I’ll do a case study on the Century Cafe and Bakery in NYC later but just for today let’s take a look at:

What was I facing trying to help this particular business with a custom web integrated with SEO?

This is a Chinese bakery in the center of Chinatown in New York City and the competition is fierce (in a friendly way). There are over 2 dozen Chinese Bakeries in the main Chinatown area, and most serve it up fresh, tasty, and cheap. Chinese Bakeries are actually one of New York’s hidden treasures… I was lucky to check out one in 1993 when a friend of mine from Hong Kong told me the best egg and ham sandwich on a fresh baked bun with a coffee in NY was under a dollar and only available in Chinatown. So the biggest Chinese Bakery was just like all the smaller ones in that it was  just a brick and mortar business with print advertising in local Chinese and English news papers. They survived on storefront and word of mouth advertising mostly so it was a level playing field fighting for new business from the biggest bakery to the tiniest one. I knew the family that operated the business after a while and I offered to build them an optimized website for free. Actually this was a classic “I’ll work for food project”. So back when I was not on a low carb diet and I could eat anything in the place, my kids and I tried about half of the items on their menu of 200 freshly made baked goods a day in exchange for 80 hours of work building and optimizing a website.

What measurements indicated SEO success for this medium sized business?

I used a lot of SEO techniques, all 100 % pure white hat legitimate and standard techniques, and I got them to rank #5 on Google for the phrase:

Manhattan bakery

Ranking is a solid indicator for SEO’s that their campaign is doing well or not doing well. Century Cafe was locked in at # 5 for the phrase in the Google main index for the first 7 months of 2009, and I never spent a single dime in internet marketing to get it there. By the way, there are 5,400 other webpages that Google reports that have the words “Manhattan Bakery” in their title. So Century Cafe got Google Page One, in the Top 10 rankings, in the # 5 position against a massive field of internet competitors for that lucrative and highly competitive phrase. And the rankings in themselves are great, but the real indicator to the business is the number of sales they make – compared against their investment to make those sales.

So did SEO actually help their business, did it help their bottom line?

In this case, SEO definitely increased the number of clients that walk in through the front door and made a purchase. The business owners know this because lots of new customers mentioned to them that they had a beautiful website and that was the reason they were able to find the place. It increased the number of phone orders where the client told them “I’m looking at a cake on your website and I’d like to order one with this message on it…”. And it got them more positive advertising exposure by getting them listed automatically in a lot of the popular food guides and food directories. So the rankings are great but the real end game for SEO is more sales for my client, and the Century Cafe scored big.

I work with 30 full time SEO’s and my boss is probably one of the top 100 SEO’s in the world today. Every single SEO and designer in my place told me the photo work and the photoshop work I did for that site was the best food imagery they had ever seen on the internet. My photograph of the “chocolate strawberry cake” is one of the most popular such photos in the world right now on Google images. And my “cloud building” is the most popular on Google images in that category as well. The site does about 4 GigaBytes in bandwidth traffic a month now, and most of it is actually people looking at those cake pictures that they can click on 3 times to make cherries take up the entire screen in high resolution. So I never made a dime directly on the project, but it was a great subject to cut my teeth on as a demo site for what SEO can do for a business with zero dollars in investment toward the internet marketing effort. If the operators of the bakery wanted to go higher in the rankings, there are a lot more things I would be able to do for them in terms of their SEO campaign if I had some funding. We will get into that in a later post.

Cheers -