People searching for a restaurant usually want one of four things: the menu, the hours, the address or a table. They are often on a phone and often close by. If the answers are slow to find, they pick somewhere else.
Put the menu on the page as text
A menu saved as a PDF is hard to read on a phone and hard for search engines to understand. Publish it as normal text on a web page, with dish names and descriptions, so people can read it and Google can read it. You can still offer the PDF as a download.
Keep it current. An old menu with prices that are wrong does more harm than no menu.
Get the hours right everywhere
Hours should match on your website, your Google Business Profile and any ordering or reservation service you use. Include holiday hours and change them before the day, not after a customer arrives to a closed door. Wrong hours are among the most common reasons for bad reviews.
Make reservations and ordering one tap away
Put a reservation or order button and the phone number at the top of the home page. If you use a third-party service, link straight to your own page on it. Every extra tap loses some of the people who were ready to book.
Use the Google Business Profile properly
Choose the cuisine category that fits you best, add the menu link, upload photos of the food and the room, and answer the questions people ask. Reply to reviews, good and bad. Customers read the replies as well as the reviews.
The Google Business Profile checklist covers the setup, and the restaurant website checklist covers the site.
Help Google understand the page
Structured data tells search engines what a page contains, such as a restaurant's name, address, hours and cuisine. Google documents the markup for local businesses and restaurants. A developer can add it once, and it stays correct as long as the hours and details are kept up to date.
Where I can help
If your restaurant is around Rockland County or the nearby counties, my page on restaurant websites describes what I build, and local SEO covers the search side.