SEO for restaurants and cafes around Cincinnati

Restaurants score worse than anybody, and it is not laziness

Food and drink is the largest group in the scan I ran and it is also the softest. 84 restaurants, cafes and bars around Cincinnati and Northern Kentucky, and the average gap score came out at 40.8 out of 100 against a regional average of 30.9. That is not a small difference and it holds on both sides of the river.

The reason is not that owners do not care. It is that the owner is working the floor six days a week and the website was built by a friend, or a cousin, or whoever did the menus. Restaurants are the one trade where the person who would fix the website is the same person who is short staffed on a Friday night.

What actually matters for a restaurant is also different from what matters for a plumber. Almost nobody chooses where to eat by reading a website. They look at the Google listing, the photos, the reviews and whether the hours are right, and they do it on a phone from three streets away. That is where the work belongs and that is where I would start.

So for restaurants I sell the profile tier and nothing else, at $249 a month, and I will talk you out of anything bigger. Margins in food are the worst of any business I look at, and a $650 retainer is not a sensible thing to put on a restaurant that is otherwise doing fine. The profile, the photos, the reviews and the hours are the whole job.

Covington and Newport are where this is most obvious. Covington averages 45.6, the softest market I have measured anywhere, and a great deal of that is Mainstrasse. If you run a place down there I am about ten minutes away and I will look at it for nothing.

What that means in practice

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