Shake Shack UK runs the restaurant brand’s UK website, with location pages, menus and news. In early 2026 I carried out a technical SEO audit of the site, prioritised every issue, worked through the fixes with the development team, and verified them on the live site. Most of the high-priority issues were fixed, and the remaining work was set out clearly with the evidence behind it.
At a glance
| Client | Shake Shack UK |
| Type | Hospitality, restaurant brand |
| Platform | WordPress |
| Work | Technical SEO audit, prioritised fix list, developer briefs, fix verification, image SEO and Core Web Vitals, content strategy |
| Audit date | January 2026 |
| URLs crawled | 972 of 1,219 found |
The starting position
A restaurant brand’s website has a few jobs that matter most in search: location pages that show up when people search nearby, menu pages that answer what’s on offer, and a site that loads quickly on a phone, which is how most people check a restaurant.
The audit crawled 972 URLs and grouped the findings by priority: 11 high, 5 medium and 5 low, alongside warnings and opportunities.
What the audit found
The high-priority findings included:
- An offers page marked noindex, stopping Google showing a page that should be found
- Structured data errors on menu pages, and a parse error on a location page
- Hreflang issues, with annotations not using canonical URLs and some pointing to non-indexable pages
- Legacy URLs returning 404 errors, left over from old location pages
- Failing mobile Core Web Vitals on the homepage, with Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.29 against Google’s threshold of 0.1 for a good score
- Location pages losing traffic and keyword opportunities around “near me” searches
Medium and low-priority findings covered H1s changed by JavaScript, multiple H1s, large images, long titles, missing alt text and missing meta descriptions.
The SEO and AI search strategy
| Area | The aim | What it involved |
|---|---|---|
| Indexing | Make sure every valuable page can be found | Removing the incorrect noindex, redirecting an outdated page, handling legacy 404s |
| Structured data | Help search engines understand menus and locations | Fixing invalid properties and broken JSON-LD |
| International signals | Show the right version of each page | Aligning hreflang with canonical URLs |
| Page experience | Fast, stable pages on mobile | Image compression, correct sizing, and width and height attributes to cut layout shift |
| On-page basics | Titles, descriptions, headings and alt text that help | A meta description template for locations and menu items, single H1s, alt text on priority images |
| Local and location content | Win “near me” and location searches | Recommendations to expand location pages and strengthen the locations hub |
| Verification | Confirm fixes are live and complete | Re-checking the live site after each round of fixes |
What was done
Every issue went into a shared tracker with a description, how to fix it, and a status the development team updated. Among the fixes completed:
- the noindex on the offers page removed
- invalid structured data on menu pages corrected and republished
- hreflang aligned with canonical URLs
- legacy US location URLs confirmed as 404s and handled
- non-descriptive “click here” anchors replaced
- emojis removed from JavaScript-updated H1s, and multiple H1s fixed
- 36 priority images resized and compressed
- an outdated “opening soon” page redirected
- meta descriptions rewritten using a template for locations and menu items
- alt text added to priority images
Verifying the fixes
A fix marked as done isn’t always complete, so the live site was checked. When the image size fix for layout shift was verified on the homepage in May 2026, 166 of the 294 images on the page still lacked width and height attributes. Most were icons repeated once per location listing inside a template, which meant one template fix would clear the majority. That finding went back to the development team with a file listing every affected image, where the fix belonged and the action needed.
The result
Most of the high-priority issues were fixed and checked on the live site, and the remaining work was set out for the development team with the evidence behind each item.
What I learned
On a site with a long list of locations, one template can repeat a problem dozens of times on a single page. Finding the template behind the issue, rather than listing every instance, turns a daunting fix into a single change.
A fix isn’t finished when the ticket is closed. Checking every change on the live site, rather than taking it as done, is what showed which issues were genuinely resolved and which needed another pass.
Limitations
Several fixes depended on the development team’s schedule, and some were still in progress at the time of the last check. Performance improvements need re-measuring once all the image changes are live before their effect can be judged.
Services used
This project drew on a technical SEO audit, image SEO and site speed and Core Web Vitals, with the crawl run through the site audit system. It sits in hospitality and restaurants, and the Tribera Living case study shows a content-led audit for another multi-location brand.
FAQ
What is Cumulative Layout Shift?
Cumulative Layout Shift, or CLS, measures how much a page’s content jumps around while it loads. Google treats a score of 0.1 or less as good. Images without width and height attributes are a common cause, because the browser can’t reserve space for them before they appear.
Why check fixes after they’ve been made?
Because a fix marked as done isn’t always live or complete. A verification check on the actual page confirms whether the change reached the site and covered every instance. On a restaurant site with many locations, one template often repeats an issue dozens of times on a single page.
What does hreflang do?
Hreflang tells search engines which language or regional version of a page to show to which audience. For it to work, each version must reference the others using their canonical URLs, and the pages it points to must be indexable, otherwise search engines may ignore the annotations.
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