SEO case study

Restaurant SEO: 2.1K Traffic Boost in Less Than 6 Months!

By the end of this case study, you’ll understand why SEO is a must-use marketing channel for restaurants. 

In less than 6 months, we were able to completely turn around a Toronto restaurant’s performance on Google. 

We boosted their traffic by 2.1k, got them ranking for over 1,000 relevant keywords, and built high-quality backlinks to improve their reputation and online authority.   

The impact on their business was night and day, as they saw a huge uptick in business due to their increased visibility on Google. 

Here are a few quick statistics that prove why every restaurant needs a strong presence on search engines:

  1. 60% of restaurant searches originate from mobile devices. 
  2. Around 78% of mobile local searches lead to offline purchases. 
  3. 76% of consumers who search for ‘near me’ keywords will visit a business within a day. 

So, if you want to bring more diners into your restaurant, you need an SEO strategy. 

For more proof of why that is, stay tuned to learn the story of how we generated so much traffic for our client’s restaurant in Toronto! 

The Client: A High-End Restaurant and Nightclub in Toronto 

Our client operates a luxurious restaurant that seamlessly transitions into a nightclub located in the heart of downtown Toronto. 

It’s a hotspot for corporate lunches, rooftop terrace getaways, and high-energy dance music. 

While the location was by no means struggling, its online presence wasn’t where it needed to be. 

As a result, they weren’t ranking for crucial local SEO keywords related to their restaurant and nightclub. This meant valuable traffic coming from keywords like ‘rooftop bar toronto’ was going to their competitors’ websites.

Obviously, this was far from ideal. 

Eager to compete as fervently online as they do in person, they decided to invest in a comprehensive SEO strategy. 

While they had dabbled with some basic SEO in the past, they had never received help from true experts. 

This meant their performance on search engines left much to be desired. Besides not ranking for many keywords, the rankings they did have were very low (we’re talking positions 40 and lower, but more on this in a bit). 

That’s why they decided to seek help from coveted SEO professionals like us. 

We had actually recently knocked out a successful SEO campaign for another one of the restaurant owner’s properties, so we were already in their good graces. 

During the initial consultation, we decided the client needed the same treatment as the other restaurant, which was a HOTH X campaign. 

Getting set up on HOTH X 

HOTH X is our managed SEO service where we use all our products to provide an end-to-end SEO strategy for clients. 

Rather than focusing entirely on link-building or content creation as our individual product offerings do, HOTH X combines everything into one powerhouse package. 

Each client gets connected with a dedicated campaign manager who:

  1. Conducts in-depth SEO research to put together a detailed strategy 
  2. Stays in constant contact with the client, providing updates and answering questions 

We recommend HOTH X for clients who need extensive SEO work done, which was definitely the case for our restaurant owner. 

Since we already achieved resounding success with one of their other restaurants, they had faith that we would recreate the magic again, and they were correct. 

Before we got started implementing a strategy, though, we had an SEO audit to conduct. 

The SEO Audit: Resolving Technical Issues and Looking for Easy Wins 

Every HOTH X campaign begins the way every SEO strategy should, with an audit. 

Why are SEO audits important?

We’ll answer that question with another question. 

Have you ever tried to drive your car with no wheels?

Yep, that’s what doing SEO can be like if you don’t kick things off with an audit. There are a multitude of technical SEO errors that can cause your content to outright disappear from Google’s search results. 

If these issues aren’t fixed before you start creating new content, your web pages may not show up on Google at all! 

That’s why we closely analyze things like:

  1. The website’s loading speed (so that they can pass the Core Web Vitals test) 
  2. Their internal linking and URL structures 
  3. Their Page Index report on Google Search Console (to ensure there are no indexing errors) 
  4. Their robots.txt file (to ensure crucial pages aren’t being blocked from search engine crawlers) 
  5. Duplicate content (if there is any) 
  6. Thin content (content that has less than 1,000 words) 

This website did have a few pages with thin content and a handful of indexing errors, so we fixed those before moving forward. 

The next step was to identify easy-win keywords, which are keywords that the website already ranks for, albeit in a pretty low spot (definitely not in page one territory yet). 

We call them ‘easy-win keywords’ because:

  1. The content they appear in is already indexed, meaning it won’t take as long to see results. 
  2. With a little tweaking (i.e., proper keyword optimization, backlinks, etc.), we know we can improve their rankings fairly quickly and easily. 

Surprisingly, this client was sitting on a goldmine of easy-win keywords. They were already ranking for lots of local keywords, but they were just not on page one. 

After optimizing their easy-win opportunities, we moved on to the main strategy. 

The Strategy: Blogs and Link-Building for Private Event Space Keywords 

Once the audit was done, we discovered the website’s two main issues:

  1. Not enough content for crucial local keywords 
  2. A lack of domain authority 

If our client was going to rank for private event space keywords like ‘rooftop bar toronto,’ they needed to release content centered around them – which is why we started publishing regular blog posts. 

Each post contained:

  1. A highly relevant topic that their audience searched for often 
  2. High-resolution images to break up the text 
  3. Expert insights and a compelling call to action (CTA) at the end 

These blogs started raking in traffic and ranking for vital keywords in just a few short months! 

On the link-building side, we primarily targeted link insertions from relevant websites with high domain authority. 

Here are a few examples:

As you can see, both of these links have high DR (domain rating) scores (in the 70s), which means they’re extremely authoritative. For reference, DR is measured on a scale of 1 – 100, with 100 being the highest. 

The Results: 2.1K Increase in Traffic, Ranking for 1.1K Keywords 

After a few months, the website’s traffic increased by 2.1k, and it continues to rise due to our efforts:

They reached out to us during their all-time traffic low in January of 2024, and by March, their traffic was already skyrocketing. 

They’re now ranking for 1.1k relevant local keywords, 33 of which are in the top 3:

The client is now set up to capitalize on all the mobile searches mentioned in the intro, and their restaurant has seen a ton more foot traffic as a direct result. 

Want to replicate similar results for your restaurant or bar?

HOTH X is the way to do it, so don’t wait to reach out for a free SEO consultation today!