Your Customers Are Searching. Can They Find You?
SEO, PPC, and website strategy for Nashville’s independent restaurants.
Nashville’s restaurant economy runs on search.
But it’s not just tourists. Corporate dining, private events, and catering are searched just as aggressively. “Private dining Nashville” is searched hundreds of times per month. “Catering near me” has grown over 120% year over year. Whether your customers are visitors looking for their next meal or companies planning their next event, they start on Google.
Every one of those 17.3 million visitors will search for where to eat before they decide. The restaurants that show up get the tables. The ones that don’t get walked past.
What happens when someone searches “best restaurants near me” in Nashville.
Google shows 3 restaurants. Not 30.
93% of local pack clicks go to the top 3 results. If you’re not in that pack, you’re invisible to the majority of searchers.
“Near me” searches are exploding.
“Food near me” searches grew 99% year over year. “Food near me open now” surged 875%. These are people ready to spend money right now.
90% research before they eat.
9 out of 10 diners look at a restaurant online before walking in. They check your menu, your reviews, your photos. If your website is slow, outdated, or nonexistent, they move on.
75% of local searches convert.
Three out of four people who search for a local restaurant take action: they call, they visit, they book. These aren’t window shoppers. They’re hungry.
How well is your restaurant showing up right now?
Most restaurant owners assume their online presence is working. These four questions take less than a minute to answer on your phone, and the results are usually surprising.
When someone searches for your type of food near your neighborhood, which three restaurants does Google show them?
Search it right now on your phone. Google shows three restaurants in the local pack. 93% of clicks go to those three. If you are not one of them, every new customer searching goes somewhere else.
If one of your regulars shares your website with a friend right now, what does the preview look like?
Copy your URL and paste it into a text message. Look at the preview card. If it shows a broken image, a generic template logo, or a blank placeholder, every referral from a happy customer dies right there.
How many people search for catering in your area every month, and does your restaurant show up for any of those searches?
Catering is 3 to 5 times the ticket of a dine-in plate. Most restaurants offer catering but have no dedicated page for it online. If Google cannot find a catering page, someone searching “catering near me” will never see you.
When you Google your own restaurant, does Google show your menu, prices, and hours right in the search result, or just a plain blue link?
Some restaurants show star ratings, price ranges, and hours directly in the search result. Others show a plain text link. Two restaurants side by side, one with a rich result card and one without. The rich result wins the click almost every time.
Own the searches your customers make before they decide where to eat.
SEO is how your restaurant shows up when someone searches “best brunch in Germantown” or “private dining Nashville” or “catering near downtown.” Every piece of content we publish is another page that can rank, another search you can win, another customer who finds you instead of your competitor.
Tourist & diner searches
The searches visitors and locals make when they’re deciding where to eat right now:
- → “best brunch in Germantown”
- → “late night food Midtown Nashville”
- → “where to eat near the Ryman”
- → “best happy hour East Nashville”
- → “restaurants with outdoor seating near me”
Corporate & event searches
The searches event planners and companies make when booking high-value reservations:
- → “private dining Nashville”
- → “corporate catering Brentwood”
- → “rehearsal dinner venues Franklin”
- → “restaurants for large groups near me”
- → “office lunch catering Nashville”
Every one of these searches is a customer looking for exactly what you offer. Our SEO services create the content that ranks for them, automatically, every day. The more you publish, the more searches you own.
Fill tables today while your SEO rankings build.
SEO takes months to compound. PPC puts your restaurant at the top of Google search results tomorrow. We manage your Google Ads so every dollar goes to real diners in your area, not tourists in another state seeing your ad by accident.
Most restaurants running Google Ads are wasting money without knowing it. Ads running at 2am when the kitchen is closed. Clicks from junk networks that never convert. “Conversions” that track button clicks, not actual reservations.
We fix that. Real conversion tracking. Negative keywords blocking irrelevant searches. Ad schedules matching your hours. Geographic targeting matching your market. Every dollar pointed at someone who is ready to eat.
What we fix in most restaurant ad accounts:
- Ads running on junk networks with 1% click rates
- Zero negative keywords blocking irrelevant searches
- Conversion tracking that measures clicks, not bookings
- Ads running 24/7 including hours the restaurant is closed
- Landing pages pointing to a slow homepage instead of a reservation page
Search gets them there. Your website converts them.
Most restaurant websites are built by POS companies or template platforms. They’re slow, not optimized for search, and share a domain with thousands of other restaurants. Google can’t tell you apart.
A proper restaurant website loads in under 2 seconds, has schema markup that tells Google your hours, menu, location, and reservation options, and has unique content that ranks for the searches your customers actually make.
The difference between a template site and a purpose-built site is the difference between a search impression and a reservation. We build sites that convert searchers into diners.
| Template | Purpose-built | |
|---|---|---|
| Load time | 4-8 sec | <2 sec |
| Schema markup | None | Full |
| SEO content | Generic | Unique |
| Mobile experience | Passable | Built for it |
| Shared domain | 50K+ sites | Yours only |
| You own the code | No | Yes |
Built by Nashville business owners. Not a marketing agency.
SEO, PPC, and website management can feel like a foreign language. Most restaurant owners know they need to show up in search, but the path to get there is confusing, expensive, and full of people selling things they don’t fully understand themselves. Agencies charge $3,000 to $10,000 a month, deliver reports full of jargon, and disappear when the results don’t come.
We know because we lived it. Christine spent over $80,000 on agency SEO before she learned to do it herself. Adam’s WordPress site was hit with a spam injection attack that destroyed years of domain authority. We built Distill Works because the tools and agencies weren’t built for people like us, people who run businesses, not marketing departments.
Executive Transportation of Nashville
Luxury chauffeur service operating across a 400-mile radius. Our SEO services took them from zero organic presence to 45 page 1 rankings in 6 months.
Hillcrest Kennel & Grooming
Over 70 years in the Nashville community. Our SEO took them from zero search presence to 357,000+ quarterly impressions and 1,576 top-3 keyword rankings.
A Little Local Flavor
Nashville’s premier food tour. TripAdvisor Top 1% Worldwide with 2,600+ five-star reviews. Christine knows the Nashville restaurant community because she’s part of it. Her award-winning SEO strategy is the foundation of our SEO services.
Combined 3,600+ five-star reviews across our businesses. We use every service we offer, in our own businesses. If it doesn’t work for us, we don’t sell it to you.
A Little Local Flavor is part of your membership.
One of our founders runs Nashville’s #1 rated food tour. Perfect 5.0 rating. 2,600+ five-star reviews. Top 1% Worldwide on TripAdvisor. A Nashville food platform that draws 14,000 visitors every month, all of them actively planning where to eat in your city. That platform is now part of what you get when you work with us.
Authority backlink
A link from an 8-year-old Nashville food authority site. This is what agencies charge $300-$500/month for. You get it included.
Neighborhood dining guides
Featured placement on high-traffic dining pages read by thousands of Nashville visitors monthly. NARA members get first placement.
Permanent partners page
A dedicated link from a permanent page on alittlelocalflavor.com. Not a directory listing. An editorial endorsement.
Your story, told in our voice
A dedicated feature about your restaurant published on an award-winning platform with 14,000 monthly readers looking for Nashville dining.
Day-one visibility
SEO takes months. This puts you in front of 14,000 Nashville visitors immediately while your own rankings build in the background.
A press credential you keep
“As featured in A Little Local Flavor” is yours to use on your website, social media, and in your restaurant. A Nashville food credential that builds instant trust.
This is earned media. Not an ad. Not a directory listing. A genuine editorial feature from a trusted Nashville voice.
One restaurant per cuisine. Per neighborhood. That’s it.
We limit this partnership to one restaurant per cuisine category per neighborhood. Once your category is claimed, it’s closed. This is not a pressure tactic. It is the only way to make the editorial recommendation genuine.
If the Italian restaurant in Germantown signs first, the other Italian restaurants in Germantown are out. The value of being featured is that it’s exclusive. We will never recommend two competing restaurants in the same space.
Included automatically with:
SEO Services, starting at $799/month
PPC Management, starting at $399/month
No extra cost. No separate application. You sign on for the service, we take care of the rest.
We’re here to help, not to sell you something.
As a NARA partner, Distill Works offers exclusive member pricing on all services. But the first step isn’t a contract. It’s a conversation. Tell us about your restaurant, and we’ll show you where you stand in search and what’s possible.
SEO Services
Automated blog content targeting the searches your customers make. Publishes on autopilot. Compounds over time.
PPC Management
Google Ads that put your restaurant at the top of search results. We manage the spend, you get the diners.
Website Design
Fast, SEO-optimized websites you own. No templates. No shared domains. Built to convert searchers into reservations.
Exclusive NARA member pricing on all services.
No commitment to start. We’ll review your online presence and show you exactly where the opportunities are.
team@distillworks.com distillworks.com