There are hundreds of bakeries in New York City and some have been in the same neighborhood for over 100 years. Generations of people have used the same bakery for their entire lives. Many New York City bakeries are world famous and they get magazine, newspaper, and tv coverage. The competition was tough.
The Century Cafe and Bakery was near a corner of one of the busiest intersections in Chinatown, on Bowery near Grand, and 1 block from the 2nd busiest subway stop in the neighborhood. Perfect location really and their storefront and fantastic product line did all their advertising for them. Classic brick and mortar story, build it and they will come. But being in the heart of Chinatown and featuring American and Chinese styled bakery products, the Century Cafe wanted a way to break more into the mainstream and compete along side the big boys. That’s where Mal Milligan stepped in and built them a website and worked it for SEO.
Mal started by taking 1100 photos using a Nikon D-60 SLR and 3 Nikon lenses. With 15 years of professional Photoshop experience, he cut the photos down to around 100 and cropped them and tweaked them for the website. He created a WordPress website using a Studio Press Theme and the magic began. The pictures became an instant success on Google images and Flickr. And more and more people started finding Centurycafe.com in Google, Yahoo, and Bing searches. The phrase “That’s the best food photograph I’ve ever seen on the internet” became common at the office when Mal showed off his latest web design project.
In the summer of 2009, centurycafe.com became the #1 Google ranked result for the phrase “Manhattan Bakery” and the business has never looked back. The website is getting more than 3,500 unique visitors a month consistently and it’s getting listed on Google Local and seen during searches up to 7,000 times a month now by local New Yorkers. What a difference, to go from no website to 40,000 unique visitors and 50,000 Google local impressions a year! It’s increased their exposure out of the local Chinatown community and into the mainstream. Now besides being known as the best Chinese bakery in town, they are known as the best bakery in Manhattan by many more more people that would have never known they existed if it were not for Web Design Workplace and their custom websites integrated with SEO.
The competition on Google for the phrase “Manhattan bakery” is serious major leagues for a medium sized multi-million dollar business. Google reports over 6,000 web pages it’s aware of that have the phrase “Manahttan bakery” in their title. To be honest it’s a little bit lucky to get a #1 ranking on Google but it generally takes a lot of hard work and adherence to the SEO best practices guidelines we commonly refer to as “White Hat SEO”.
In this case Web Design WorkPlace put the icing on their cake. The internet exposure has turned out to be very valuable and a lucrative return on investment for the owners. Another NYC web design success story for Mal Milligan and his firm Web Design WorkPlace.
