A Step-by-Step Framework for Diagnosing What's Holding Your Catering Website Back

This guide is for catering business owners or marketing managers who already have a website but aren't generating consistent leads from organic search. You don't need to be technical—you need to be systematic.

There are three situations where this audit is most useful:

• You've been live for 6+ months and rankings haven't moved despite some effort on your part.
• You recently lost visibility after a site redesign, hosting migration, or platform switch.
• You can't explain why competitors outrank you for searches you know your business serves well.

What this guide is not: a general SEO tutorial for beginners. It assumes you understand that Google uses search signals to rank pages, and that you want to find the specific signals your site is currently getting wrong.

Work through each section in order. Earlier sections cover foundational issues—crawlability, speed, structured data—that affect everything downstream. Fixing a conversion problem on a page Google can't fully index is wasted effort.

Before examining keywords or content, verify that Google can actually find, crawl, and render your pages. A surprising number of catering sites have indexing problems quietly suppressing all other efforts.

Crawlability Check

Open Google Search Console (free). Under Coverage, look for pages marked Excluded or Errors. Common culprits on catering sites include:

• Menu PDFs that are not crawlable as HTML pages
• Event gallery pages accidentally set to noindex after a redesign
• Duplicate URLs generated by filtering or sorting on menu pages

Page Speed on High-Value Pages

Use Google PageSpeed Insights on three specific URLs: your homepage, your primary service page (e.g., corporate catering or wedding catering), and your contact/inquiry page. On catering sites, large uncompressed food photography is the most common cause of poor mobile scores.

Industry benchmarks suggest a Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) above 4 seconds materially reduces both rankings and form completions. You don't need a perfect score—but you do need to know where you stand.

Mobile Rendering

Use Google's Mobile-Friendly Test on your catering menu page specifically. Menu tables and multi-column layouts frequently break on smaller screens, even when the rest of the site renders correctly.

Document every issue you find here before moving forward. Technical problems at this layer affect every other section of this audit.

This is the most commonly overlooked gap in catering SEO. Most catering sites have one services page that lists everything—corporate events, weddings, birthday parties, holiday parties—in a single block of text. Google cannot rank a single page for all of those distinct searches simultaneously.

Map Your Current Coverage

List every event type you cater. Then check: does a dedicated, indexable page exist for each one? A dedicated page means its own URL, its own title tag, its own body copy, and its own calls to action. Not a section on a longer page—a separate URL.

What to Look For

• Missing pages entirely: Common gaps include office lunch delivery, holiday party catering, and graduation party catering—all high-intent local searches.
• Thin pages: Pages with fewer than 400 words of unique content typically don't rank competitively for specific event-type queries.
• Keyword mismatch: Pages targeting "event catering" when the search volume is concentrated in "corporate catering [city]" or "wedding caterer near me."

How to Prioritize

Use Google Search Console's Performance report filtered to your domain. Look for queries containing event-type terms (wedding, corporate, birthday) where your average position is between 8 and 20. Those are pages that exist but underperform—they're faster to fix than building from scratch.

Queries with impressions but no clicks at position 20+ indicate you're appearing but not winning. A dedicated, properly optimized landing page can move those rankings into the top five.

For local catering searches, your Google Business Profile (GBP) often determines whether you appear in the map pack—the three-business block that captures a significant share of local search clicks. Auditing it takes less than 20 minutes and frequently reveals quick wins.

Category Selection

Your primary category should be Caterer. Secondary categories should reflect your specific event types: Wedding Caterer, Corporate Caterer, or Food Catering are all available. In our experience, many catering businesses are listed only under a generic restaurant category, which misaligns the profile with catering-specific search intent.

Services and Menu Sections

GBP allows you to list individual services with descriptions. Check whether each major event type you offer is listed here with a brief description. Leaving this blank is a missed opportunity to surface your profile for specific event searches.

Photos and Posts

Check the date of your most recent photo upload and most recent post. Google's local ranking algorithm uses engagement signals—profiles with recent activity consistently outperform static ones in competitive markets. If your last post was more than 90 days ago, that's a flag.

Review Volume and Recency

Look at your review count compared to the top two competitors in your market. Review recency matters as much as total count. A competitor with 40 reviews from the last 12 months will typically outrank a business with 80 reviews where the last one was 18 months ago.

Document your category settings, service completeness, posting recency, and review gap. These four factors together give you a clear picture of your GBP's current competitive position.

Once you've confirmed the technical foundation is sound and your page structure makes sense, examine whether the content on each page actually targets the right searches with enough depth to rank.

Title Tag and Header Audit

For each key service page, check: does the title tag include a specific event type and a location? Generic title tags like Catering Services | Company Name don't signal relevance for specific searches. A title tag like Corporate Catering in Austin, TX | Company Name does.

Duplicate Content Check

Many catering sites copy-paste the same menu descriptions or boilerplate service copy across multiple pages. Use a tool like Siteliner (free for small sites) to identify pages with high internal duplication. Google treats heavily duplicated pages as lower quality and may rank none of them well when competing against a site with unique copy on each page.

Local Keyword Depth

Most catering sites target their primary city. Fewer target the neighborhoods, suburbs, or specific venues they regularly serve. If you regularly cater events at convention centers, hotels, or corporate campuses, those venue names and neighborhoods are legitimate keyword opportunities—especially for long-tail searches like "caterer for [venue name]."

Schema Markup

Check whether your site uses LocalBusiness or FoodEstablishment schema markup. You can verify this using Google's Rich Results Test (free). Schema doesn't directly boost rankings, but it helps Google understand your business type and service area, which matters for local pack eligibility. Missing schema is common on catering sites built on older themes or DIY page builders.

Running the audit is step one. The harder part is deciding what to fix first. Every catering site has more opportunities than time, and working in the wrong order slows results.

Prioritization Framework

Use this sequence to order your fix list:

1. Crawl and indexing errors — Google can't rank pages it can't read. Fix these before anything else.
2. Page speed on core service pages — Slow pages suppress rankings and kill conversions simultaneously. High ROI fix.
3. GBP category and service completeness — Low effort, measurable impact on map pack visibility within 30-60 days in most markets.
4. Missing event-type landing pages — Takes more effort but captures high-intent traffic that a single services page cannot.
5. Title tag and on-page keyword alignment — Quick wins if the pages already exist but are poorly optimized.
6. Schema markup — Lower urgency but worth implementing once the higher-priority items are complete.

When to Handle It Yourself vs. When to Hire

Steps 1, 2, and 5 on this list are manageable for most business owners or an in-house marketing coordinator with basic CMS access. Steps 3 and 4 require content strategy and keyword research to execute correctly—doing them without that foundation often means rebuilding later.

If the audit reveals more than three significant gaps, or if you've already attempted fixes that haven't moved rankings, that's a reasonable point to bring in outside help. The cost of six more months of underperforming search traffic usually exceeds the cost of professional optimization.