Local SEO for pubs and restaurants: showing up when people search nearby

Local SEO for restaurants and pubs means making sure that when someone nearby searches "pub with food" or "Italian near me", your venue shows up and looks worth the walk. Google ranks local results on relevance, distance and prominence. Distance is fixed, but a complete Google Business Profile, steady reviews, accurate listings elsewhere, a clear website and a few local links all help the other two.

#How does local SEO work for restaurants and pubs?

Google spells out the three things it weighs in its local ranking help page:

• Relevance is "how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for."
• Distance is "how far each business is from the customer who's searching."
• Prominence is "how well-known a business is", based partly on "how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have."

The same page says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up, that verified profiles are more likely to appear, and that "more reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking." It's also clear that "there's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google."

That's most of the game. You can't move the pub closer to the people searching, but you can make it obvious what you are (relevance) and give Google plenty of evidence that people know and like the place (prominence).

It isn't only Google. Apple Maps, Bing and the AI assistants that sit on top of search all need the same basic facts about you, and they all get them from listings, reviews and websites.

#Start with your Google Business Profile

Claim and verify your Google Business Profile before anything else, because it's the listing that feeds Google Maps, the map results in Search and Google's AI features. Our full Google Business Profile guide for pubs and restaurants walks through every field; the short version is below.

• Verify it. Google offers phone, text, email, video or postcard depending on your venue, and says reviews take up to five business days (verification help).
• Choose the most specific primary category for the whole business and as few extra ones as you can.
• Use your real-world name. Google's guidelines don't allow taglines or unnecessary extra information in the name, so leave "Best Sunday roast in town" for the description.
• Put the address and map pin exactly where the door is, since that's where Google thinks you are.
• Set regular hours, kitchen hours and special hours for every bank holiday.
• Add your menu, a menu link and your booking link.
• Tick every attribute that's true (outdoor seating, accessibility, payments).
• Upload real photos, starting with the front of the building as people see it from the street.

Relevance comes from that detail. Google can't match you to "dog friendly pub with garden" on facts it doesn't have, so tick the outdoor seating attribute and mention the dogs in your description and photos.

Then keep it current. Wrong hours are, I think, the quickest way to lose someone for good: they turn up, the door's locked, and they don't come back to check whether it was a one-off.

#Reviews: how many you need and how to keep them coming

Google doesn't give a target number of reviews. It says more reviews and positive ratings help local ranking, and that replying shows "you value their feedback" (local ranking tips). In my view, a steady trickle matters more than a big total, because a profile whose latest review is from last spring tells guests nothing about how you're doing now.

The way to get that trickle is boring and reliable: ask every guest, the same way, at the same moment. Google lets you create a review link or QR code from your profile under "Read reviews", then "Get more reviews", and suggests putting it on receipts and displaying it in the venue (Google's QR code help). A QR code on the bill folder and a quick "we'd love a review, whatever you thought" from the team covers most of it.

Stay inside the rules. Google's prohibited content policy bans offering incentives for reviews, selectively asking happy customers for positive ones, discouraging negative reviews and setting staff review targets. In UK law, fake reviews and concealed incentivised reviews have been banned practices since 6 April 2025 under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024. Our guide on how to respond to restaurant reviews covers replies, templates and what the CMA's guidance says.

#Citations and directories: which ones matter for UK venues?

A citation is any listing of your venue's name, address and phone number on another site. The ones worth your time are the listings people and machines actually use, and they matter for two reasons: they send people to you directly, and they give every search system a second and third source for your basic facts.

Nobody publishes an official list of which directories count for UK hospitality, so this is my order of priority.

Apple Business comes first after Google. Apple replaced Business Connect with Apple Business on 14 April 2026; it's free, existing claimed locations moved across automatically, and your place card (photos, hours, location details) shows across Apple Maps, Safari and Spotlight. Anyone searching in Apple Maps sees Apple's place card, whatever your Google profile says.

Bing Places is next. Microsoft's announcement of the new Bing Places describes it as a free platform for listings that appear in Bing search and Bing Maps, with an import from Google that carries over name, hours and contact details. Microsoft says Microsoft 365 Copilot Chat sends its web searches to Bing, so this one matters more than it used to.

After that:

• Your Facebook page, where the hours, address, phone and menu link should match your Google profile.
• Tripadvisor, if you have a listing there: claim it and correct anything out of date.
• Your booking platform, especially OpenTable if you use it, since OpenAI's help centre says ChatGPT can show OpenTable availability and that it works globally (ChatGPT search help).
• Any delivery apps you use, each of which keeps its own hours and menu that drift out of date fast.
• CAMRA's pub finder if you serve cask ale. CAMRA says its listings are "independently added and updated by thousands of CAMRA volunteers" (CAMRA pubs), so check yours and flag anything wrong through its contact page.
• Your food hygiene rating, which you don't create yourself; the Food Standards Agency's ratings site holds it on behalf of local authorities. Check the business name and address on it match.

Whatever the list, consistency is the job. Write down your exact name, address and phone number once ("The Brass Heron, 12 Mill Lane", not three different variations) and copy it everywhere. When you change your hours or phone number, change them in every one of these places on the same day. It's a bit of a faff, which is why it's so easy to let slide.

#What does your venue website need for local SEO?

Your website needs one clear page per venue with the name, address, phone, opening hours, menu and booking link written as text. Google's own guidance for its AI features is to make sure "important content is available in textual form." A menu that only exists as a photo of the printed card isn't text.

What I'd want on a pub or restaurant site:

• A homepage that says what you are and where, in words, near the top.
• A menu page with dishes, prices and dietary labels typed out.
• Opening and kitchen hours, including bank holiday changes.
• A contact section with the address, postcode, phone number and a map.
• Pages for the things people search for by name: private hire, Christmas parties, live sport, events.
• A booking link that goes straight to your booking system.

Those event and seasonal pages earn their keep. Someone searching "Christmas party venue" in your town in October is a hot lead, and a page that answers their questions (dates, menus, prices, capacity) gives Google something to show them. Our guide to filling your Christmas party bookings covers what to put on it.

Then the technical basics, which whoever built your site can sort:

• Add LocalBusiness structured data using the Restaurant or BarOrPub type. Google's local business structured data page lists name and address as required and recommends telephone, opening hours, menu, servesCuisine, priceRange, url and geo. There's a worked example in our post on getting recommended by AI assistants.
• Check robots.txt isn't blocking search crawlers. Google notes robots.txt is for managing crawler traffic and "not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google" (robots.txt introduction).
• Verify the site in Google Search Console, which Google says can make Business Profile verification instant.

Give each page a title that says what and where, for example "The Brass Heron | Pub and kitchen in Anytown". It's usually the line people see in search results, so make it tell them they're in the right place.

#Local links and press: how do you earn them?

Links from other websites are one of the prominence signals Google names, and for a venue the local ones make the most sense. You don't need many. You need real ones, from sites a customer in your town might plausibly visit.

Places I'd start:

• Ask your suppliers. Breweries, butchers, bakers and coffee roasters often list the venues that stock them.
• Submit events to local what's-on listings on newspaper, council, tourism and business improvement district sites.
• Ask the clubs and charities you already support. If you sponsor the five-a-side team or host the quiz for the hospice, a link on their site is a fair request.
• Invite local food writers and bloggers when there's a genuine story, such as a new menu, a new chef or a reopening.
• Pitch the local paper with real news. A refurbishment, an anniversary or a fundraiser is a story; "we have a new burger" usually isn't.

I'd steer clear of anyone selling links or "citation packages" by the hundred. A dozen local sites a customer might click from are worth more of your time.

Social media fits here too, though Google's local ranking page doesn't mention it. Busy Instagram and Facebook accounts give journalists, bloggers and event listings something to point at, and give people another way to check you're open. Our guides to restaurant social media marketing and promoting pub events go deeper. If that's the part that keeps slipping, Venuesmith builds a plan of Instagram and Facebook posts from a sentence about what's coming up, and nothing goes out until you approve it.

#How does AI search change local SEO for restaurants?

AI search changes where people ask, but not much about what you need to do. Google says there are "no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, nor other special optimizations necessary", beyond being indexed and eligible for a snippet, and its best practices include keeping your Business Profile up to date and making structured data match the visible text (AI features and your website).

The other assistants lean on the same kinds of sources. OpenAI says ChatGPT search partners with other search providers and uses unnamed third-party providers for nearby business listings. Microsoft says Copilot Chat sends its searches to Bing. Apple's place cards are managed through Apple Business. Google's Ask Maps, launched in the US and India in March 2026, draws on information about more than 300 million places and reviews from Google's contributors (Google's announcement).

Two things become more important as a result. Bing Places and Apple Business are worth more than they were, since Copilot Chat searches Bing and Apple's place cards show in Spotlight and Safari as well as Maps. And the text on your website matters more, because it's the likeliest place for these systems to find answers to questions like "does it have a garden" or "do they do gluten free". Our guide to getting your restaurant recommended by AI assistants covers where each assistant gets its information, schema markup and which crawlers to allow in robots.txt.