A Step-by-Step SEO Audit You Can Run on Your Cafe's Website This Week

An SEO audit is not a single checklist — it is a structured diagnostic across five distinct layers of your cafe's online presence. Each layer can either support or undermine the others, which is why skipping any one of them produces an incomplete picture.

The five layers are:

• Google Business Profile (GBP): Your listing in Google Maps and the local pack. This is the first thing most people see before they ever visit your website.
• Local keyword rankings: How your cafe appears in search results for terms like "coffee shop near me," "[neighborhood] brunch," or "best espresso in [city]."
• On-page signals: The content, title tags, header structure, and internal linking on your actual website pages.
• Technical health: Site speed, mobile usability, HTTPS status, crawlability, and structured data markup.
• Online reputation: Your review volume, recency, average rating, and how consistently you respond to reviews across Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor.

Many cafe owners focus almost exclusively on their website when they think about SEO. In practice, for a local business, your GBP listing and your review profile often carry equal or greater weight than anything on your website itself. A thorough audit treats all five layers as interdependent.

Before you begin, gather these tools: Google Search Console (free), Google Business Profile dashboard (free), PageSpeed Insights (free), and a basic rank-checking tool such as Google Search's incognito mode or a free tier of any rank tracker. You do not need expensive software to complete a meaningful first audit.

Your GBP listing is the most visible piece of real estate Google gives a local business for free. Start here because the fixes are fast and the impact tends to be immediate.

What to check

• Primary category: Is it set to "Cafe" or "Coffee Shop"? A mismatched primary category — such as "Restaurant" when you primarily serve coffee — can suppress your appearance in the searches that matter most to your actual customers.
• Secondary categories: Have you added relevant secondary categories like "Breakfast Restaurant," "Brunch Restaurant," or "Bakery" where applicable?
• Business name, address, phone (NAP): Does this exactly match what appears on your website and across other directories? Even formatting differences ("St" vs. "Street") can create inconsistency signals.
• Hours and special hours: Are your hours current? Is holiday or seasonal scheduling updated? Outdated hours generate negative reviews and suppress trust.
• Photos: Do you have at least 10–15 recent, high-quality photos covering your interior, exterior, menu items, and team? In our experience, listings with active photo libraries consistently outperform bare-bones listings in engagement metrics.
• Posts: When did you last publish a GBP post? Listings that post weekly tend to signal active management to Google.
• Q&A section: Are there unanswered questions sitting in your Q&A? Unanswered questions can be answered by anyone — sometimes inaccurately.

Scoring this layer

If your GBP has complete NAP, accurate categories, current hours, 10+ photos, and at least one post in the past 30 days, score this layer green. Missing two or more of these elements? Score it red and prioritize it first.

Once your GBP is diagnosed, move to how your website ranks for the terms your customers actually type. This layer combines keyword visibility with the on-page signals that influence it.

Checking your local rankings

Open an incognito browser window (to avoid personalized results) and search for the following query types:

• "[your city] cafe"
• "[your neighborhood] coffee shop"
• "coffee near me" (from your phone, near your cafe)
• Any specialty terms relevant to you: "vegan brunch [city]," "espresso bar [neighborhood]," etc.

Note whether you appear in the local pack (the map results), in organic blue-link results, or not at all. Appearing in neither for your core neighborhood terms is a red flag that requires attention across multiple layers.

Auditing your on-page signals

For each major page on your site — homepage, menu page, about page, any location pages — check the following:

• Title tag: Does it include your city or neighborhood and a primary keyword? Example: "Elm Street Cafe — Specialty Coffee in Portland's Pearl District." A title tag that only says your cafe's name is a missed opportunity.
• H1 heading: Each page should have exactly one H1 that includes a descriptive keyword, not just your logo text.
• Body content: Does your homepage mention your neighborhood, city, and what you serve in plain text — not just as image alt text? Google reads text. If your homepage is mostly images with minimal text, it has very little to rank on.
• Internal linking: Does your homepage link to your menu and contact/location pages? Basic internal linking helps Google understand your site structure.

Score this layer green only if your core pages have keyword-relevant title tags, single H1s, descriptive body content, and logical internal links. Missing any of these across multiple pages scores amber or red.

Technical SEO issues rarely announce themselves. They sit quietly underneath a functional-looking website and suppress rankings without any visible error message. For most cafes, technical auditing does not require developer expertise — it requires knowing what to look for.

Mobile performance

Open PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev) and enter your homepage URL. Run the Mobile test. A score below 50 is a meaningful problem — most cafe customers searching "coffee near me" are on mobile, and Google uses mobile performance as a ranking signal. Common causes of slow mobile scores include oversized image files, unoptimized fonts, and render-blocking scripts from booking widgets or third-party plugins.

HTTPS

Check that your site URL begins with https:// (padlock icon in browser). If it still runs on http://, this is a quick fix your hosting provider or website platform can usually resolve in under an hour, but it is non-negotiable for modern SEO.

Crawlability

Search Google for site:yourcafedomain.com. If fewer pages appear in results than you have on your site, Google may not be crawling all your content. Also check that you have not accidentally blocked search engines via a robots.txt setting — this occasionally happens after a website redesign.

Structured data

Schema markup tells Google explicitly what type of business you are, your hours, location, and menu. Use Google's Rich Results Test to check whether your site has any structured data. Many cafe websites have none. Adding LocalBusiness or Restaurant schema is a technical improvement that can improve how your listing appears in search results, particularly for hours and menu previews.

Score this layer green if your mobile score is 70+, your site is HTTPS, Google indexes all your pages, and you have at least basic LocalBusiness schema. Score it red if any of these are absent.

Your review profile is a local ranking signal and a conversion signal simultaneously. A cafe that ranks on page one but shows 3.2 stars with 40 reviews will lose clicks to a competitor with 4.6 stars and 200 reviews. Audit both dimensions.

Volume and recency

Check your Google review count. Industry benchmarks suggest that cafes in competitive urban markets typically need 100+ Google reviews to compete effectively in the local pack, though this varies significantly by market size and competition density. More important than the total number is recency: a steady stream of new reviews signals an active, trustworthy business. If your most recent Google review is six months old, that recency gap is working against you.

Average rating

A rating below 4.2 on Google tends to suppress click-through rates noticeably. If you are below this threshold, improving it requires a systematic approach to requesting reviews from satisfied customers — not incentivizing them (which violates Google's terms), but consistently asking at the moment a customer expresses satisfaction.

Response rate

Scroll through your last 20 reviews. What percentage has a response from the owner? Responding to reviews — positive and negative — is both a trust signal to potential customers and a behavioral signal Google considers in local ranking. Many cafes respond only to negative reviews and ignore positive ones. Responding to both is the stronger practice.

Cross-platform consistency

Check your Yelp and TripAdvisor listings. Are they claimed? Do they show accurate hours, address, and photos? Unclaimed or outdated listings on major directories create NAP inconsistency and give competitors an easy advantage.

Score this layer green if you have 80+ Google reviews, a 4.2+ rating, respond to 70%+ of reviews, and your Yelp/TripAdvisor listings are claimed and accurate. Score any dimension below this as amber or red.

After working through all four layers, you have a score for each: green, amber, or red. Now the question is where to spend your time first. Not all red scores carry equal weight.

Prioritizing by impact-to-effort ratio

Use this framework to rank your fixes:

• High impact, low effort (fix this week): Incomplete GBP categories, missing or incorrect hours, no owner responses to recent reviews, missing title tags on core pages, HTTP instead of HTTPS.
• High impact, moderate effort (fix this month): Thin homepage content with no neighborhood keywords, missing LocalBusiness schema, GBP photo library under 10 images, review volume significantly below your market average.
• Moderate impact, high effort (schedule for next quarter): Site speed improvements requiring developer involvement, building out individual neighborhood or service-specific landing pages, systematic citation cleanup across 50+ directories.

Red flags that suggest professional help

Some audit findings indicate deeper problems that self-service fixes will not fully resolve:

• A Google penalty or manual action flagged in Google Search Console
• Duplicate GBP listings for the same location
• A website that has lost significant ranking positions in a short window without any obvious content change
• NAP inconsistency across dozens of directories that have already been indexed

If you encounter any of these, the diagnostic work is essentially done — the path forward is professional remediation, not more self-auditing. These issues involve either policy risk (duplicate listings, manual actions) or technical complexity (widespread citation cleanup) that go beyond what a well-meaning owner can reliably fix alone.

For straightforward gaps — an incomplete GBP, thin page content, no schema — the self-serve path is clear and accessible. Work through your green/amber/red scores, start at the top of your high-impact list, and reassess in 60 days.

If you would rather have an expert map the gaps and build the remediation plan, you can request a professional SEO audit for your cafe and receive a prioritized diagnostic with specific recommendations for your market.