So you’ve signed up to ResDiary and you’re wondering how to make the most of those commission-free bookings. 

Whether you’ve moved from another system, or you’ve come from pen and paper, you need to maximise your SEO (search engine optimisation) to make sure that your site and your Dish Cult listing appear high on Google.

Optimise your Dish Cult listing

Google assigns websites levels of “authority” based on the quality, quantity, and relevance of the content and links on that site. Sites that have links backwards and forwards to high authority sites are given higher authority themselves.

Higher authority = higher position on Google Search.

ResDiary has great authority because of the amount of content and links on our site. By linking to us, you get good authority and therefore, better search rankings.

What to do:

Name: Put your venue’s name and location in your Restaurant Name. This helps your customers distinguish which venue to pick if there are other places with similar names to you.

Content: We would recommend having at least 100 words written about your venue in your auto-build form/Dish Cult listing details. You should include your venue name and location (i.e: The Old Inn, Glasgow) at least three times in this text. This allows Google’s bots to understand what the page is about, and where it is based, helping with those all important search results.

Take reviews: The more content you have on your Dish Cult listing, the more likely Google is to list it, and the more likely people will easily find your site. Reviews are a great way to generate lots of content, without lifting a finger.

Remove old reservation links from your site

If you have previously been using another reservation system, you might have links to their pages across your site. They might be in pages that are hidden or no one ever visits. So they’re not important, right? Wrong! 

Google’s bots assume that if you have a link to a booking site, then you’re closely related. Even if your booking page on their site is dead, this link still tells these bots that you’d like them to appear in relation to you. This means that OpenTable/Bookatable etc. will appear high on Google when people search your venue’s name. Remove that link and they’ll start slipping down. 

Some of these links may be hidden in your site’s source code. If you’re not familiar with web design, it’s a good idea to get your website developer to look into this for you.

**You may have Winner barges on your site that you'd like to keep. Ask your web developer to make these "nofollow" links and Google will ignore them.**

Finally: Add ResDiary links to your site

You might think that you’re listed on the Dish Cult portal and your online bookings will come flowing. You’re partly correct, but you also need to have a link to your Dish Cult listing on your own site. We mentioned domain authority before and this is part of this. By linking to ResDiary, you’re linked to a domain with good authority meaning you’re more likely to rise up the search rankings.

Also, you linking to ResDiary means that we are classed as having a connection to you, pushing your Dish Cult listing higher up the listings than sites you will pay commission for.