Restaurant SEO is local search optimization tailored to food service businesses. When someone searches "Italian restaurant near me" or "best brunch in Ottawa," you want your establishment ranking in the map pack and organic results. Unlike national e-commerce SEO, restaurant SEO is 80% local signals and 20% traditional on-page work. The core components: Your Google Business Profile is the foundation. Complete every field, upload fresh photos weekly, post updates about specials or events, and respond to every review within 24 hours. Google rewards active profiles with better visibility. Your NAP (name, address, phone) must be identical across your website, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Zomato, and local directories. Even small discrepancies hurt rankings. On-site, your menu pages need proper schema markup so Google can display dishes, prices, and dietary tags directly in search results. Create location pages if you have multiple outlets. Blog about local food trends, ingredient sourcing, or chef profiles, but only if you'll maintain it. Dead blogs signal abandonment. Reviews drive both rankings and conversions. A restaurant with 200+ Google reviews and a 4.3+ rating will outrank competitors with fewer signals, even if their website is weaker. Encourage reviews through table tents, receipt inserts, or post-meal texts, but never incentivize them. Technical considerations: Mobile speed is critical because 76% of local searches happen on phones, often while people are already out looking for food. If your site takes five seconds to load the menu, they're calling your competitor. Implement click-to-call buttons, integrated reservation systems, and current hours including holidays. Ottawa SEO approaches restaurant clients by auditing their Google Business Profile first, fixing citation inconsistencies next, then optimizing for neighbourhood plus cuisine combinations. A Centretown Vietnamese restaurant should rank for "pho downtown Ottawa" and "Vietnamese Elgin Street," not just the brand name. The ROI is measurable: most restaurants see a 15–30% increase in discovery searches within 90 days of proper local SEO implementation.