Run a Full SEO Diagnostic on Your Catering Website — Before You Fix Anything

A general website SEO audit checks technical health, backlinks, and on-page optimization. A catering-specific audit goes further — it examines the structure and completeness of your site relative to how people actually search for catering services.

Those searches are highly intent-specific. Someone looking for a caterer for a corporate lunch uses different language than someone planning a wedding reception. Both searches happen in the same city, but they land on different pages — or they should. Most catering websites don't have separate pages for each event type, which means one generic page is trying to rank for all of them and winning almost none.

A proper catering audit covers five diagnostic areas:

• Technical performance — page speed, mobile usability, crawlability, indexation status
• Content architecture — whether event-type and service-area pages exist and are properly structured
• Google Business Profile — completeness, category accuracy, review volume, Q&A responses
• Local citation health — NAP consistency across catering-relevant directories
• Backlink profile — whether vendors, venues, and local press have linked to your site

Each area can have isolated problems or interconnected ones. A site with perfect technical scores but no event-type landing pages will still underperform. Conversely, great content architecture doesn't help if Google can't crawl and index the pages efficiently.

The goal of an audit isn't to find every possible problem — it's to find the problems that are costing you the most visibility right now, and fix those first.

Catering websites have a specific technical vulnerability that most other service businesses don't: event photography. High-resolution images from weddings, corporate dinners, and private parties are visually important for converting visitors, but they're also the most common reason catering pages load slowly.

Run your homepage, your menu page, and your most prominent event gallery through Google's PageSpeed Insights. Pay attention to the mobile score specifically — in our experience working with catering businesses, mobile scores are often 20-30 points lower than desktop scores on the same page, because image optimization is rarely mobile-first.

Beyond images, check these technical items:

• Core Web Vitals — specifically Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). Gallery pages tend to fail both.
• Crawlability — use Google Search Console's Coverage report to identify pages that are excluded, blocked by robots.txt, or returning errors.
• Mobile usability — the Mobile Usability report in Search Console flags tap-target issues and viewport problems that affect ranking.
• HTTPS — confirm every page of your site serves over HTTPS, not just the homepage.
• Duplicate content — catering menus often exist as both web pages and downloadable PDFs. If both are indexed, Google may treat them as duplicate content.

One pattern that appears frequently in catering site audits: a fast homepage hiding slow inner pages. Prospects who click through from search results often land directly on a wedding catering page or a corporate catering page — not the homepage. If those inner pages are slow, the bounce rate climbs and the ranking potential drops, regardless of how well-optimized the homepage is.

Technical fixes are usually the quickest wins in a catering SEO audit because they don't require new content — they improve what's already there.

This is where most catering websites leave the most ranking opportunity on the table. The question to ask is simple: does your website have a dedicated page for every combination of event type and service area that you want to rank for?

If you cater weddings in three counties, corporate events downtown, and private parties throughout the metro, you likely need at minimum:

• A wedding catering page (and possibly sub-pages by county or venue)
• A corporate catering page targeting your primary business districts
• A private events or social events page
• Potentially a social catering page covering milestone events like graduations and anniversaries

Open your website's navigation and count the distinct service or event-type pages. Then open Google and search for the terms your ideal clients would use — phrases like wedding caterer [your city] or corporate lunch catering [your area]. If you're not appearing on page one for those, and you don't have a page specifically targeting those terms, that's a content architecture gap, not a technical problem.

Next, audit your service-area coverage. If you operate across multiple cities but only have one location page optimized for your headquarters city, search engines have no signal that you serve the surrounding area. Service-area pages — thin in content but geographically specific — can fill this gap, provided they include genuinely useful information about catering in that area rather than just a city name dropped into a template.

A quick content gap audit tool: pull your Google Search Console queries report and filter for terms where your average position is between 11 and 30. Those are searches where Google thinks you're somewhat relevant but doesn't trust you enough to rank you on page one. Many will point directly to event types or service areas with insufficient dedicated content.

Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is the primary driver of map pack visibility for local catering searches — and it's frequently misconfigured in ways that suppress rankings without triggering any obvious error.

Start with these diagnostic checks:

• Primary category — Is it set to "Caterer" or are you using a broader category like "Food and Beverage" or "Event Venue"? The primary category carries significant weight for local ranking. It should be as specific as possible.
• Service area configuration — If you're a catering company that travels to clients (rather than having a storefront), your profile should be configured as a service-area business. If it's set up as a location-based business with a physical address shown publicly, it may suppress ranking in the areas you actually serve.
• Services listed — Does your GBP list each event type you cater as a distinct service? Many caterers list only a general description, missing the opportunity to surface for specific event-type searches.
• Photo volume and recency — Profiles with recent, regularly updated photos from actual events consistently outperform those with a static set of older images. When did you last upload new event photos?
• Q&A section — Is your Q&A empty, or have common questions been pre-answered? An empty Q&A section is a missed opportunity — and occasionally, unanswered public questions contain misinformation that can hurt conversions.
• Review response rate — Are you responding to reviews, especially negative ones? Unresponded reviews signal low engagement and may affect ranking.

Pull up your GBP insights and look at the search queries driving profile views. If you're seeing mostly branded searches (people searching your business name) and very few category searches (people searching "caterer near me" or "wedding caterer [city]"), that's a signal your profile isn't ranking well for non-branded intent — which is where new-client discovery happens.

An audit that produces a 40-item issue list without prioritization isn't useful — it's paralyzing. The following scorecard framework helps you triage findings by impact and effort, so you know what to fix this week versus what to schedule for later.

Tier 1 — Fix Immediately (High Impact, Lower Effort)

• GBP primary category is incorrect or missing
• Key event-type pages are not indexed (check Search Console)
• Core pages returning 404 errors or redirect chains
• Duplicate business listings on Google causing profile confusion
• HTTPS not implemented sitewide

Tier 2 — Fix This Month (High Impact, Moderate Effort)

• Missing event-type landing pages (wedding, corporate, private events)
• Hero and gallery images not compressed — causing LCP failures
• GBP service area not properly configured for your territory
• No review response strategy in place
• NAP inconsistencies across The Knot, WeddingWire, Yelp

Tier 3 — Ongoing Improvements (Medium Impact, Higher Effort)

• Building backlinks from venues and vendor partners
• Creating service-area pages for secondary markets
• Expanding blog or resource content targeting seasonal catering searches
• Structured data markup for menus, events, and local business

One useful diagnostic habit: before adding any new content or optimization effort, verify in Search Console that what you already have is being indexed and performing. In our experience working with catering businesses, it's common to find pages that were created but never properly indexed — meaning optimization effort has been going into pages Google isn't even reading.

Once you've scored your site against this framework, you have a working action plan rather than an overwhelming list. Start with Tier 1 items regardless of how small they seem — foundational fixes improve the value of everything else.

Many of the diagnostic checks in this guide can be run by a catering business owner with a few free tools: Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, and a citation checker like Moz Local or BrightLocal. If you're in the early stages of trying to understand what's wrong with your site's search performance, starting with a self-audit is reasonable.

There are situations, however, where a self-audit reaches its limit quickly:

• You've made changes and rankings didn't improve — This usually indicates a deeper structural issue that surface-level tools won't surface. Common culprits include canonicalization problems, crawl budget issues, or thin content that's passing a checklist but failing quality thresholds.
• Your map pack visibility disappeared suddenly — Unexplained drops often trace to a GBP suspension, a competitor reporting your listing, or a Google algorithm update affecting your category. Diagnosing these requires platform-specific knowledge.
• You're in a competitive catering market and not moving despite doing the basics right — In dense metro areas, basic optimization gets you into the game; competitive differentiation through content depth and backlink acquisition is what moves you into the top three map pack positions.
• You're spending time on SEO and away from running your catering business — The opportunity cost of a catering business owner spending 10 hours per month on SEO diagnostics versus 10 hours on client relationships and operations is real. At a certain point, the math favors hiring.

A professional audit goes deeper than tool-based checks — it interprets patterns across technical data, content gaps, and competitive positioning simultaneously, then produces a prioritized plan calibrated to your specific market and service mix. If you've run through this guide and you're not sure what's causing the gap between your current visibility and where you need to be, that's a reasonable signal to bring in outside diagnostic help.