I Bought Dead Restaurant Domains for $5 Each and Outranked Everyone on Google in Two Weeks.

We’re all familiar with SEO and the big SEO companies and the way they work. You pay them thousands of dollars a month, every month, and in six months, they promise to get you from page 32 to page 2, sometimes page 1, but probably not. And they have really good reasons why, but you have to pay them forever just to stay there.

I think it’s a bad strategy. Personally, I never had enough time and enough money to just pay people endlessly for what could potentially be a great outcome. So here’s how I think you hack SEO as a restaurant owner – and the best part is, most of this costs almost nothing.

Start Where the Search Already Lives: Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor

When you type in “best Italian restaurant in Los Angeles,” the top three hits are typically Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. They’re the ones that do the roundups. But how do they figure out who makes those lists?

They’re scraping online reviews. So one of the first things we do with clients is update your bios to make sure they are SEO-infused, actually picking up the keyword terms that people are using to search. In addition to that, we reply to every single review, and when we do, we seed the same keywords in there.

So when I reply to a review, I’m saying something like, “Hey Jamie, so glad you had a wonderful date night with us.” I’m seeding keywords naturally – “date night,” “best dinner,” the neighborhood name, the cuisine type. What this does is it makes you far more likely to be included in those roundups, because you’re doing a thing no one else is doing. You can end up in one of those roundups as quickly as five or six weeks.

Don’t Outrank the Bloggers. Become Their Best Friend.

The other thing I see on page one when I type in “best Italian restaurants in Los Angeles” is a bunch of bloggers. People who probably don’t make any money off their blogs, but they wrote a “Top 15 Italian Restaurants in Los Angeles” article and it’s just had staying power in the search results.

I don’t want to outrank those people. I want to become best friends with those people.

So I reach out to them. “Hey Jason, read your roundup. I thought it was absolutely amazing. I agree with every choice on there, but based on those choices, I think you’d really like what we do for a living. So what I’d like to do is invite you and a guest to come in on me. I want you to have a great time, and if you think we’re worthy of being included, great. And if not, no sweat.”

There’s this great quote that I think about all the time: at the bottom, everybody’s competing, and at the top, everyone’s collaborating. It’s cheaper for me to build that relationship with a blogger than it is to pay an SEO company to outrank them over the course of six months. I would be way more likely to pay that person $1,500 for an immediate inclusion than I would an SEO company $1,500 a month for six months to try to outrank them.

The Dead Domain Hack: Thousands of Backlinks for Tens of Dollars

This is the one that blows people’s minds. If you know anything about SEO, one of the greatest determinants of ranking is backlinks – other websites that drive traffic directly to you.

I want the best backlinks for my clients that money can buy. But rather than going out and buying a bunch of sketchy third-party backlinks, here’s what we do.

Restaurants go out of business every single day. If you closed your business tomorrow, how tightly would you hold on to that domain? You wouldn’t. Eventually it’s going to expire. Now think about your area. Think about your community. Think about your competitive set. Think about how many restaurants have gone out of business in the last five years.

Those domains are just sitting there, dormant. And maybe those restaurants were reviewed by Eater. Or LA Weekly. Or the New York Times. Or the Miami Herald. Or whatever your local newspaper is. Maybe they were written up by a bunch of bloggers. All those backlinks still point to those dead domains.

We buy those domains for about $5 each, and then we do a permanent redirect to our own domain. What we’re able to do is create thousands of backlinks for tens of dollars. And it’s transformative. You can end up on page one, outranking everyone, in about two weeks – as soon as the algorithm updates and sees that all of those backlinks are permanently redirected to you.

That’s what I’m trying to give you. An unfair advantage.

Schema Updates and the LLM Revolution

There’s a whole new world out there when it comes to search. 50% of search is now coming from LLMs like ChatGPT. Everybody’s trying to figure out how to end up included in those results.

The best way to do that – and I’m about to get into some nerdy territory – is to update your schema. Schema is the structured data on your website that tells search engines and AI systems exactly what your restaurant is, what you serve, where you’re located, and what you’re known for.

How do you do it? I don’t think you need to know how to do it yourself. I think that’s a total waste of time. What we do is we use AI to scrape your online reviews, your social media engagement, and your competitors’ data. We then update the schema across all of your pages using all of that data to make sure the search intent is there.

And by “we,” I mean AI. There are a bunch of tools out there that will do it for you. There are some really powerful AI agents. It’s one of the first things we do with clients. It takes about five minutes to write the prompt, and it takes the agent about five hours to do it. And you immediately begin populating in LLM results, because those systems are always updating.

Earned Media: How to Get on the Morning News Every Month

One of the first things I talk about with awareness is earned media. PR companies are best in the world at building one-to-one relationships with people who write press, and the way they do that is by nurturing those relationships, by giving your stuff away for free. And you can do the same thing.

In a 24-hour news cycle, reporters are desperate. They are ravenous for new content. And you can be that resource for them.

One of the best tools we used was the morning news. I don’t think anyone wakes up first thing in the morning and turns on the TV looking for hard-hitting journalism. Most people watching the morning news just want to know what’s going on this week, what’s going on this weekend, what should they be doing.

Across all three of my brands, we were on KTLA almost every single month. And I was shameless, as I’m sure you can imagine. I dressed up as Colonel Sanders for fried chicken day. I dressed up as a chicken for another event. I was always willing to do whatever it took to get the media. Because I wanted those eyeballs. I knew once I got them, I would have an offer that would immediately convert.

The approach is the same as with bloggers. Look at the reporters that are writing up your competitive set. All of their information is available online. Reach out. Invite them in with no strings attached. Give them the opportunity to bring a guest. Expose them to what you’re doing.

If you begin to invite them to all the activations and events you’re running, you will build that relationship. And then they will begin to cover you, because it’s easier for them to cover you than it is to go dig and find who the next big thing is going to be. Have you ever noticed that when you look at the Eaters of the world, the roundups are almost always the same people? It’s because those relationships are built.

The Attention-to-Offer Pipeline

Here’s how all of this fits together. Everything I’ve just described – SEO hacking, blogger outreach, dead domain backlinks, schema updates, earned media – is about one thing: attention. Getting eyeballs on your restaurant.

But attention without an offer is a waste. When we were on the news for National Fried Chicken Day at South City, the goal wasn’t to get people to come in that day. The goal was to send them to a website where they could fully read the offer, redeem it, and then come into the restaurant on their own schedule.

We had an offer that was easily redeemable and possessed scarcity, high perceived value, and urgency, with the ability to get it with a relatively light lift. And we extended it for an entire week, because people are busy. One day is hard to hit when you have a family, a career, and a life.

That is how you should be using press and attention. Get the eyeballs. Make a best-in-class offer. And then the rest takes care of itself.

Your 7-Day SEO and Earned Media Action Plan

Day 1: Audit your bios. Look at your Google Business Profile, Yelp, TripAdvisor, and website. Are they SEO-infused with the keywords people actually use to search for restaurants like yours? Update them today. This takes 30 minutes.

Day 2: Reply to every review with keyword seeding. Go through your most recent reviews on Google and Yelp. Reply to every single one, and naturally seed your target keywords – cuisine type, neighborhood, dining occasion. “So glad you had a wonderful date night at our Italian restaurant in the Arts District.”

Day 3: Find the bloggers on page one. Search for your category and location. Identify every blogger or independent writer in the top 20 results. Reach out to each one with a genuine invitation – dinner on you, no strings attached. You’re building relationships, not buying placements.

Day 4: Research dead domains. Think about restaurants in your area that have closed in the last five years. Search for their old domains. Check if they’re available on domain auction sites. Buy any that have meaningful backlinks for $5 to $15 each. Set up permanent redirects to your website.

Day 5: Update your schema. Use an AI agent to scrape your online reviews and social media, then update the schema across your website pages. This takes five minutes to prompt and a few hours to execute. You’ll immediately start appearing in LLM search results.

Day 6: Identify three local reporters. Find the reporters covering food, lifestyle, or local events in your market. Follow them. Engage with their work. Then reach out with an invitation – not a pitch. Build the relationship before you need the coverage.

Day 7: Plan your next press-worthy moment. What’s your next activation, LTO, or event that would make great morning news content? Build the offer around it – easily redeemable, high perceived value, extended for a full week so busy people can participate. Money likes speed. Start today.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does the dead domain backlink strategy work for restaurant SEO?

Restaurants go out of business every day, and their domains expire with all their existing backlinks from press coverage, blogger reviews, and media mentions still pointing to them. You buy those expired domains for about $5 each and set up a permanent redirect to your own website. The search algorithm sees thousands of high-quality backlinks suddenly pointing to you, and you can reach page one in about two weeks when the algorithm updates.

How do restaurants get included in LLM search results like ChatGPT?

Update your schema – the structured data on your website that tells AI systems what your restaurant is and what you’re known for. Use AI agents to scrape your online reviews, social media engagement, and competitor data, then update the schema across all your pages. It takes about five minutes to write the prompt and about five hours for the agent to execute. You immediately begin populating in LLM results because those systems are constantly updating.

What is the blogger outreach strategy for restaurant SEO?

Instead of paying an SEO company to outrank bloggers who appear on page one for your target keywords, build relationships with them directly. Invite them and a guest to dine on you with no strings attached. If they think you’re worthy of inclusion, they’ll add you. It’s cheaper and faster to pay a blogger $1,500 for immediate inclusion than to pay an SEO company $1,500 a month for six months trying to outrank them.

How can restaurants get regular coverage on local morning news?

Reporters in a 24-hour news cycle are ravenous for content. Morning news viewers just want to know what’s happening this week and weekend. Reach out to local reporters, invite them in with no strings attached, and begin including them in every activation and event you run. Build the relationship before you need the coverage. Across all three of my brands, we were on KTLA almost every single month because we made ourselves easy to cover.

How does keyword seeding in review replies improve restaurant SEO?

When you reply to every online review and naturally include your target keywords – cuisine type, neighborhood name, dining occasions – you’re creating fresh, keyword-rich content that search engines and roundup algorithms scrape. This makes you far more likely to be included in “best of” roundups on Google, Yelp, and TripAdvisor. You can end up in those roundups in as little as five to six weeks just by consistently seeding keywords in your review responses.