Getting Found on the Jersey Shore: An SEO Guide for Asbury Park Businesses
Written by Gabriel Bertolo
June 25, 2026
Asbury Park is having a moment, and it has been for a while now. Cookman Avenue is packed, the boardwalk is alive again, and new boutiques, restaurants, and galleries keep opening. It’s one of the best comeback stories on the Shore.
And most of the businesses living that comeback are nearly invisible in search.
That matters more here than almost anywhere, because Asbury Park runs on a season. You have a short, intense summer to make your year, and a long, quiet winter where every customer counts double. When someone searches for what you offer, in July or in January, you cannot afford to be the business they never found. We keep an office in Asbury Park, so this isn’t a market I’m guessing about. This is the guide I’d hand any owner on these streets who wants to stop leaving customers on the table.
In a year-round town, being hard to find online is a slow leak. In a Shore town, it’s a burst pipe during the only month that pays the bills.
Think about how your customers actually search. In season, you’ve got visitors who don’t know the area, typing “best breakfast in Asbury Park” or “things to do near the boardwalk” or “shops on Cookman Avenue.” They’re standing three blocks away, ready to spend, and they’re going wherever Google sends them. Out of season, you’ve got locals searching year-round for the services that keep your doors open through the winter. Those are two different audiences, and most Asbury businesses are built to catch neither.
Local SEO is how you catch both. It’s the difference between a summer where the tourists find you and a summer where they find the place next door. And it compounds, so the work you do now pays off every season after.
If you do one thing, do this. Your Google Business Profile is the most important asset you have in local search, and most Shore businesses treat it like an afterthought.
When someone searches for a local term, Google shows a map with a few businesses pinned above everything else. That’s the map pack, and those spots get the clicks, the direction requests, and the foot traffic. Everyone below them is mostly invisible, which, on a busy summer weekend, is a lot of lost customers.
Google’s research shows that 76% of people who search for something nearby visit a business within a day.
On the Shore, in season, it’s often within the hour. The visitor searching “coffee near me” on the boardwalk is going to walk into someone’s shop in the next ten minutes. The only question is whose.
Getting into that map pack comes down to things you control. Claim and fully complete your profile and fill in every field. Choose the right primary category. Keep your hours exact, and update them for the season, because nothing kills trust like a tourist driving to a closed business that Google said was open. Add real photos of your space, your food, and your products. And keep the profile active, because Google rewards the ones that look alive and quietly buries the ones that look abandoned over the winter.
Here’s the part nobody else will tell you, and it’s the whole game on the Shore.
Your search strategy has to flex with your calendar. In season, you want to be visible for the high-intent visitor searches, the “near me” and “in Asbury Park” terms that tourists use when they’re already here and ready to spend. Lean into it. Post on your Google Business Profile about your summer hours, your specials, and the event happening this weekend. Make sure your site speaks to someone who’s never been to town and needs a reason to choose you.
Out of season, the game shifts to locals and to the searches that carry you through winter. This is when you build, when you earn reviews, publish content, and strengthen the foundation, so that when the season turns, you’re already at the top instead of scrambling to get there. The businesses that win in July are the ones that did the work in February. Treating NJ SEO campaigns as a year-round build with a seasonal front end is the single biggest edge a smart Asbury Park business can take.
In a town built on restaurants, boutiques, bars, and hotels, reviews aren’t a nice-to-have. They’re the deciding factor.
A visitor choosing between two Cookman Avenue restaurants they’ve never heard of is going to pick the one with more and better reviews almost every time. And reviews do double duty, because they’re also a direct local ranking signal that helps you climb in the map pack. So ask for them, make it easy, and respond to all of them, the good and the bad, like a future customer is reading, because one is. A steady stream of recent, genuine reviews is one of the most powerful and most underused tools a Shore business has.
Your Google Business Profile gets you on the map. Your website closes the deal and proves everything the profile claims.
The Asbury businesses that win tend to keep their sites fast, mobile-first, and clear, because most of your customers are searching on a phone while they decide. Give your real offerings their own pages instead of cramming everything onto one. Write in plain language about what you do and the part of town you’re in, working in the genuine local terms people search. And add LocalBusiness schema, the behind-the-scenes code that tells Google your name, address, hours, and that you’re in Asbury Park, New Jersey, specifically. A site built this way and tied into real Asbury Park SEO and web design is what turns a profile into rankings.
There’s a fast-moving new layer on all of this. More people are asking ChatGPT, Google’s AI Overviews, and Perplexity to recommend places and businesses instead of scrolling a list of links. A visitor planning a trip might ask an AI engine for the best spots in Asbury Park before they ever arrive. You want to be the name it gives.
The work that gets you there overlaps with everything above, a clear and consistent presence, real reviews, and content an AI can read and trust. But it’s its own discipline now, and the businesses building for it early will be hard to unseat. I wrote a full breakdown in my guide to AI SEO, and it’s the core of how we approach generative engine optimization.
Ignore the vanity numbers. Rankings and traffic are nice, but the metrics that matter are tied to money, calls from your profile, direction requests, bookings, and orders. Track those through your Google Business Profile insights and Google Analytics, and watch the trend across the seasons, not the day.
A lot of this you can start yourself, and you should. At some point the work outgrows the time you have to actually run a business through a Shore season, and that’s when it’s worth help. When we take this on, we’ve moved clients from page 25 to page 1 within six months and turned quiet phones into more than 150 calls a month.
When you want a straight conversation about SEO for your Asbury Park business built around real revenue, that’s what we do at Radiant Elephant. We have an office right here; every project is run by me rather than handed to a junior, and we know this market because it’s one of ours. We’re not an out-of-town agency that swapped your town’s name into a template.
How long does local SEO take to work for an Asbury Park business? Expect early movement in a few months and stronger results past that. Local SEO compounds as your Google Business Profile strengthens, reviews accumulate, and your site builds authority. The smart move on the Shore is to build through the off-season so you’re already ranking when the summer crowd arrives.
How much does SEO cost for a Shore business? It depends on your category and how competitive it is. The more useful question is return rather than price. A single strong summer season driven by better visibility can pay for a year of the work, so judge SEO against the customers it brings in, not the monthly fee alone.
How do I rank in the Google map pack in Asbury Park? Start with a fully completed, active Google Business Profile, the right primary category, accurate seasonal hours, consistent business information everywhere it appears, and a steady stream of genuine reviews. Proximity to the searcher matters, which is why being genuinely specific about Asbury Park and your part of town beats a vague, regional approach.
Do online reviews really affect my rankings? Yes, in two ways. Reviews are a direct local ranking signal that helps you climb in the map pack, and they’re the single biggest trust factor for a visitor choosing between businesses they’ve never tried. In a town that runs on restaurants, shops, and hospitality, recent genuine reviews are one of the highest-impact things you can focus on.
Gabriel Bertolo is a 3rd generation entrepreneur who founded Radiant Elephant over 13 years ago after working for various advertising and marketing agencies.
He is also an award-winning Jazz/Funk drummer and composer, as well as a visual artist.
His Web Design, SEO, and Marketing insights have been quoted in Forbes, Business Insider, Hubspot, Entrepreneur, Shopify, MECLABS, and more.
Check out some publications he's been quoted in:
Quoted in HubSpot's AI Search Visibility Article and HubSpot's Article on 6 Best Wix Alternatives
Quoted in DesignRush Dental Marketing Guide
Quoted in MECLABS
Quoted in DataBox Website Optimization Article and DataBox Best SEO Blogs
Quoted in Seoptimer
Quoted in Shopify Blog