Background:
With over 600 locations in 46 U.S. states and in 17 countries, Charleys can be found in retail shopping centers, airports, strip centers, and Army & Air Force bases worldwide.
Charleys recently underwent a brand refresh to focus on the craveability of their food. Their website was lagging in communicating that message to customers.
Wildfire was tasked with completely redesigning the website and user experience to better align with the brand refresh, adding deep hooks to their online ordering platform, and creating a location-aware experience that made finding and ordering from the nearest Charleys location simple and intuitive.
The Solution:
To achieve the desired outcome, the Wildfire team leveraged BrightEdge to begin working on the individual project components. To start, the team using BrightEdge’s Site Audit to conduct regularly scheduled full site audits, then going in and repairing any technical SEO issues. The team utilized SearchIQ to identify and address major ranking factor issues, including On-Page, Schema, and Page Speed for Charleys high priority keywords/pages. Using Recommendations, which provides specific on-page recommendations for page titles, meta descriptions, H1s, H2s, and Image Alt Text, the team was able to implement many changes throughout the site to help improve on-page SEO.
The Results:
As a result of this work, the new site automatically detects the user’s location and sets their store to the nearest Charleys. This helps the site to display menu options and promotions specific to the user’s location. The site also automatically updates menu items, store location data, and store hours all from the online ordering system, helping to streamline these types of updates. The overall optimized UX is also geared to maximize online orders.
In a two-year span from October 2021 to October 2023, Charley’s experienced substantial growth in its online visibility and performance metrics. The number of keywords ranked on the first page increased dramatically from 24 to 609. Moreover, there was a remarkable surge in organic impressions by 166.32% and organic clicks by 53.5% between August 2021 and July 2023.
Utilizing advanced AI-powered SEO tools, Wildfire achieved impressive results, including a more than 60% increase in revenue from search traffic compared to 2021. Additionally, the company saw significant enhancements in conversion rates, transactions, and average order value, highlighting the effectiveness of their strategic approach to search engine optimization.