How to Do restaurant SEO and Rank #1 on Google and LLMS ft. Andrea Abbondanza

Running a restaurant in 2026 isn’t just about great food. It’s about getting found before your competitors. 🍝

In this episode of Inside A Hustler’s Brain, recorded at the summit in Phuket, I sat down with Andrea Abbondanza, founder of SEO for Restaurants (Australia) and BrianzaDigitale (Italy). He has 15 years in SEO and is known as the restaurant SEO specialist. 🇮🇹🇦🇺

He shared exactly how he gets restaurants more bookings, and how he’s bringing AI agents into hospitality. 🤖

📊 In this episode, we unpacked:

• 🎯 Why Andrea specialised in restaurants
• 📍 Why Google Business Profile drives most restaurant traffic
• 🤖 Citations, branding and ranking in LLMs
• 📊 The right channel mix at each stage of growth
• 🧩 The ecosystem behind his 40% booking growth
• 📄 The page elements that convert diners
• 👩‍🍳 Bella, his AI booking agent and avatar
• 🧠 His take on AI, jobs and money

🎥 Watch the full episode:

🎯 Why Andrea Chose Restaurant SEO

Andrea spent years in generalist agencies before choosing a niche. Because he’s Italian and loves food, he picked restaurants, “definitely not because it’s the most profitable niche.” Restaurant owners are busy and don’t understand much about SEO, but they love food and culture. 🍕

His bigger point: how do you stay relevant when AI can do the delivery? Specialization. Find your niche, then niche down, and cultivate your personal brand. The more you specialize, the better you understand clients’ needs and can repeat successful campaigns. 🔁

For another niche-agency story, read how Lawrence Hitches scaled StudioHawk. 📈

📍 Why Google Business Profile Drives Restaurant Traffic

For restaurants, Andrea says roughly 80–85% of traffic comes from Google Business Profile. That’s why optimizing it is the first step, followed by the website, keeping the two consistent. 🗺️

Then come the technical pieces: schema and FAQs, publishing posts to your profile like social media, adding local entities like stations and directions, and building citations for the suburbs you target. Many restaurant pages still lack rating schema and lose CTR because of it. 🧩

Restaurants have an advantage: their signals are naturally real. A real restaurant gets directions, phone calls and bookings, and people happily leave reviews, unlike plumbers or roofers. On top of strong optimization, he recommends Google Ads to build audiences and target better. ⭐

🤖 Citations, Branding and Ranking in LLMs

“I think as SEOs, for a long time, we’ve been actually cheating,” Andrea says. Now, think about how Google and LLMs like Perplexity or Anthropic’s models see your brand: your website, social media, YouTube, TikTok and blog posts. 🏷️

Backlinks may still matter, but what counts more is how many times your brand is mentioned across citations, on your site and on third-party sites. For live research, LLMs still pull from search results, so classic SEO is still relevant. But to earn citations, he would invest in branding. 📣

For more on this, read Cindy Krum on where brand discovery happens now. 🔍

📊 The Right Channel Mix at Each Stage

Andrea’s channel order depends on the restaurant’s stage:

• 🆕 New restaurant: start with Google Ads, because you can be at the top straight away, while building SEO in the background
• 🏛️ Established restaurant: push SEO, starting with basic optimization for quick ranking gains
• 📸 Then social media: visuals matter, but TikTok doesn’t convert like it did three years ago. A mix of Google, TikTok and Meta still works

His promise to clients: “My job is to bring more customers to your door. When they walk in the door, that’s your job.” Restaurants are all about experience; sometimes the food is average, but you remember how they treated you. 🍷

🧩 The Ecosystem Behind 40% More Bookings

Andrea says his clients see on average a 40% increase in bookings in 12 months, often with big growth in the first two or three months, though restaurants are seasonal. 📈

His system covers website management, Google Business Profile management and Google Ads. With more budget, he adds social awareness campaigns, and for some clients, local creators who visit to shoot photos and videos. “It’s an ecosystem where everything works well.” 🌐

The sales pitch starts simple (“you’re going to get more bookings”), then moves to brand: What’s your main dish? What makes you different? Why should people choose you over competitors? 🍽️

📄 The Page Elements That Convert Diners

On-page is the most important part. Andrea’s checklist:

• 📅 A flawless booking process; many restaurants have broken booking buttons on Maps
• 🎉 Strong function pages: one event can be worth $2,000–6,000, so four functions might pay for a year of marketing
• 🔍 Analyze competitors’ booking flows and compare them with yours
• 🖱️ Track behaviour with Microsoft Clarity, then A/B test your calls to action

“You can generate traffic, but conversion is what’s more important.” Local SEO isn’t as competitive as e-commerce, so with a comprehensive strategy, “you’re going to smash.” 💥

On CMS, he works with any platform. Many restaurants use Squarespace or Wix (“Wix is terrible”), but he prefers WordPress. He also builds simple new sites with Claude Code; he built one in two hours with multiple calls to action, spreadsheet-connected leads and QR codes. ⚙️

👩‍🍳 Meet Bella: Andrea’s AI Booking Agent

Restaurants juggle POS and delivery systems, but what really drives revenue is phone calls, bookings and functions. So Andrea built an AI agent: a fully automated, agentic autoresponder that answers the phone and questions using a knowledge base of menus, food preferences, allergies and function packages. 📞

The agent is called Bella (from “Bella Ciao”). He once jumped on stage to sing the song with a Punjabi band at a conference after-party in Chandigarh, and his booking system was already called “Ciao.” Now Bella is an AI avatar with an Italian greyhound and friends in New York, London and Melbourne, and he’s building a pipeline for an automated AI channel. 🐕

He also runs a YouTube channel as “the SEO chef” and expects fully automated YouTube videos within 6–12 months. AI video editing is possible with tools like Claude Code, but it needs powerful GPUs, so he runs it locally and uses external servers for simpler tasks like scraping. 🎬

His vision: one day, your agent will chat with Bella to book a table, though he assumes bookings will still pass through a booking system. For more on AI agents in business, see GoHighLevel’s new AI features. 🤝

🧠 Andrea on AI, Jobs and Money

Will AI replace humans? “Yes, it’s already happening.” Agentic flows can replace whole departments, and he points to big companies laying off white-collar workers. His advice: keep learning AI, because “if you reject the change, the change is going to happen anyway,” and think strategically about your positioning so you can’t be substituted. ⚠️

Best money advice he’s received from other SEOs: look at how you allocate your time. Are you doing what a CEO must do, or repetitive tasks you could automate or delegate? He’s a bootstrapper who values freedom, and his real advice is to do something you love. 💡

• 🧘 One person to meet: Buddha
• 🎉 Last 24 hours: a big party with good friends
• 👨 Best advice: from his father, about how competitive life can be; stay kind and open-minded
• 🌙 Morning person? No, though he’s been vibe coding from 5 AM lately
• 🏆 Heroes: Cristiano Ronaldo and Valentino; in SEO, people like James Dooley

For more on AI and jobs, read Anil Agarwal on how AI is changing SEO. 🔗

📝 Key Takeaways From the Andrea Abbondanza Interview

• 🎯 Specialization keeps you relevant when AI can do the delivery
• 📍 Google Business Profile drives around 80–85% of restaurant traffic
• 🏷️ For LLMs, brand mentions across the web matter more than ever
• 📊 New restaurants start with Google Ads; established ones push SEO
• 📅 A flawless booking flow and strong function pages drive revenue
• 🖱️ Track with Microsoft Clarity and A/B test your calls to action
• 🤖 AI agents like Bella can handle calls and bookings

❓ FAQs About Andrea Abbondanza

Who is Andrea Abbondanza?

Andrea Abbondanza is the founder of SEO for Restaurants (Australia) and BrianzaDigitale (Italy), with 15 years of SEO experience, specializing in restaurants and hospitality.

How important is Google Business Profile for restaurant SEO?

Very. Andrea says about 80–85% of restaurant traffic comes from Google Business Profile, so it’s the first thing to optimize.

How do restaurants get cited by LLMs?

By building a brand that’s mentioned many times across the web: your site, social media, YouTube and third-party sites. Classic SEO still matters for live searches.

What results does Andrea get for restaurants?

He says clients see on average a 40% increase in bookings within 12 months.

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If you own a restaurant or do SEO for hospitality clients, share this with someone who needs more bookings. 💬

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