Local SEO for Dhaka restaurants: the 6 things that actually move rankings
Six concrete moves that pushed a Gulshan restaurant from page 3 to position 2 for 'best Thai food Dhaka' in four months. None of them were paid ads.
A restaurant client (we’ll keep them anonymous — they’re still actively competing) came to us in January at position #18 for “best Thai food Dhaka.” By May they were at position #2.
No paid ads. No directory link-buying. Six structural changes, all free, all repeatable.
1. Google Business Profile, properly filled
The single biggest unlock. Most restaurant GBP listings are 30% complete: name, phone, address, one photo. We did the full 100%.
- 47 menu items added (with prices, dietary tags, photos)
- 22 interior + exterior + food photos
- Hours confirmed for normal days, Eid, Pohela Boishakh, Independence Day
- Reservation link (direct to the website’s table-booking flow)
- Q&A section pre-filled with the questions we knew Google was already showing in the SERP
A complete GBP doesn’t just sit in the local pack — Google starts trusting the website it links to, which lifts the organic ranking too.
2. Schema markup for Restaurant
Most BD restaurant sites have no schema. Adding the proper Restaurant schema with menu, hasMenu, acceptsReservations, paymentAccepted, and priceRange fields tells Google what kind of business this is in machine-readable form.
Result: rich snippets started showing in the SERP — opening hours, rating stars, price range — making the listing visually bigger than competitors.
3. Page per cuisine, not page per restaurant
If you serve five cuisines (Thai, Chinese, Bengali, Continental, Sushi), the temptation is to put them all on /menu/. Wrong. Build five pages:
/menu/thai-food-dhaka//menu/chinese-food-dhaka/- …
Each ranks for its specific intent. Each links back to the homepage. Internal linking compound returns.
4. Real reviews, written by real customers
Not fake reviews. Not paid-for reviews. We trained the host staff to ask every diner who said “we loved it” at the end of the meal: “Can I send you a Google Maps link to leave a review? Takes 30 seconds.”
Conversion rate on this ask: ~25%. The restaurant went from 38 reviews to 162 reviews in four months. Average rating went up to 4.7.
Reviews are a ranking signal and a conversion signal. Customers searching “best Thai food Dhaka” who see 162 reviews vs. 11 reviews on a competitor will click yours.
5. Page speed under 2 seconds
Local search results are increasingly weighted by page experience. We rebuilt the restaurant’s site on Astro (the old WordPress site loaded in 6.2 seconds on a Banglalink 4G connection). New site: 1.1 seconds.
LCP, FID, CLS — all green. That’s now table stakes, not a bonus.
6. Backlinks from BD food coverage
We pitched the restaurant to three BD food blogs and one Daily Star food columnist with a real story angle (“first Thai chef in Bangladesh trained at Bangkok’s Issaya Siamese Club” — a fact we surfaced from the owner’s bio). Two coverage pieces ran. Two backlinks. Both passed enough authority to move rankings by week 8.
What didn’t work
For transparency:
- Directory submissions (Yelp BD, BdYellowPages) — minor lift, mostly fluff.
- Pinterest + Instagram links — they help discovery but Google considers them nofollow for ranking purposes.
- Paid press releases — wasted ৳15,000. Don’t do this.
The takeaway
Local SEO for BD restaurants is about being thorough in the boring places. Complete the GBP. Add proper schema. Build one page per cuisine. Ask for real reviews. Ship a fast site. Get one real backlink from a real publication.
Four months later you’re not on page 3. You’re on page 1.
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