Site, Social and SEO for Local Restaurant
This project for the Southeast Asian restaurant included design of a website, social media account creation and management, business directory listing clean-up and photography. Unfortunately, this restaurant closed its doors (lease issue) shortly after opening, leaving the website only partially completed.
Website Visual Design
A graphic artist had already created the logo when I came on the project, so I took the colors for the website from those already in the logo. Echoing the theme of the Bambu Tea House, I constructed a page background of a stylized bamboo thicket and a full-width footer with alternating Asian styled endless knots. Other than that, the design for this site was fairly ordinary. The layout for the site is fully responsive for different screen sizes, with content intelligently reflowing to accommodate varying window widths without breaking up the narrative flow. For mobile devices, the top of page displays large, easily tapped links going to the various menu sections.
Challenging Local SEO
The real challenge came from claiming and cleaning up the other online accounts associated with this business. Over the years that the restaurant had struggled to open, multiple Google Maps listings, Facebook, Twitter and Yelp accounts had been created, then abandoned. This was further complicated by having had three different business phone numbers and even having had the address of the building, situated on a corner, changed from the side street to the main street.
A crucial concept in local SEO (search engine optimization for a business with a specific geographic location) is citation consistency, meaning that every online reference to the business (restaurant reviews, press releases, Google, Bing, Apple and Yahoo maps listings, Yelp listings, social media business pages, etc.) should use the same NAP (Name, Address, Phone). Search engines work algorithmically, and businesses that are referenced everywhere by the same NAP are ranked much higher in search results, than businesses that aren’t. The search engines are not sure if it’s the same business with different phone numbers. In the case of this business, the owner was set on having the name be “Bambú” (with the accent acute diacritic mark) rather than “Bambu” which wreaked havoc with both searches and NAP consistency.
Social Media Setup
After (re)claiming and cleaning up the maps and business listing directories, setting up the social media accounts, including creating cover images was relatively straightforward. Here’s the Twitter page:
Here’s the cover photo for the Facebook business page, where I also populated static content like address, phone, hours, price range, and updated content, such as menu changes, specials, events, promotions.
Banner ad for the local online community bulletin board, WaccoBB.net:
Desktop Printed Items
To encourage patrons to review the restaurant on Yelp, I produced these business cards to be handed out by the waitstaff at the conclusion of the meal.
For the daily printed menu, I designed the 8.5×5.5 inch menu booklet to be inkjet printed, two sided, 8.5×11 sheets and folded in half. Shown here are the back and front outside cover and the front and back inside cover:
