Aioli – a renowned West Palm Beach-based bakery and yummy lunch-time favorite had already established their local presence via strong branding, in fact they have a cult-like following. There were no major on-site or technical search engine optimization concerns to be handled immediately. An Audit of their website’s current ranking keywords revealed that they were not appearing for non-branded searches (‘aioli sandwiches’ versus ‘sandwiches near me’) and thus not reaching those unfamiliar with their brand — something that matters in a tourist-heavy town.

Aioli was dominating local branded search but they were not ranking well for any terms outside of their brand. In addition, the Google My Business pages were not fully set up, resulting in poor Discovery performance locally. Without proper Google Analytics tracking, they had no way to measure their performance or understand how often people were ordering from their website. These challenges were holding Aioli back from optimizing and maximizing their local performance in search.

In order to monitor and control the restaurant’s presence in local search, self-managed local directory listings were created through MOZ Local. Both Google My Business pages were optimized including updating the listings’ images and details and adding the full restaurant menu featuring item name, description and pricing.

Google Analytics goal tracking was set up to manage online ordering goals and reporting. Marketing tasks like tracking the percentages of guests ordering versus return orders and seeing the referral source (like an Instagram post!) of online visitors is now a possibility.

Google Search Console was set up to monitor, maintain, and troubleshoot the site’s presence in the search results. This differs from Google Analytics in the sense that it reports external data from the search engine, not local data recorded from the website. Through effective use of these tools, Search Appeal was able to confirm that Google could discover the site, develop, track and manage measurable and actionable goals, and improve the restaurant’s presence in local search.