Budapest restaurant SEO case study

Background

The client is a restaurant in Budapest that came to us because its recently built new website had cost a great deal of money but was not delivering the expected results. It did not rank well for important keywords, and some of its subpages were not even indexed.

SEO audit

As usual, we started the work with an SEO audit. For us, an SEO audit means a full-scale SEO analysis, based on data from several professional paid tools and many years of SEO experience. Depending on the size and condition of the site, the audit runs to 50+ pages and covers every technical and content issue, as well as a competitor analysis.

During the audit it quickly became clear that the problem was probably the website’s engine. It had been built on AngularJS. Many developers like to use this engine because it is “shiny”, fast and “modern”, but they are not aware that it is not search-friendly at all.

If you read up on it a little, it is considered an engine that is particularly hard to optimise, and Google does not like it. Unfortunately, we had already had experience with this kind of website at a previous client. That client was not willing to switch, and so we could not achieve results for them, which is why we strongly recommended changing the engine.

WordPress website

Based on the audit, our client accepted that a new website would be needed, but wanted to keep the existing design. Respecting these requirements, our WordPress developer built the new website in line with SEO rules. After installing and configuring the usual WordPress SEO plugins, we put the new site live.

Result:

The results speak for themselves: every important page was indexed immediately, and individual keywords improved by 30–40 positions. All this purely from the engine change – content SEO had not even started yet.

Content optimisation and link building

The real SEO work could only begin once the technical issues had been eliminated. After the essential keyword research, we started optimising the existing subpages, then produced new posts weekly based on a defined content strategy.

Once the site was in order both technically and in terms of content, it was time for continuous link building. The professional link building strategy steadily strengthened the backlink profile of the whole website, so the site appeared in good positions for more and more keywords.

Local SEO

The essence of local SEO is for the restaurant to appear as often and in as high a position as possible in local searches. Although the restaurant had a great many positive reviews, this alone proved insufficient in local searches. From the very beginning we tried to focus on strengthening local search, so this was also part of the content strategy.

Result:

Thanks to the mobile- and user-friendly website, content optimisation and link building, as well as its many reviews, the restaurant achieved better and better rankings in local searches.