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Cooper's Hawk Winery & Restaurants
National Restaurant Chain Sees 60% Increase in Driving Directions in 3 Months
Case Studies — Digital Marketing
Digital Marketing for National Restaurant
About Cooper's Hawk
Cooper’s Hawk had humble beginnings as a small, single-restaurant company founded by an entrepreneur with a vision. Solopreneur Tim McEnery wanted to create a place where people could come together, forge bonds, and celebrate moments over the shared love of food and wine. Started in 2005 and now 44 restaurants strong, this bootstrapped startup has become a dining powerhouse with a remarkable wine catalog and a food menu inspired by flavors from all over the world.
By December of 2019, the chain had already established a strong customer base through word-of-mouth and storefront marketing of their wine club. However, it was time to go beyond. Cooper’s Hawk was looking for a way to expand their presence even further by leveraging the wide-open digital space.
Campaign Goals
CH’s overall goal was to increase online visibility and improve traffic to specific local pages on their website.
Goal Measurement
Campaign goals were measured through the following metrics:
- Traffic from GMB to local pages on website — This meant increasing individual Google My Business rankings for a higher volume of keywords. By doing this, those searching the web (via search engines like Google) for keywords related to Cooper’s Hawk would naturally and effortlessly discover the Cooper’ Hawk location near them.
- Getting more visitors to visit individual restaurant for a dine-in experience — This meant optimizing each location’s GMB listing with relevant information that can be easily found via keywords. GMB posts and menu optimization coupled with driving directions and hours of operation helped drive more dine-in reservations.
Challenges
Cooper’s Hawk faced several challenges:
- CH’s current GMB listings were underperforming and under-optimized. This meant Google searches were less apt to serve up the CH GMB listings during search queries.
- Cooper’s Hawk lacked a local SEO digital marketing strategy.
- CH’s competitors boasted more market footprint, name recognition, market resources and overall budget.
Despite such a rich company heritage, hallmarked by quality craftsmanship and customer satisfaction, CH’s local SEO challenges and well-established competitor base meant they had an uphill battle ahead of them.
Solutions -- Strategies & Tactics
1. Locations
Priority number one was to hyper-focus location targeting for maximum visibility of each listing. Using the ‘Service areas’ section of GMB, we optimized for the most populous nearby neighborhoods and towns in the vicinity of each restaurant.
2. Posts
The next step was to increase activity and engagement on the listings using Google My Business posts. Posts are useful for giving quick updates on special events and offers, but they’re also a great way to engage with your customers and signal to Google that you’re active on the platform. We put together a complete schedule of posts—all of which were geared toward their upscale casual audience—and began posting regularly.
Post views immediately shot up, and we were able to drive considerable traffic to the website through the CTA (call-to-action) buttons.
3. Menus
As a restaurant chain, food is the main component of Cooper’s Hawk’s business. We did some digging and found that customers often search for specific food items when trying to find a place to eat.
The opportunity to capitalize on these types of searches was too big to miss. To increase Cooper’s Hawk’s visibility for specific food searches, we went through the entire menu and added in each item to all 44 locations using GMB’s ‘Menu’ feature.
It was a long process, but in addition to improving the SEO of each listing, this also gave customers a way to view the menu and see the restaurants’ offerings all within the GMB platform.
4. Links
Google My Business provides a place on every listing to include a primary website link. The purpose of this is to drive website traffic and help customers seek out additional information they may need. When we first began, this link was driving traffic to the Cooper’s Hawk homepage on all 44 listings.
Looking a bit closer at user intent, we determined that customers who click on a restaurant’s GMB link are most likely trying to find information pertaining to that specific location—i.e.: reservations, telephone number, management info, etc. Focusing on this intent, we switched out the existing links to point directly at the specific location page for each restaurant.
Now, instead of being taken to the main homepage and having to navigate to find what they were looking for, customers are pointed directly at the information they need.
Results
With a bit of research and some slight tweaks, we were able to make significant improvements to the visibility and functionality of Cooper’s Hawk’s Google My Business listings. Requests for driving directions skyrocketed, as did phone calls and website visits.
Conclusion
WebRocket Digital believes in metric-driven approaches to deliver measurable results and improvements. By staying true to these values, WebRocket was able to collaboratively work with each of its internal teams and the client to increase the number of dine-in guests for Cooper’s Hawk. Today, thanks to this dedication, we have a true success story on our hands — and one that is only growing more each day.