SEO basics that survive the first restaurant redesign
A redesign should not hide your menu from Google. Protect URLs, location pages and the dishes people already search for.
A redesign is exciting until organic bookings dip three weeks later. Usually it is not Google punishing good design. It is /menu becoming /our-food without a redirect, titles rewritten for vibe, and location pages deleted in a cleanup.
Inventory your landing pages before visual work. Which queries bring covers. Which location pages convert. Those deserve special treatment, not accidental deletion.
Technical hygiene: canonicals, sitemaps, hours markup, sensible headings, internal links to the live menu. A beautiful site with a PDF menu still struggles to be found for the dishes you actually serve.
Do not chase mystery. A two-word hero and a video background can look premium while saying nothing to a tourist searching for your neighbourhood. Clarity beats cinematic parsley.
Treat SEO as launch criteria. Redirect map signed off, metadata reviewed, Search Console watched. Rankings fluctuate. Preventable losses are sloppy handovers.
Common questions
- What should you protect in a restaurant redesign?
- Menu URLs, location pages, booking paths, and any article that already brings covers. Redirect the rest with a signed-off map.
- Does a live menu help SEO?
- Search engines can read HTML dishes. They cannot read last week's PDF. One source of truth is discoverability as well as honesty.