Feed Your Catering Site with SEO
Amy's Culinary Adventures is a full-service catering company in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills. The challenge wasn't just traffic -- it was the right traffic.
First I optimized the site's "metadata" like its URLs, as well as its Page Titles and Page Descriptions, those little headlines and snippets that make up lists of Google search results. That rocketed her rankings for many keywords. How?
Think of Page Titles and Page Descriptions like tabs in a file cabinet. Google likes sites that use keywords to tell it about itself -- keywords in actual searches people are using to find whatever they're looking for, like "your keyword #1" or "your keyword #2."
Google likes keywords to be "organized" in a hierarchy, in readable sentences (not just repeated keywords) for its users. That's why Google's crawling your site is called "indexing." This data is a handy reference for Google to send visitors searching for what your site offers.
When a site's metadata is incomplete, when Google can't find that individual data in Page Titles and Page Descriptions, Google doesn't know what keywords to rank for. Not only is the site leaving valuable searches on the table, but Google penalizes it on the searches it does rank for.
When I rewrote all that data, just that one part of SEO "served up" the site the way Google likes it -- literally, in this case, like food on a plate.
Plus results are more clickable. While other sites might have short Page Titles like "Dessert Menu," Google users see "Our Dessert Catering Sweetens Your Wedding or Party."
Next I curated content for "interconnectability" -- pages I could link together -- to point to the main ordering portions of the site. Google likes sites with hyperlinked pages on the same topic, each different but adding unique content for the "ranking authority" of the site.
I used menus and writeups from many of Chef Amy's "underground dinner parties," mystery food events scheduled with a date and a time but no location till only a few hours before. Each of these underground dinners had its own theme, like "Cheese, Please" and "The Chocolate Affair." They made perfect content for interconnectability.
For ongoing SEO, I developed content (blogs) for two key concepts -- "weddings," which are high-ticket items, and "desserts," which have high profit margins.
Currently the site ranks two keywords at number one, four keywords in the top three, 12 keywords in the top five, and 36 keywords in the top 10. Before SEO, the site wasn't ranking for any of those keywords at all.
Plus the "actual rankings" are much higher. Competitors in the top three and top five in this category tend to be wedding blogs and Yelp lists. Users searching for a caterer don't want to read wedding blogs. And users aren't likely to trust something as personal and intimate as a wedding to a pile of angry Yelp reviewers. Chef Amy's ideal clients skip right over those to her wonderful site experience and personality, which they trust and eventually email or call.