Tuscan Pizza is a locally beloved pizzeria and hot spot that sits between three neighboring towns in the sleepy South Jersey area. The creation of the Miguel Carranza, who is by all measures a pizza extraordinaire, Tuscan is the culmination of over 20 years in the industry. First starting as a line cook in Queens, Miguel’s vision has always been to create the best pizzeria in whatever city or town his family found themselves in. When the Carranza’s journeyed to southern New Jersey, he undertook a massive project when he decided to open the doors to Tuscan Pizza.
Tuscan and Miguel have been a success ever since that day. With a growing and dedicated customer base, they knew it was time to build a website that could match the success of their brick and mortar location. To turn the tide, Tuscan Pizza joined forces with The Content Group to launch Tuscan Eats – a website dedicated to their loyal customers that provided them with instant access to their menu, employment application, third-party ordering system, and an engrossing blog.
Determining Goals:
When it comes to projects like Tuscan Pizza, we ultimately want to define our client’s goals and then wrangle a scope of work that achieves those outcomes. A series of meetings helped us understand everything we needed to accomplish together with Miguel and his family. Staying focused on the project’s mission, these meetings served as a roadmap that breaks the work into manageable sprints. Since the main focus was to expand their digital footprint locally, we needed to be able to adjust scope as everyone gains new knowledge and understanding throughout our work together.
When we say we roadmap planned work, it means we know how tasks are going to be handled by both our team and the Tuscan Pizza team – while ultimately planning for flexibility. The final goal of all this work is being able to make small adjustments over the course of several sprints. For Tuscan Pizza, this allowed us to optimize their website for a local audience that continues to diversify and grow.
Search Engine Optimization:
In addition to the 20 plus years of cooking experience, Miguel also happens to be one of the friendliest and most sociable people you could hope to meet. This has garnered him a lot of good will amongst his customers and nearly all of their reviews reflect this, but what happens when word of mouth isn’t traveling as far or as fast as you’d like? You optimize your website for both users and search engines.
Since Tuscan Pizza hired us to build the site from the ground up, we were able to optimize the site with best possible keywords for a local market. This meant no SEO audit was necessary and we could focus on analyzing competitors in the area for keyword and backlink analysis.
Competitor Analysis
Fairly quickly, we realized that Tuscan Pizza’s competitors didn’t have much an online presence. In fact, outside of your major chain pizzerias, only three competitors in a three town radius had a website. This meant most local keywords were fair game and didn’t have much competition.
With our analysis, we look for keywords that are ranking somewhere on the Google result pages, but not in the top spots where the majority of traffic is. Once we identify these areas, we can optimize for them and see quicker traffic gains (as shown in the image below).
Content Gap Analysis
With content gap analysis, we looked for Tuscan Pizza’s competitor keywords that were winning them the most traffic. This became the basis of our content creation. We picked out high priority phrases, keywords that were based on industry trends knowledge, as well as seasonal content that could boost viewership quickly.
Consistent Blog Posts
Tuscan Pizza really wanted their customers to learn more about the team, promote customer interaction, and provide content that was written in such a way that customers wanted to share it socially. We provide Tuscan Pizza with two blog posts a month that range from extremely creative to informative.
Custom Forms:
Tuscan Pizza wanted to be able to vet potential employees while also allowing them to easily apply on their new website.
Using Gravity Forms, we created a custom employment application that allowed users to input their general information, list previous employers, select their education level from a multi select field, and agree to the terms and conditions of submitting their information to Tuscan.
The purpose of the employment app was two fold: see who was serious about getting a job at this growing location and also collect user data. The latter is being utilized in a forthcoming remarketing email campaign.
Continuous Learning Propels Future Projects:
We try to implement new ideas into every project we undertake. Some projects allow for these ideas to flourish and Tuscan Pizza is an example of that. This was the first site we customized from the ground up and we learned a lot throughout the process.
The unique challenges associated with dominating the local pizzeria landscape gave us not only a fun project with the Tuscan Pizza team, but also new experiences – which we absolutely thrive on. We executed a wonderful website and companion SEO campaign that continues to grow and scale on the SERPs, all while having fun collaborating together. We love being on the cutting edge and helping small businesses build their digital footprint. We’re always curious about what’s around the corner for our NJ SEO company and how we might be able to leverage it to benefit our clients.