, “vegan restaurants near me”, “best lunch near me” and “restaurants open now”. Those carry intent, and they get spoken as often as typed, so short, plain answers on your pages win them.
AI answers
A guest deciding where to eat increasingly types the question into ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini or Google AI Overviews and gets four names back.
There is no map to climb into and no ad slot to buy. Those systems name places they can verify, and verification takes four things: an entity described consistently everywhere you appear, structured data stating your cuisine, hours and address, review sentiment that reads the same across platforms, and mentions in publications the models already trust.
The part most cannot do
That last ingredient is where a normal SEO shop stops.
Getting written about takes a pitch to a city dining desk or a food editor, which is a different job from keyword mapping.
We run PR, SEO and GEO from one senior team, so the coverage we earn does double duty: a link Google respects, and a sentence an AI model repeats to a hungry stranger two years later. Forbes, USA Today Network, Mashable, Entrepreneur and Inc. have all run our clients.
The first ninety days
Days 1 to 7. We audit the site and the profile, check what the AI assistants currently say about your city’s dining scene, and pull apart the two rooms taking the searches you want.
Days 8 to 30. You approve a twelve month roadmap carrying the targets, deliverables and dates the guarantee attaches to. Nothing publishes before you sign it.
Days 31 to 90. Profile rebuild, schema, menu and dish pages, location pages, a review flow live at the host stand, speed fixes, and the first pitches to city dining desks. The map pack usually starts moving in this window.
From day 91. Content and coverage compound, AI citations get tracked, and the monthly report ends in covers and direct orders.
Cost
Most agencies hide the numbers.
Single location independents typically pay $500 to $2,500 a month. Competitive metros and multi location groups run $3,000 to $6,000. Anything near $300 buys automated directory submissions.
A $2,000 retainer is roughly forty covers at a $50 average check. AceIt engagements run mid five figures to six figures annually, which means we fit groups, franchises and ambitious single sites rather than a twenty seat cafe. Model it at the ROAS calculator. Wherever you sign, ask what exactly is guaranteed, how it is measured, and what triggers a refund.
Why AceIt
Restaurant margins are single digit, so a retainer is not a line item you forget.
Twelve of them, paid against dashboards nobody opened, no coverage earned, no map pack movement, and the same two rooms down the street still taking the reservations, is a genuinely expensive year.
Which is why the outcome goes in writing. Targets, deliverables and timelines are agreed before kickoff, and if we do not deliver what we committed to, on the timeline we committed to, you get your money back. We will not pretend a ranking position is ours to sell, because any agency selling that is misleading you. What we commit to is measurable: map pack positions on the terms that fill tables, qualified organic traffic, review growth, direct orders taken back from the delivery apps, and citations in AI answers. Every agreed item carries the refund. Senior people only, replies in 1 to 2 hours.
Proof
Our PR work took Vezbi, a community super app, past 1 million brand impressions as it moved into the U.S., with every placement earned organically. Our Forbes program has secured 50 plus placements across 12 plus industries, and a single anonymized feature returned 4,200 plus visits, a 38% lift in branded search, a DA 94 backlink and 12 secondary pickups. More case studies.
The fit
It fits groups opening locations, franchises with profile chaos across markets, chef driven rooms whose reputation outruns their search visibility, and operators who want direct orders instead of paying a third of every ticket to an app. One dining room needs a profile, a menu page and a review engine. A group with nine locations needs location pages that rank against neighborhood competitors instead of each other, plus governance so a manager cannot break the hours at 11pm. Adjacent: hotel SEO, small business SEO.
Skip it if this weekend is the problem. Search builds, it does not rescue a bad month, so keep paid running while the foundation goes in. Skip it too if the food and the service are not ready. Ranking a room with a 3.1 star rating only spreads the problem faster.
Questions
Anything else, email [email protected] and it comes back in 1 to 2 hours.
Most single location restaurants pay $500 to $2,500 a month. Competitive metros and multi location groups run $3,000 to $6,000, and franchise programs sit above that. Below roughly $300 you are buying automated directory submissions. AceIt engagements run mid five figures to six figures annually, every deliverable backed by a refund.
Map pack movement often appears within 30 to 60 days, once your Google Business Profile, hours, photos and reviews are fixed, because local signals update quickly. Organic rankings take 3 to 6 months, and press driven authority builds over 6 to 12. Your timeline goes into the agreement before kickoff.
For most operators, yes. The demand already exists within a mile of your door every night, and search decides who receives it. A few extra covers a night, plus direct orders that skip a 20 percent delivery commission, usually cover the retainer. Ads stop the hour you stop paying.
No honest agency can, because position one is not ours to sell. We guarantee what we control, agreed in writing before kickoff: deliverables, timelines, map pack and traffic targets, review growth and coverage. If we miss what we committed to, you get your money back, in the contract.
The same foundation feeds both. Google needs a complete, consistent Google Business Profile, readable menu schema, real reviews and authoritative links. ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and AI Overviews need an entity they can verify and trusted sources naming you, which is why coverage and structured data matter more than keyword density.
Yes. Groups and franchises get one profile strategy per address, location pages built to rank against neighborhood competitors rather than each other, governance so local managers cannot break hours or links, and reporting split by site, so you see which rooms win search.
Next step
Send us your restaurant, plus the two rooms nearby that keep taking the tables. Inside 1 to 2 hours you get the near me searches going to them, the reason your profile keeps losing, and exactly what month one would cover. Targets and timelines go in writing, backed by a 100% guarantee: you get the agreed results or your money back.
Every engagement carries a 100% guarantee: you get the agreed results or your money back
