SEO for Calgary restaurants.

Searching a restaurant's name and finding a delivery aggregator first is common in Calgary, and it costs money on every order. The app takes a commission on a customer who was specifically looking for you.

Fixing it is usually unglamorous and quick: a real title tag with the name and cuisine, the name as actual text rather than a logo image, LocalBusiness and Restaurant schema, and a page that loads on a phone in under three seconds.

Every dish name is a search term. 'Birria tacos Calgary' finds restaurants whose menus are readable text and cannot find restaurants whose menu is a JPEG the designer exported.

It also breaks dietary search entirely. Someone searching 'gluten free pasta Calgary' is matched against menu text, and a PDF menu removes you from the results even if you have exactly what they want.

The filter is whether the page describes something with an enquiry attached. Browsing traffic is worth little; a group booking enquiry is worth a great deal.

The profile is where diners look at pictures of the food, check whether the patio is open, and see how recent the reviews are. Photos are the strongest single lever, and recency matters. A profile whose newest photo is from 2022 reads as a restaurant that may have changed hands.

The attributes section is heavily underused: outdoor seating, accessible entrance, takes reservations, good for groups, serves vegetarian. Each one feeds a filter diners actually apply.

The assistant needs to know what you serve, where you are, what you're good at and what makes you different. A site whose menu is an image and whose homepage says 'a culinary journey' gives it nothing to work with.

The restaurants getting named are the ones whose sites state plain facts: the cuisine, the neighbourhood, the signature dishes, the dietary options, the hours. That's the same content that helps a human decide.

This is the vertical where the usual advice inverts. Somebody deciding where to eat tonight opens Maps, filters, looks at photos, checks whether you are open, glances at the reviews, and taps directions or call — without ever loading your domain. Money spent on a beautiful site while the profile is thin is money spent on the least-visited part of the journey.

So the priorities reorder. Photographs that look like the actual room and the actual plates, updated as the menu changes. Hours that are right, including the statutory holidays where most restaurants lose a day to a wrong listing. The menu readable as text rather than trapped in a PDF or an image, because that is what gets pulled into the panel and quoted by an assistant. Attributes filled in properly — patio, takeout, reservations, dietary options — since those are what the filters run on.

The website still matters for the searches that are considered rather than immediate: private events, catering, large bookings, and "best patio in Kensington" style research. Those are worth real pages. The nightly decision is not one of them.

A restaurant's reviews are not a ranking tactic, they are the decision. Volume matters less than recency and pattern: three recent reviews describing slow service will cost more covers than a hundred old five-stars will save, because the reader is scanning for what has been true lately.

Reply to the bad ones once, briefly, without arguing, and never with details that identify the customer. The audience is the next person scrolling, not the reviewer. And ask everyone rather than the pleased ones — filtering by sentiment is against Google's policy, and in a business with this much review volume it is also the easiest kind of pattern to spot from outside.

The mechanics, including what can actually be removed and what cannot, are in the guide on getting Google reviews. The restaurant-specific part is simply cadence: a steady trickle every week, which in this trade is achievable without a system because of the sheer number of customers.

Search your own restaurant and count how many of the first page results are yours. For most Calgary restaurants a meaningful share belongs to delivery platforms and aggregators, each with its own copy of your menu, its own prices, and its own idea of when you are open.

That is worth managing rather than resenting. The platforms are how a lot of people find you, but a stale menu on one of them produces a customer who arrives expecting a dish you stopped serving. Set a reminder to update every platform when the menu changes, in the same pass as the website and the Business Profile.

The one thing worth defending properly is your own name search. Somebody typing your restaurant into Google has already chosen you, and they should land on your profile and your site rather than on a platform charging commission for a customer you had already won.