HORECA Sector – SALT, a Michelin Star Restaurant
How to increase organic ranking through Tech SEO and link building within 3 months?
SALT is a renowned Michelin-starred restaurant.
They approached us to get ranked to and boost their organic traffic for niche keywords – such as ‘michelin star restaurant budapest’, ‘fine dining budapest’ and lookalikes.
They gave us 3 months to show our SEO skills and to make a decision afterwards whether to keep on going or pausing the SEO initiative.
Short disclaimer: the cooperation is still active ever since.
Let’s see the results of the first 3 months.
Problem Statement
The HORECA sector is highly competitive, especially since COVID. There are far fewer incoming tourists and locally less and less people can afford fine-dining, high-end gastronomy.
All these pump up the competition and the advertising costs, therefore organic traffic could be a crucial, cost efficient alternative to accelerate website traffic. However, on one hand, SEO – Search Engine Optimisation rarely generates results overnight. It takes a bit of time (at least a few months or so) to get traction, which may hurt even more when time and money are scarce resources. On the other hand, there are many local and international aggregator sites (such as Tripadvisor) with long SEO history to compete with.
Domain: saltbudapest.com
Industry: HORECA
Employee: 10+
Partnership with Markestic: 2023
Solution
We started off with a detailed Tech SEO Audit, then along the proposed action plan we supported their web developers to fix every SEO-related issue.
Besides many tiny mistakes, the most crucial ones were:
- badly handled 301 redirects
- missing meta elements
- existing meta elements that do not max out their potentials (too short, etc.)
- page duplicates or unnecessary internal redirects
- oversized images that slowed down the website
- inaccurate hreflang elements.
When the technical part is done, an SEO project can proceed to 2 main directions: On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO. The former one focuses on content creation, whereas the latter one on link building. Obviously these are non-exclusive strategies and they shall be deployed simultaneously, however, when resources are limited (they wished to spend a maximum of 500 EUR per month to test the potential of SEO), we always start with low-hanging fruits.
After a backlink audit on SALT and its direct competitors, we concluded that the site could stand out more easily and in a much shorter period of time by building relevant links. Based on our customer business needs, we selected a limited number of niche keywords and topics around which links to be built and then took off.”
Results
By simply building 2 relevant links per month over the course of 3 months, SALT got ranked to 20 new keywords and got better rankings for 21 others with an overall monthly search volume of almost 25.000.
The volume may not be outstanding but their relevance is much more essential, just like the financial budget out of which the results got achieved.
Such as: ‘budapest restaurant michelin star’ for which SALT had never ranked before and after 3 months, their organic position is already 5.
SEO is certainly a longer strategy to build upon, however, it certainly pays off, sometimes even in the short run.
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