How to Make Money with SEO in 2024 – Entrepreneur

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Copyright © 2025 Entrepreneur Media, LLC All rights reserved. Entrepreneur® and its related marks are registered trademarks of Entrepreneur Media LLC
By Zac Almeida Edited by Amanda Breen
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Search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial part of modern digital marketing and a great skill to learn if you’re trying to make extra money and grow your reputation online. Almost 50% of online shoppers start with a search engine query, which means a business’s search engine position can make or break the company’s bottom line. Even if a store has a brick-and-mortar location, local SEO is important. With 78% of local searches on mobile resulting in an offline purchase, every business today should include local SEO in their strategy.
Once you gain SEO expertise, you can put your skills to work by joining an agency full-time that focuses on SEO, launching your own consulting service, or using your knowledge to take a business’s digital marketing efforts to the next level. In each of these cases, you’ll find great opportunities to make a living.
Many factors determine your income as an SEO expert: education, certifications, work experience and additional skills. However, if you invest the time to become a pro at driving traffic online, you can easily net more than $100,000 annually. So, here’s a look at the ways you can earn money from SEO.
By working at an SEO agency, you’ll not only learn technical skills like website analytics, you’ll also be exposed to business structures that help you develop valuable skills like time management, client pitching and more. You’ll also have an opportunity to learn from senior team members and work with multiple clients. However, drawbacks may include the inability to select your own clients and a more rigid 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. schedule rather than choosing your own hours.
If you have deep knowledge of ecommerce SEO, you can use search engine optimization to sell physical products through an online marketplace. According to U.S. Census data, ecommerce sales in the U.S. grew by nearly 8% in 2023 compared to the previous year. This trend is expected to continue in 2024.
Start by picking your niche and determining the product you’ll be selling. You can do that by conducting keyword and audience research to understand which terms online shoppers are using and what goods they’re most likely to buy.
For instance, if you find the phrase “stainless steel pasta maker” gets a lot of traction but there aren’t enough companies selling this product, it could be an opportunity to fill that gap. By determining the demand for a particular product or a vacancy in the market, you can reap the benefits.
Make sure you also perform an in-depth SEO competitor analysis, which is how you’ll know what it will take to rank highest for your target keywords. The ecommerce market is booming, which means it could provide meaningful income. But there’s always an element of unpredictability as you look for customers or try to scale your business.
Monitor metrics regularly: To understand how your SEO strategy is performing, businesses need to monitor their metrics regularly. This includes tracking page views as well as bounce and click-through rates (CTR). The more data businesses have on their website performance, the better they can refine their SEO tactics.
Say you’ve launched an ecommerce website and it’s doing well, but now your customers are seeking additional products. Consider dropshipping, in which a third party handles manufacturing, storing inventory and fulfilling orders, most of which are at a wholesale price.
With dropshipping, an individual places an order on your website and you share the order information with your dropshipper. Once the order information is received, the dropshipper fulfills the order and mails the package to the customer.
Dropshipping allows anyone to set up an ecommerce business and focus on marketing and scaling rather than shipping and inventory logistics. It allows you to focus on what you do best: Attracting online customers to make a purchase. However, there are some drawbacks, including lower profit margins, no control over inventory, no control over shipping errors and fewer opportunities to customize or brand your products.
If you choose to use a dropshipper you’ll want to harness your SEO skills, because with lower profit margins you’ll need to attract an even larger volume of customers. Create original and unique product descriptions (instead of copying the same text from the manufacturer’s website) to make the content stand out and ensure you have the right keywords and a personalized tone.
Related: Dropshipping Businesses: How They Work & Steps to Get Started
Once you’re an expert, you can make money by opening your own SEO consulting shop. If you can help clients increase traffic to their websites, boost sales and meet their business goals, your services will be in high demand.
Some of the SEO services you’ll provide include keyword research and website auditing as well as implementing technical SEO strategies that can be used on various platforms. As a consultant, you’ll also perform competitor analysis and share detailed plans on how to leverage this data, whether that applies to the content strategy, backlink strategy or particular keywords clients are using. Consultants can also recommend frequent content adjustments to account for new search engine algorithm updates.
While working for yourself may sound intimidating, it can be a very lucrative and enjoyable career, especially for someone who already has experience in an SEO agency. The pros include an opportunity to work with clients and brands of your choice, a flexible schedule and an opportunity to grow your own business. The drawbacks of SEO consulting, however, include the stress of managing clients, difficulty finding new leads and clients and the time it takes to develop experience.
If you have a well-established blog and are using SEO to drive significant traffic to the site, you can leverage your digital content by hosting sponsored posts and banner ads on your website. Paid ads allow you to earn money based on the amount of traffic you generate, while sponsored content typically involves featuring a particular brand or service for a predetermined rate.
Starting a blog gives you the freedom to choose your niche, whether it’s technology, beauty, fashion or travel, and you get to infuse the content with your own style while building an online community of like-minded individuals. It also provides flexibility, as you can choose your hours to work, and it gives you a lot of creative freedom to experiment with new forms of content. Starting a blog does, however, require significant time and energy in order to produce quality content, and it may be difficult to regularly create engaging posts. Occasionally, you’ll also have to deal with technical issues on the backend of your site.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the practice of increasing the percentage of users who perform a desired action on a website. This action may range from scrolling through the entire page and filling out a form, to adding a product to a wish list or making a purchase. At the heart of CRO is a meaningful action the marketer wants a user to take.
While SEO increases the traffic to your website, CRO helps by making the visits to your site profitable. For example, SEO may help you rank well for the keyword “buy black jeans,” but a good CRO tactic will help you increase your sales percentages by reducing abandoned carts or bounce rates. Here are seven ways to improve your CRO strategy:
In the past, many business’s brand teams have considered public relations and SEO separately and left SEO to their digital teams. But as the two disciplines grow closer together, brands are starting to see the benefits of integrating them. Here are just three ways this can happen:
Building your brand: Growing your brand is essential. As more people become aware of your business, it will begin to rank higher in search engines, particularly for keywords related to your goals. But SEO alone won’t grow your brand. Public relations efforts including media outreach and partnerships with other businesses are necessary to build awareness.
Links: Backlinks from high ranking, influential websites can also transform your search engine rankings. So, how can you convince other websites to link to yours? This is where public relations comes into play. Compelling storytelling is a major component of PR, which can help you craft blog posts, case studies, or high-quality video content to attract the attention of target brands. In most cases, you will spend some time building a relationship before others backlink to you.
Thought leadership: Becoming recognized as a thought leader in your industry can be transformative for your SEO, as your name will appear on other websites and will become a part of industry public relations. A comprehensive public relations effort will help you present yourself to others as an expert in your field.
Search engines are shifting focus to human behavior and experience, so improving your website’s rankings means you need to focus on your site’s usability. There are several aspects of UX design integrated with SEO best practices, including fast loading times, mobile-friendly use and easy-to-navigate pages with engaging content.
One of the biggest UX signals that Google can measure is bounce rate, which is when a user visits a site from a Google search, doesn’t find what they are looking for and clicks back to Google without having visited any other pages on that website. It’s a clear sign that users are unable to find what they’re looking for. Websites with lower bounce rates are usually doing a better job of helping users find what they’re searching for and often rank higher, typically on the first page of results.
Business owners can employ many digital marketing strategies, including social media, email marketing, influencer marketing and pay-per-click (PPC) ads. However, SEO is still one of the best places to focus your efforts for three primary reasons:
SEO has changed in many ways in the past several years, which is why experts are constantly recommending tweaks to businesses strategies. These are just some the biggest changes over the past decade:
The key to building and sustaining organic traffic is knowing the best SEO tools to leverage for your specific needs . Whether you’re a search engine optimization specialist or just starting to learn how Google works, these are some of the best SEO tools for keyword research, link building, traffic analysis and understanding the competition:

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a crucial part of modern digital marketing and a great skill to learn if you’re trying to make extra money and grow your reputation online. Almost 50% of online shoppers start with a search engine query, which means a business’s search engine position can make or break the company’s bottom line. Even if a store has a brick-and-mortar location, local SEO is important. With 78% of local searches on mobile resulting in an offline purchase, every business today should include local SEO in their strategy.
Once you gain SEO expertise, you can put your skills to work by joining an agency full-time that focuses on SEO, launching your own consulting service, or using your knowledge to take a business’s digital marketing efforts to the next level. In each of these cases, you’ll find great opportunities to make a living.
Many factors determine your income as an SEO expert: education, certifications, work experience and additional skills. However, if you invest the time to become a pro at driving traffic online, you can easily net more than $100,000 annually. So, here’s a look at the ways you can earn money from SEO.
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28 Free SEO Tools to Maximize Your Website’s Visibility in 2025 – Shopify

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Search engines offer a window into our collective wants, questions, concerns, and curiosities. Knowing the basics of search engine optimization (SEO) can help you become a more effective entrepreneur, whether you’re using search volume to evaluate demand for a product idea or learning how to create the most useful content for your customers. 
From the technical aspects of your site to backlink analysis to keyword research, there are many components to SEO. Luckily, you can automate this process. “There are so many [SEO] apps, tools, and resources,” says Jeremiah Curvers, cofounder and CEO of Polysleep. “You don’t need to be an expert, especially now with the advent of so many AI tools.”
Many of the best ecommerce SEO tools have a monthly fee of about $100 and up, but there are still good free SEO tools (or good tools with free trials) you can use for keyword research, backlink analysis, and more. Here are 28 of the best.
Free keyword research tools help you uncover which phrases your target audience is looking for on search engines. Once you identify them, you can include them in your website copy to increase the odds of appearing in the search results for those phrases. Here are the best options: 
Ahrefs’ comprehensive package starts at $29 a month, but the company also has a suite of free SEO tools for keyword research, checking the difficulty of a keyword, and SERP analysis. 
Best features:
Use it for: Keyword research and tracking backlinks.
Totally free or not? Ahrefs has several free tools, but it does try to upsell you to one of its paid packages, which starts at $29 a month.

WordStream’s Free Keyword Tool provides recommended target words and phrases to incorporate into your SEO strategy. Enter a keyword or your website URL to receive a list of recommendations and keyword difficulty rankings. It’s a great tool for coming up with short- and long-tail keywords to target, filtered by industry and location.
Key features:
Use it for: Keyword research.
Totally free or not? WordStream’s free keyword tool is free to use.
Keyword Tool is another great keyword research tool for search engines like Google and Bing, as well as YouTube, Amazon, and social media platforms, including X and Pinterest.
The free version of the tool lets you find relevant long-tail and short-tail keywords, but if you want insights into the search volume, competition, and keyword difficulty, you’ll need to pay for the Pro version.
Key features:
Use it for: Keyword research.
Totally free or not? You can access limited features on the free version, including lists of long-tail keywords. To unlock search volumes and additional features, you need to upgrade to the Pro plan (starting at $69 per month if billed annually).
With Google Keyword Planner, you can find new keywords to target, research estimated search volumes, and discover related keywords and phrases. You can also unlock long-tail keywords to find phrases that are hyper-focused for your business and its goals.
Key features:
Use it for: Keyword research.
Totally free or not? Google’s Keyword Planner is free to use. However, you must sign up for a Google Ads account, create a campaign in Expert Mode, and enter your billing information. 
Ubersuggest is a free tool that provides keyword suggestions based on a URL or a target keyword of your choice. You get three daily searches with a free account; anything beyond that requires a paid subscription. 
Ubersuggest will offer you a list of keyword ideas you can use to generate product ideas, angles for capturing more organic traffic, your next blog post, and more. You can also see the blogs ranking at the top of the SERPs with your target keywords to understand search intent and generate content ideas.
Best features: 
Use it for: Keyword research and SERP analysis.
Totally free or not? You can run three free searches a day. If you want to do more, you’ll need to sign up for a paid plan, which starts at $29 a month. You can start a free seven-day trial of any plan.
With Amazon Keyword Research by Helium 10, you can research keywords and Amazon Standard Identification Number, a 10-character code that identifies Amazon products. In addition to search volume, this tool reveals the estimated number of competing products, match type (organic searches, sponsored ads, or Amazon Recommended lists), and frequency of related words. It’s a great tool to improve your Amazon search rankings.
Best features: 
Use it for: Amazon SEO.
Totally free or not? You can use Helium 10’s Amazon Keyword Research tool for free.
When you type in a keyword or URL, AnswerThePublic provides a list of related keyword ideas in the form of phrases and questions—these make great headers for blog posts, FAQ pages, or other forms of content marketing. You can download a CSV file with the keywords or look at the visual analyzer, a wheel that groups questions into categories like how, why, where, and when.
Best features: 
Use it for: Relevant keywords and content ideas.
Totally free or not? Three free searches per day. You can get more searches with a paid plan, which starts at $11 per month and is free for the first seven days.
Seed Keywords differs from other keyword research tools; rather than providing keywords and their search traffic and volume metrics, Seed Keywords leverages crowdsourcing. You prompt your network to picture themselves in a hypothetical scenario and ask what phrase they would search in that scenario. It helps you understand how people search, which can inform your research process. 
Best features: 
Use it for: Keyword research.
Totally free or not? Seed Keywords is free.
Technical search engine optimization is the process of increasing your website’s functionality. Looking for an easy way to track your website’s speed and mobile friendliness? Here are the best technical SEO tools that won’t break the bank: 
Bing Webmaster Tools offers a breadth of SEO features, including backlink tracking, keyword research, and site audits. You can use the free SEO tool to run reports as well. 
Best features:
Use it for: Website audits and tracking backlinks.
Totally free or not? Bing Webmaster Tools is a free service.
With 70 SEO functions, SEO Review Tools offers one of the most comprehensive collections of free SEO tools. It includes technical SEO tools, content SEO tools, and SEO authority tools that can help you create content clusters or test your Core Web Vitals (how Google determines a site’s technical health).
There are a lot of tools to trawl through here, but it’s handy if you want to build your own free tech stack for your SEO needs.
Best features:
Use it for: Tracking backlinks, keyword research, SERP analysis, and checking broken links.
Totally free or not? The tools available through SEO Review Tools are free to use.
Semrush offers a wide range of SEO features. Though you’ll need a paid account to access most of them, Semrush offers a handful of free SEO tools to help you monitor and improve your site’s search performance. 
Best features:
Use it for: Search rankings and site audits.
Totally free or not? There are several free tools, but if you want more complex features, you’ll need to pay for a subscription (prices start at $117.33 a month when you pay for the year). 
Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a free SEO tool that analyzes your website to find broken links and other SEO issues that might harm the user experience and your rankings. Screaming Frog will audit up to 500 URLs for free and tell you which pages need attention. You can also pay for more URLs.
Key features:
Use it for: Website crawling and technical SEO audits.
Totally free or not? You can access most of the features in the free version and crawl up to 500 URLs for free. If you want advanced features, such as crawl comparisons, Google Analytics integration, and spelling and grammar checks, upgrade to the paid version for $259 per year.
GTmetrix is a free SEO tool that checks your site for site speed, performance, and structure issues. Create a free account for monitoring from a few locations, like San Antonio, Texas; Mumbai, India; and London, UK. 
Best features:
Use it for: Site performance and speed. 
Totally free or not? The free version provides different charts and graphics to help you visualize how your page loads. If you need historical data and more test locations, you can upgrade to a paid version, which starts at $4.25 a month if billed annually.
The Google SERP Snippet Optimization Tool is a real-time editor that helps you write optimized meta titles and descriptions. As you enter the text in the form field editor, the free SEO tool will show you how it will appear in an actual Google search.
Checking the length of your title and description will ensure vital information doesn’t cut off. 
Best features:
Use it for: SERP snippets, meta titles, and meta descriptions.
Totally free or not? Google’s SERP Snippet Optimization Tool is free to use.
Backlinks are a valuable currency in SEO. Other sites that link to yours essentially vouch for it, which influences trust and credibility. Here are the best free backlink checkers to monitor your site’s backlink profile: 
Enter your website URL into SEOptimer’s free backlink checker to learn which sites link to yours. In addition to tracking your backlinks, you can also enter a competitor’s URL to see who’s linking to their site. This can help you build a backlink database of potential sources. 
Key features:
Use it for: Tracking backlinks.
Totally free or not? The Free Backlink Checker SEO Tool is free to use, but advanced features—such as keyword recommendations, SEO audits, and weekly email digests—start at $21.75 per month when billed annually.
The Synup Listing Scan is a complete audit and review of your local listing profiles. Enter your basic information and the free SEO tool will scan your digital presence and check your Google listing, as well as third-party listing sites like Yelp and your local chamber of commerce. You’ll also see your reputation via reviews.
Key features:
Use it for: Local SEO.
Totally free or not? You can run a scan of your local listings for free.
BrightLocal offers a host of free local SEO tools for small businesses. These free tools provide a good insight into your current local positioning and identify areas for improvement. 
Key features:
Use it for: Local SEO.
Totally free or not? BrightLocal has a few free tools, but accessing the advanced features requires a paid package. These start from $29 a month if you pay for the year.
Search engines use the content on a webpage to contextualize what it’s about—and therefore, what it should rank for. These on-page elements also significantly impact the user experience, which is a ranking factor in many algorithms. Here are the best free on-page SEO tools: 
The Detailed SEO toolbar is a browser extension that displays SEO metrics. Available for both Chrome and Firefox, it’s a free tool that also adds a menu to your right-click menu to complete basic tasks, such as highlighting nofollow links, performing a site search, and viewing the site in another SEO tool. 
Key features: 
Use it for: On-page SEO analysis. 
Totally free or not? The Detailed SEO toolbar is free to use. 
Wincher offers a suite of SEO tools, including a free on-page SEO checker. Enter a URL and keyword target into the search bar to view how optimized your page is for that term. The tool will show opportunities to improve the page for your target keyword.
Key features:
Use it for: On-page keyword optimization. 
Totally free or not? The on-page SEO checker tool is free. For other features—including reports for up to 500 keyword reports, 10 websites, and daily ranking updates—you need a paid plan, which starts at $41 per month when billed annually.
The GoSEO Product Optimizer is a Shopify app that has a free plan and works within your Shopify admin. It offers SEO scores to monitor how optimized your product pages are, alongside AI content generators to produce copy for product descriptions, image alt text, and tags. 
Key features:
Use it for: Page optimization on your Shopify store.
Totally free or not? Free to install. There is also a paid plan; for $14 a month, you can also access real-time SEO recommendations, an SEO audit by an expert, and more ChatGPT features. 
The TinySEO Speed Image Optimizer offers one-click image optimization for Shopify stores. It offers automated image backups, image compression, and alt text to ensure that product imagery doesn’t hinder search performance. 
Key features: 
Use it for: Image optimization on your Shopify store.
Totally free or not? There’s a free plan. For more features—including lazy loading, asset preloading, and instant indexing—choose a paid plan, which starts at $14 a month. 
Are you exceeding your SEO KPIs? Has visibility increased since you implemented your new SEO marketing strategy? Uncover the answers with these free SEO reporting tools: 
Google Analytics is a powerful analytics tool that gives you real-time insight into your website’s performance and visibility in search. It shows what keywords people are searching to land on your site, your bounce rate, and other important metrics for improving your search ranking.
Install the HTML code in your website’s code to start taking advantage of Google Analytics for free.
Best features:
Use it for: Website analytics.
Totally free or not? Google Analytics is free to use.
Formerly Google Webmaster Tools, Google Search Console is a free website analytics tool that tracks your website’s performance in Google searches. You can dig deeper into your data, find click-through rates and which keywords you rank for, and submit XML sitemaps and individual URLs for ranking.
Best features:
Use it for: Keyword performance and click-through rates.
Totally free or not? Google Search Console is free to use.
Google Trends is another great keyword research tool to inform your SEO strategy. Enter a topic or phrase and Google Trends will show you line graph charts depicting peaks and dips in search volume for that phrase. It will also tell you where in the world the phrase is trending, as well as related trending keywords.
Best features:
Use it for: Keyword research.
Totally free or not? Google Trends is free to use.
Google Business Profile is an important, free local SEO tool. With it, you can create and manage your Google listing that pops up when someone searches for your business. This is also what shows up in Google Maps. Note: You don’t need a physical business presence to use this tool, but you must make contact with clients in person; online-only brands may not find as much value in it.
Best features:
Use it for: Local SEO.
Totally free or not? Google Business Profile is free to use.
PageSpeed Insights is a diagnostic tool that will help you identify SEO issues with page load time. If your site takes too long to load, your SEO rankings will fall. Simply enter your URL to receive an SEO audit and list of recommendations to optimize your site for better performance. You can run both desktop and mobile-friendly tests.
Best features:
Use it for: Website load speed and technical SEO audits.
Totally free or not? Google PageSpeed Insights is free to use.
Digital public relations helps raise brand awareness and position yourself as an authority in your industry. Here are the best marketing tools to get started: 
Qwoted is a free SEO tool that connects journalists with sources. You can create a profile to become an expert in the database, which then allows you to answer journalist call-outs about topics related to your business or industry. Qwoted will also automatically match you with journalists seeking sources that fit your profile—a great way to develop press relationships and backlinks.
Best features:
Use it for: Building backlinks
Totally free or not? You can create an expert account for free.
While Qwoted spans pretty much every industry, B2B companies may want to check out Help A B2B Writer. Journalist requests are sent only to qualifying sources, so you won’t have to sift through requests that are not relevant to your business. This is a great way to build relationships with writers and journalists to secure backlinks for your website.
Best features:
Use it for: Building backlinks.
Totally free or not? Help A B2B Writer is free to use.
There are endless paid software suites that offer robust tools to meet most SEO needs—from keyword research to backlink analysis—in much greater depth. But the tools above can prove pretty useful for the price (free!).
If you’re a Shopify store owner, check out the Shopify App Store for SEO apps to optimize your site for search.
There are several free SEO tools, including Google Keyword Planner, WordStream’s free keyword research tool, and MozBar’s SEO toolbar. Many comprehensive SEO tools have a handful of free features or a free limited-time trial.
Use free SEO tools to help plan and execute your SEO strategy for free. Tools like Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, and Semrush have features to find keywords, audit your site, and generate backlinks for free.
Many great SEO tools provide accurate information about keywords, SERP performance, and backlinking. Some of the best include Moz, Ahrefs, Semrush, WordStream, Ubersuggest, Google Keyword Planner, and Yoast SEO.
When searching for free SEO tools, shortlist those with the following features:
Free SEO tools can offer the same results, but they tend to limit how much data you can pull from them. They’re good for optimizing smaller sites, but if you’re working on a larger website, you might need to upgrade to unlock the tool’s full feature set.
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The 6 best restaurant SEO tips for better search ranking – Yelp for Business

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It’s thanks to search engine optimization (or SEO for short) that you are reading this article about restaurant SEO right now.
The internet is an ever-growing resource of easy-to-access information on every subject imaginable, and with that comes a lot of online competition for search engine rankings. These days, your restaurant website needs to incorporate savvy techniques if you want to rank high on Google searches. Similarly, you’ll want to show up on restaurant review sites like Yelp for maximum online visibility. If you don’t have an SEO strategy and a strong social media online presence, your brand may as well not exist to internet-browsing potential customers.
This article will teach you what restaurant SEO is and share some essential restaurant SEO tips. Read on and discover why SEO strategy is an important aspect of the restaurant industry.
Restaurant SEO: waiter serving food
Search engine optimization (SEO) is a type of digital marketing that focuses on making strategic changes to your restaurant’s website to help it appear on the results pages of the internet’s top search engines. Rather than spending lots of money on advertising, SEO is about making simple, organic changes that help your website stand out amongst millions of others on search engines.
Restaurant SEO is about imagining the needs of your potential customers and the kind of Google searches they will be making. You then provide website content that gives them the answers they desire. The tricky part is optimizing this content using keyword research and other techniques that drive traffic to your website via organic searches.
You likely won’t witness results from restaurant SEO overnight. It can sometimes take months to start seeing your hard work pay off when checking your website’s Google Analytics. But it’s worth the wait.
The increased traffic from a solid restaurant SEO strategy means more people learning about your webpage and potentially sharing it with family and friends via social media. This in turn builds brand awareness and loyalty via increased customer engagement.
You can also improve your restaurant business by including links to online ordering on your homepage. You now have a user experience that looks like this:
Restaurant SEO: waiter and manager using a tablet
Now that you’ve been inducted into the ever-changing and sometimes confusing world of search engine optimization, let’s take a look at some methods that promote SEO best practices. SEO experts and amateurs alike are constantly coming up with new techniques to try to win the favor of the almighty algorithm.
If you’re serious about this journey, you must keep up with the latest SEO trends for your website to appear on the coveted first page of Google results.
Have you ever tried to find something quickly in a city you were visiting or even in your hometown? On the first page of Google search results, you will almost always see a Google map of local businesses with positive online reviews related to your keywords.
Improving your local SEO is one of the easiest restaurant SEO hacks there is and will help get local customers through your front door or ordering takeout. Just add business information (make sure it’s the same across platforms) such as your phone number to online directories and review websites like Yelp.
Once Google has crawled your restaurant’s information from these sources, your establishment will have more credibility in organic searches as Google will recognize your restaurant’s name as an actual business. It also gives your restaurant a greater chance of appearing on the map during a search, giving searchers easy access to all of your most essential information such as website, reviews, phone number, and address.
Having a solid Google business profile is one of the most valuable things you can build to create a solid online presence. Your business listing should include all relevant contact information as well as links to your website, a readily available menu, high-quality photos, online reviews, and more. When people see that your business is well-established and real with a number of positive reviews and photos, they’re more likely to want to visit your establishment.
Additionally, restaurants can include online ordering in their Google business profile. New customers may be more inclined to order delivery the first time rather than commit to a full in-person dining experience, so providing the option makes for an excellent marketing strategy for first-timers.
Yelp provides excellent reach as a restaurant marketing tool with its tens of millions of monthly active users. For a point of comparison, Yelp reaches 8x more consumers online than OpenTable. So what can you do to make the most out of your Yelp page?
Claim and verify your business listing and complete your profile. To begin, follow these steps:
Restaurant SEO: creating a business listing using Yelp
We recommend reading Yelp 101 to get your page thriving with photos, customer reviews, and much more.
Excellent photos combined with reviews make your restaurant come into focus for new customers. You can simply drag and drop photos to your page, and customers can upload photos as well. Yelp users who upload photos get regular notifications about their photo’s metrics, keeping them thinking of you.
Screenshots of mobile notifications from Yelp
Practice responsiveness to reviews: Responding to as many reviews as possible demonstrates credibility and helps build your brand.
Using keywords relevant to your cuisine, special dishes, or location in your description helps customers find you via Yelp. So, if you’re an Italian restaurant, highlight as many dishes as possible (pizza, specific pasta types, etc.) with photos to tip the search algorithm in your favor.
Be sure to regularly update your menu to include seasonal items or specials, which can attract more attention. Additionally, consider implementing check-in offers where customers receive a small discount or free item when they check in on Yelp. This can increase the number of check-ins, which in turn increases your visibility on the platform.
Restaurants that use Guest Manager paired with Yelp Ads experience 87% more traffic on their Yelp business page. Yelp Guest Manager also allows for online bookings and waitlist-joining direct from search engines—a huge bonus to online visibility.
Google and Yelp's mobile view of Six Gals' restaurant
Your restaurant’s website is a key pillar of your business. Curious customers will look to it for a number of things beyond simply your menu (though that’s crucial). They’ll want to see photos, a bit of a story, your specials, and more. An impressive 77% of diners will visit a restaurant’s website before they visit, so making it professional in appearance and smoothness is vital.
Where your website shines in terms of SEO is in your on-page SEO as well as accompanying photos. Specifically, this means the keywords that will appear in Google or other searches that help put you to the top of the page. For example, including “Best Italian restaurant in Omaha” will help people searching for exactly that find you.
How far down the website rabbit hole you want to go is up to you. We recommend reading up on our restaurant website design article for a detailed breakdown on how to make your website work for you.
Manager wearing a pair of eyeglasses while using a laptop
Without articles or a blog on your website, what is a restaurant homepage left with? Probably menu items, contact information, an order page, and a link to your Yelp page. This is essential information and relevant for any restaurant website. But, it doesn’t give you many opportunities for restaurant SEO conversions.
Start using keyword planning tools like Google Keyword Planner to determine the popularity of searches that are relevant to your restaurant. You can then write articles that are optimized for specific keywords.
Not only could these blog posts attract potential customers to your website, they could also educate searchers about what’s happening at your spot. Not all articles need to be current—evergreen articles can help drive traffic year round. Evergreen articles are written to be informative and relevant at any point in time instead of tied to a specific week or month.
For example, try adding an article about your restaurant’s commitment to sustainability rather than write about your weekly specials. It takes a lot of time and patience but in the end, consistent, evergreen blog posts work as free advertising since they are web traffic-drivers.
Make sure to view your articles on mobile devices before you publish them. All of your headings and images should still display correctly. You could have the best on-page SEO in the world, but a potential customer will leave the page instantly if you don’t have a mobile-friendly website.
Search engine algorithms have come a long way from the early days of the internet. There was once a time where people would stuff relevant keywords in hidden text at the bottom of an article and have free rein over what they wrote. Now there’s an entire industry devoted to serving the needs of businesses that simply don’t have the time or resources to worry about SEO techniques.
If you have more room to play in your marketing budget, try an agency. SEO and content marketing agencies create professionally optimized content for you to drive traffic to your website. Outsourcing to companies that help restaurant owners and other businesses stay ahead of competitors will save you hundreds of hours.
An agency will research the search terms of your demographic and use special software to write SEO-optimized articles that include dozens of keywords complementing users’ Google searches. They’ll also fill articles full of relevant backlinks, since link building helps the authority of your site. They also have established knowhow on penning meta descriptions and formatting articles to improve both readability and search rankings as well as adding alt text to photos. Many pros use tools like Semrush for its myriad metrics which the average business owner probably doesn’t need to understand.
If you’re not ready to hire an agency, start with a freelance SEO copywriter. They have the time and energy to churn out content for you so you can stay focused on running your restaurant.
Chefs cooking at a restaurant
The world of restaurant SEO is still a constant game of cat and mouse—search engine rules change and websites adapt to follow the rules.
The best thing you can do if you want to keep appearing in searches is to stay consistent with content and keep up to date with any changes. First and foremost, make sure customers can find you via Google and Yelp and make the most of those pages.
Consider starting a blog that can potentially have hundreds of articles, all optimized for different keywords. Remember that local search is a very easy fix that can legitimize a new restaurant quickly. If you’re feeling overwhelmed, you’re best off just leaving it to the experts. Consider using the services of an SEO and content marketing agency.
Speaking of leaving it to the experts, you don’t need to reinvent the wheel in your front-of-house (FOH) services either. Yelp Guest Manager takes care of everything FOH while giving you a significant boost in online visibility. Curious to see how it works? Get a demo to help to optimize your connection with 95 million monthly users.
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How A Full-Funnel SEO & PR Strategy Can Drive Leads & Sales – Search Engine Journal

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Large AI Overviews on SERPs are affecting visibility and causing a dramatic decrease in traffic.
Unlock the power of full-funnel SEO and PR integration. Learn how to influence audience behavior and achieve top search engine rankings.
Integrating digital PR & SEO with a full-funnel strategy both influences audience behavior and top-three rankings in search engines.
In my recent webinar with Search Engine Journal about how to earn links with digital PR, I didn’t have time to dive into the importance of the audience journey and a full-funnel strategy. This article is to remedy that.
Have you found that ranking in search engines is more difficult lately? Or maybe your link building isn’t driving the top 3 ranking it used to.
Google representatives have been actively discussing the decrease in the importance of links in Google’s algorithm.
What does this mean?
This doesn’t seem to mean links don’t work, but that links and brand mentions in the context of the audience’s journey are factors that help to break into the top 3 positions of Google – and, I believe, eventually, how you’ll make it into SGE or other high-visibility areas of search.
A full-funnel PR and SEO strategy is a method for building links and brand mentions in the context of the audience’s journey online, creating an off-page user experience.
Here’s a quick snapshot of the key takeaways you’ll find throughout this article:
Google recommends being helpful to the audience and demonstrating Experience, Expertise, Authority, and trust (E-E-A-T) in a category to rank highly.
Your audiences are constantly looking for a solution that solves their problem or creates an opportunity, and for trusted sources to guide them through the decision-making process.
They may become aware of this problem or the solutions long before they even reach the search engines.
The chart below illustrates the sites that receive the most visits vs. those that send the most referral traffic.
This data indicates that search engines will drive the most traffic to sites, but any given audience spends a significant amount of time engaging on other platforms, digesting content about various topics.
Social and News sites get 20% and 12% of the shares of visits, respectively, while search engines drive over 70% of total traffic.
If the audience is using several touchpoints to learn about a given product or solution, wouldn’t Google use these to determine which company is a helpful source and what its E-E-A-T is for those topics?
I had my digital PR data team at PureLinq gather data for sites that ranked in Google for a seed set of cybersecurity keywords.
We then identified all of the keywords that those sites ranked in the top three positions. From that, we gathered data about the count of brand mentions and brand search volume for each domain.
The chart below shows the number of brand mentions (x-axis), U.S. search volume for brand keywords (y-axis), and the count of keywords in the top three (bubble size). Larger bubbles mean a higher count of keywords ranked in the top three.
This data set is only for cybersecurity brands.
As brand mentions increase, the bubbles grow in size, showing that a larger number of brand mentions correlates with a higher count in the top three rankings.
Brand mentions seem to influence ranking. I know there are a large number of confounding variables in this analysis. However, the idea that Google can use these measures to identify E-E-A-T is believable.
How does this play out in the real world? To understand more, I looked at Lectric eBike.
This case study demonstrates the power of integrating digital PR with SEO to create a cohesive and effective full-funnel marketing strategy.
The key to success was the strategic alignment of content across all stages of the customer journey, ensuring that each piece contributed to building awareness, trust, and, finally, decision-making confidence.
By securing authoritative links and mentions, Lectric eBikes not only improved its SEO performance but also established itself as a trusted brand in the eyes of consumers and search engines alike.
The rise in organic visibility and brand searches directly contributed to the overall increase in website traffic and, ultimately, sales.
This case underscores the importance of a holistic approach to digital marketing, where PR and SEO work hand in hand to guide the customer journey from awareness to conversion.
At the time of this analysis, Lectric was ranked in position 1 for “ebike” and 3 for “ebikes.”
As a result of the non-brand and brand visibility, the website went from <40,000 estimated clicks per month to over 200,000 in just about 2 years – and it still seems to be growing.
Lectric integrated digital PR and SEO together with a full-funnel PR & SEO strategy.
Late in 2022, Lectric began to secure more media links & brand mentions.
At first glance, you might think that the growth in backlinks was the major factor in the organic traffic growth.
The famous Ahrefs chart shows a strong correlation between the number of referring domains and organic traffic growth.
However, this chart causes much confusion since it doesn’t tell the full story.
Note: Semrush and Ahrefs have very different traffic estimates lately. However, any traffic estimate will be inherently inaccurate. They estimate these based on position, average monthly search volume, and estimated clickthrough rate (CTR) using Google’s keyword planner data. They all calculate CTR differently.
A little more digging with Ahref’s content explorer and BuzzSumo shows that the site saw growth in brand mentions starting in mid-2022, around the same time the organic traffic began to grow.
Lectric gained much of the organic traffic improvement by focusing on creating content for each stage of the audience journey.
The brand generated links and brand mentions based on the audience’s needs and wants, driving brand search volume.
Lectric eBikes secured media coverage on environmental and technology news platforms and podcasts. This effort placed the brand in front of a broad audience, emphasizing its commitment to eco-friendliness and innovation.
Placements gained during this stage aimed to educate the audience on the environmental benefits of e-bikes, leveraging unique data and expert commentary to secure media coverage.
These placements generated topically relevant and authoritative links and brand mentions related to the company and individual expertise.
Expert commentary and unique data appeal to journalists. Lectric could have used PR outreach to pitch Lectric’s sales data and CEO commentary to obtain media coverage.
I almost exclusively use unique data and expert commentary to secure media coverage in digital PR. This is a very effective technique.
The company obtained mentions in articles that discussed market success, customer satisfaction, and endorsements from reputable sources. This helped build trust and positioned Lectric eBikes as a reliable choice.
Coverage included comparative discussions on pricing and quality, showing how Lectric stands out from competitors. This was crucial for audiences evaluating their options.
Digital PR Insight
The Axios article is a great example of a technique I use in data campaigns. Find data about specific states or cities that relate to your niche. Then, use that data to pitch media about a given topic.
The website’s content was tailored to answer final questions and overcome objections. This included detailed product comparisons, reviews, and clear, transparent pricing information.
By this stage, Lectric eBikes focused on ranking for both non-brand and brand-specific keywords, facilitating easy access for users ready to make a purchase decision.
The audience is actively searching Lectric by name as a result of the digital PR.
Lectic’s site has comparison, reviews, and showroom information easily accessible in the main navigation.
It also has clear pricing and product options.
Pro tip: Brand search for a company or product seems to have an impact on a site’s ability to rank in the top three for non-brand keywords.
If you’re unfamiliar with the audience journey, here’s an overview.
A full-funnel strategy means that you create content for each stage in the audience’s journey and at the touchpoints where they are going for that type of information.
The audience journey has several stages:
A full-funnel strategy creates content for each stage of the audience journey.
Using e-bikes as an example:
The audience journey has touchpoints they use to learn or gather insights at different stages.
For example:
Targeting each stage of the audience’s journey can create topically relevant links at key touchpoints.
Designing a strategy means laying out a structured roadmap for businesses to effectively guide their target audience from awareness to decision-making.
I’m a big fan of templates that simplify processes. I created this React Workbook as part of my Digital PR for SEO Mini MBA course. You can use it to create an audience journey map, identify assets, and create an integrated PR and SEO strategy. Screenshots are below.
Start by mapping your audience’s journey, identifying key stages, touchpoints, and content needs. This will serve as the foundation for your strategy.
Understand and visualize the path your audience takes from first becoming aware of a need or problem to making a purchase decision.
The screenshot below is of an audience journey map template I created to make the process of mapping the audience journey more actionable.
Develop a variety of unique assets and resources tailored to each stage of the audience journey, designed to engage, inform, and convert your target audience. These assets should be useful for both digital PR and SEO.
Instead of creating endless blog articles, create assets that are linkable and shareable.
In my webinar with SEJ, I gave the example of how my digital PR team earned links by analyzing publicly available data in manufacturing around the outsourcing of manufacturing overseas due to increasing labor costs in the US.
This idea was a result of recent media trends discussing the idea that US manufacturing may be in a recession. We did this for a CFO consultancy that worked with manufacturing companies.
Thus, these assets can show your overall expertise in a given category.
With assets in hand, start an integrated digital PR and SEO program.
Launch a coordinated digital PR and SEO campaign that leverages external media coverage (links and brand mentions) and optimized online content to improve organic search visibility and drive targeted traffic to your website.
I use this integrated topic tour canvas to simplify the planning process.
Pro Tips
Implementing this full-funnel strategy requires ongoing collaboration between your PR, SEO, and content teams to ensure all efforts are aligned and focused on guiding the audience toward conversion.
By systematically mapping the audience journey, creating engaging content for each stage, and leveraging both digital PR and SEO, businesses can build a powerful online presence by ranking in the top three and driving brand search.
More resources:
Featured Image: eamesBot/Shutterstock
Kevin is the Founder & Head of Digital PR Strategy at PureLinq, a provider of digital PR for SEO services. After …
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6 tactical ways to (responsibly) use AI for everyday SEO – Search Engine Land

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6 tactical ways to (responsibly) use AI for everyday SEO  Search Engine Land
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James Brockbank on vanity vs. sanity SEO metrics, the shifting SEO landscape, and link relevance – Search Engine Land

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James Brockbank on vanity vs. sanity SEO metrics, the shifting SEO landscape, and link relevance  Search Engine Land
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Rethinking your keyword strategy: Why optimizing for search intent matters – Search Engine Land

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Rethinking your keyword strategy: Why optimizing for search intent matters  Search Engine Land
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