Organizing a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) campaign across a multi-unit restaurant group presents a particular challenge. SEO pivots on choosing tailored keywords that will target your local audience in a unique way. However, if each campaign is unique then it becomes difficult to compare these efforts across different regions and share group insights across all units.
At Hudson Creative we experienced this challenge going into our second year working with Patina Restaurant Group, a national dining & hospitality leader with approximately 60 restaurants across the United States. In our first year we spent significant individual effort with each location; choosing keywords, organizing website content and cleaning up third party referral links. The results were impressive, but it was difficult to show a simple cross-section of our efforts across the all units. As we moved towards the year-end roundup, we worked with the Patina marketing team to create a concept called the ‘Digital Dashboard’, a reporting tool used to monitor progress of Same-Store units open in the same month YoY. This dashboard now enabled us to track valuable metrics like Users from Search, Seated Website Reservations, Phone Calls, Get Direction Requests, Total Covers (and more) to find out where our efforts correlated with fluctuations in the business.
Screenshot taken from the Patina Restaurant Group Digital Dashboard. Entering our fourth year providing SEO and digital marketing services to Patina Restaurant Group, our efforts continue to generate real business value through tangible metrics like Website Visitors from Search and Seated Website Reservations.
SEO is a long term investment, and results can take up to 6 months to show signs of progress. Once you start to experience this progress it’s important to “optimize” your efforts by doubling down and focusing on the activities that have the greatest impact. The digital dashboard is an important tool that continues to help us to survey data across different sources and identify correlations that drive value where Patina needs it the most.
Reporting on Individual Campaigns
It’s also important to create reports for individual SEO or Paid Advertising campaigns. These individual campaign reports provide detailed information on the strategy and results of successful campaigns (and not so successful campaigns) that can then be tested and absorbed as group learnings. In addition, these reports can also help marketing managers monitor progress, make decisions and allocate budget accordingly.
Above is a screenshot of a Google Ad dashboard developed by Hudson Creative so that marketing managers can monitor total cost and conversions in real time.