SEO for Hospitality & Events
Hospitality search is almost entirely mobile, local and immediate. Most of the battle happens in the map pack and on your Google Business Profile, not on the website, so that is where we start. Get the profile right and you win the customer standing outside deciding where to eat.
A £1,000 deposit, then 11 monthly payments, or £5,500 for the year. That buys up to five target keywords, a named consultant, and a monthly roadmap you can read in ten minutes.
See all three packagesHow your customers search in this sector
Short, immediate and on a phone. "Coffee near me" at 9am converts within the hour, and position one takes most of it, so third on the map is worth more than first on the page below.
The profile is the shopfront
Photos, opening hours, menu links and review replies do more here than anything on the site, and they are what the customer sees before they choose.
Events and seasons are planned
Christmas catering searches start in September. Publish in November and you have missed the year, and the bookings that came with it.
The search happens minutes before the visit
"Coffee near me" at nine in the morning, "restaurants open now Sheffield" at seven in the evening, "Sunday roast Doncaster" on a Saturday night. Hospitality search is the most immediate there is. The gap between the search and the visit is often under an hour, and almost always the same day.
That collapses the funnel to a single moment. There is no consideration phase to nurture and no email to capture. You are either one of the three results on that screen or the customer has walked into somewhere else.
It also means your opening hours matter almost as much as your ranking. People apply "open now" filters constantly, and a venue with wrong or missing hours is dropped from a large share of searches at exactly the moment it could have won them.
Your Google Business Profile is your website
This is the one sector where that is close to literally true. Most hospitality decisions are made entirely inside Google Maps or the local pack (photos, rating, hours, menu, a glance at the busy-times graph) and the website is never opened.
So the profile deserves more attention than the site. Specifically:
- 01
Photos, constantly
Food, the room, the exterior so people can find the door. Hospitality profiles with recent photography outperform those without by a clear margin, and the effect is stronger here than anywhere else.
- 02
Hours, including every exception
Bank holidays, Christmas, the week you close for a refit. Wrong hours produce one-star reviews from people who turned up to a locked door, and those are the hardest reviews to answer.
- 03
The menu, as text
A menu that exists only as a PDF or an image cannot be read: not by Google, not by an assistant, and not by someone using a screen reader. Put it on the page as real text and it can rank for every dish on it.
- 04
Attributes filled in
Outdoor seating, dog friendly, wheelchair accessible, vegan options, takeaway. These feed filters people actually use, and most venues leave them blank.
Dietary and occasion terms are the winnable ones
"Restaurant Sheffield" is contested by every venue in the city. "Gluten free restaurant Sheffield", "dog friendly pub near Ecclesall", "private dining room Doncaster", "vegan Sunday roast". These are searched by people with a specific need, they convert extremely well, and most venues have never written a word about them.
The condition is that it has to be true. A gluten-free page on a venue that cannot safely feed a coeliac customer produces one visit and one bad review. Where it is true, it is often the single highest-return content a venue can publish, because the searcher has already chosen themselves.
The same goes for occasions: birthdays, wakes, christenings, work Christmas parties, small weddings. Occasion searches are planned rather than immediate, which makes them the one part of hospitality search with a research phase you can actually reach.
Caterers, venues and event suppliers are a different business
Anything booked in advance (catering, venue hire, photobooths, event planning) behaves nothing like a café. The lead time is weeks or months, each booking is worth a lot, and the search is comparative rather than immediate.
That makes the website matter again. People shortlist three or four suppliers, look at galleries, compare packages and prices, and email several. Publishing prices or packages is a real advantage here because so few suppliers do, and the ones that do get contacted by people who have already accepted the number.
Seasonality is the other constraint. If most of your bookings are taken in a ten-week window, the content and the campaign need to be in place three months before it, not during it.
Reviews are the product
Nowhere else does the star rating do as much work. A 4.2 and a 4.6 on the same street produce visibly different footfall, and the rating is read before anything else on the profile.
Ask at the point of maximum satisfaction, which in hospitality is at the table or on the way out, not by email the next day. A QR code on the bill works. Reply to everything, and reply well to the bad ones, briefly and without arguing, because the reply is read by everyone who reaches that review afterwards.
Recency matters more here than almost anywhere: a venue whose most recent review is eight months old reads as one that has gone quiet, and people go elsewhere.
What a hospitality campaign costs
Campaigns start at £497 a month plus VAT after a £1,000 deposit. For a single venue, most of the value is in profile work and local pages, and we will be straight with you: a café with one location may get most of the available benefit from doing the free checklist properly.
Where a campaign earns its keep is multi-site operators, venues with an events arm, and caterers competing across a county: anywhere the website is doing real work rather than the profile doing all of it.
Four steps, then round again
SEO never finishes. The work runs on a loop, and you see the report every time round, good month or bad.
- Step 1Keyword research
We start with the terms that show buying intent, not the ones with the biggest numbers. Alongside those, lower-competition terms that rank sooner and bring early results.
- Step 2Competitor analysis
Then we look at who outranks you and why. Once we know what they are doing, we know what it takes to beat it.
- Step 3Implementation
The team does the work: on-page fixes, new content, links and local signals. Every item is listed in your monthly report, not buried in a dashboard.
- Step 4Reporting & revision
Each month you see what was done and what it moved. When something is not working, we change it rather than wait for it to come good.
Three packages. Prices included.
Pick the one that matches where your customers are. Pay for the year, or a deposit and eleven monthly payments. Either way, the number on this page is the number on the invoice.
- Up to 5 keywords per campaign
- Up to 5 URLs included
- GMB post every 14 days
- 1+ new landing page or article
- Targeted locations, blog posts, on-page SEO report
- Initial audit & corrections, citations audit
- Monthly roadmap & action report
- Up to 10 keywords per campaign
- Up to 10 URLs included
- GMB post every 7 days
- 2+ new landing pages or articles
- Targeted locations, blog posts, on-page SEO report
- Initial audit & corrections, citations audit
- Monthly roadmap & action report
- Up to 20 keywords per campaign
- Up to 10 URLs included
- GMB post every 4 days
- 5+ new landing pages or articles
- Targeted locations, blog posts, on-page SEO report
- Initial audit & corrections, citations audit
- Monthly roadmap & action report
Every package includes keyword analysis, heading tags and meta description optimisation, image alt tag analysis, duplicate content checks, sitemap creation, mobile responsiveness reporting, citations, load time testing and search engine reports. All prices are subject to change. Budgeting for the website too? Here iswhat a website should actually cost.
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