Why "near me" searches decide who wins this week
Roughly 46% of all Google searches have local intent. For restaurants, that number is higher — closer to 76% of mobile users searching for a place to eat will visit one within 24 hours. The phrase isn't always "near me" verbatim; Google infers location from the device. But the effect is the same: someone is hungry, they have a phone, and the top three results on Google Maps will get the lion's share of the orders.
If you're not in those top three, you're invisible — no matter how good your food is.
What we actually optimise
Local SEO has changed. It used to be about keyword stuffing and citation count. Today, Google's local algorithm cares most about three things:
- Relevance — is your business actually about what the person searched for? This is signalled through your business name, primary category, secondary categories, services list, menu, and posts.
- Distance — how close are you to the searcher? You can't move your restaurant, but you can widen your effective radius by being demonstrably better than competitors at the edge of it.
- Prominence — how well-known is your business? This is where reviews, photos, citations, and inbound links do their work.
Most agencies fixate on prominence. We work on all three, in that order, because relevance is the cheapest to fix and the highest-leverage.
What "good" tends to look like
After a few months of consistent work, what you typically want to see in your Google Business Profile insights is:
- Profile views trending steadily up
- Direction requests trending up (a useful proxy for foot traffic)
- Calls trending up
- Website clicks trending up
- Review rate higher than before, with most reviews being recent
We won't quote specific multipliers because the honest answer is "it depends" — on starting point, competition, postcode, cuisine, and how good your food and service actually are. We can't fix the food. What we can do is make sure none of the controllable signals are leaking visibility.
How we differ from a "marketing agency"
Most agencies sell Local SEO as a checklist they run once and forget. We treat it as the ongoing health of your most important asset: your Google Business Profile is, for most independent restaurants, doing more work than the website ever will.
That means weekly posts (not monthly). Photos refreshed every 2–4 weeks. Reviews requested after every order, not in batches. Q&A monitored daily. Insights pulled into a monthly report you can actually understand.
If that sounds like more work than what your current marketing person does — it is. That's why it works.