Case studies //
The Galley Restaurant
Thirty-six years in the same 17th-century building on the Topsham estuary, a Michelin plate and an AA rosette on the wall, and a website that told none of it.
- Sector
- Hospitality
- Engagement
- Rebrand, Website & SEO
- Period
- 2026
01 //
What I walked into
The Galley is a seafood restaurant in Topsham, Devon, in the same building for thirty-six years. Fish landed at Newlyn, dairy from up the road, a chef with a serious CV, a Michelin plate, an AA rosette, Trencherman's and Harden's. None of that reached anybody who hadn't already been.
The site was on a website builder and it was quietly working against the business. The homepage led on a picture of the building, so nothing said seafood. Awards were listed in no particular order. Suppliers were unnamed or misspelled. Menu prices were out of date. The history was wrong in three places. The booking flow took deposits it then failed to refund.
Underneath that, no analytics, no Search Console, no way to know what anything was doing, and a business that had watched its customer growth stall.
02 //
What was actually going on
A restaurant like this doesn't need to be discovered by everyone. It needs to be found by the person forty minutes away searching for somewhere worth the drive, and it needs to look, in the four seconds they spend deciding, like the thing it actually is. Every fix was the same fix: stop hiding the proof. The awards, the suppliers, the thirty-six years, the fish landed that morning: all of it already existed. None of it was on the page.
03 //
The work
- 01
The story and the proof
- Rebuilt the site's argument around what makes it worth travelling for: the estuary, the building, the boats it buys from, the people it buys from by name.
- Awards ordered by weight (Michelin, AA rosette, Trencherman's, Harden's) rather than by whichever logo turned up first.
- Suppliers named and linked, so the sourcing claim is checkable instead of decorative.
- Thirty years of detail fact-checked line by line, because a restaurant that gets its own history wrong on its own website is not reassuring.
- 02
Website: rebuilt, not redecorated
- Moved off the website builder onto a static build on Cloudflare: properly fast, properly optimised images, mobile-first, because most people book from a phone.
- Full 301 redirect map from the old site so nothing that had been earned in search was thrown away, and DNS handled so the restaurant's email never dropped.
- Menus, private dining, vouchers, careers and a page for the fish and chip counter with an honest status on it rather than a dead link.
- Booking integration tested end to end, and the deposit and refund configuration fixed so cancellations inside the window actually refund.
- 03
Search and measurement
- SEO audit implemented, then content pages and articles written to replace holding copy, built around what people in Devon actually search for.
- Analytics, Search Console and Tag Manager set up from nothing, with a UK-compliant consent banner in front of them.
- Historic data exported from the old platform before it was switched off, so year-on-year comparison survived the migration.
- Google Business Profile taken in hand: listings, photography, review responses, because for a restaurant that is the shop window, not the website.
- 04
Email and returning customers
- Welcome sequence and a short follow-on flow (the history of the building, then a nudge to review) so a first booking has a reason to become a second.
- Private dining enquiries routed into the same system rather than an inbox.
- 05
Handing it over
- Trained the owner to publish menu and wine-list changes himself, by voice, through an AI-assisted workflow onto a staging site he reviews before it goes live.
- The point being that a seasonal menu changes faster than any agency retainer can keep up with, and a restaurant should never be waiting on a developer to correct a price.
04 //
What changed
+21%
August bookings, year on year
317 against 262, the audit's worst month, and the first to grow since December. Two-thirds of the ground lost since 2024 was already recovered before the month had closed, with the growth at dinner and September running ahead of last year.
51
August bookings straight from Google Search and Maps
16% of the month through Reserve with Google, commission-free, and a channel that did not exist a year earlier. Online bookings overall rose from 185 to 253, four in five of everything in the diary.
37 → 1
same-day cancellations, last August to this
Cancellations of every kind fell from 106 to 36. The deposit policy is not new; what changed is coverage: with nearly every booking made online, card details and policy agreement are captured on every one.
51 → 2,529
menu reads in six weeks, old site to new
The audit's first fix. The old menu was a JPG that search engines could not see; the menu page is now the most-read page on the site, and 5.6% of all visits end in a confirmed booking, against hospitality's healthy range of 2–3%.
#4 → #1
on Google for “restaurants Topsham”, at launch to now
1,900 searches a month, with 1,476 people finding the restaurant on Google in a single month. Brand search moved from fifth to first; Devon-wide seafood searches from unranked to page one.
0
developers needed to change a menu price
The owner publishes menu and wine-list updates himself, by voice, to a staging site he approves before it goes live. Seasonal menus change faster than a retainer can.
05 //
The work itself
A restaurant site has one job on a Friday afternoon: make someone forty minutes away decide it is worth the drive, and then let them book in two taps.
DigitalRebuilt · static · mobile-first
galleyrestaurant.co.uk
The homepage now leads on food, because the first job is to say *seafood* before anything else. Awards sit in order of weight. Suppliers are named and linked. The booking button follows you down the page on a phone, because that is where the decision gets made. Scroll inside each window.
Brand & campaignPoster · photography
The brand beyond the website
The same watercolour language carries off the site and into the restaurant's own promotion: a Father's Day gift-voucher poster in the house style, and the food photography that leads every page.
Why this might matter to you //
Small hospitality businesses almost never have a marketing problem in the way they think they do. They have thirty years of proof (awards, suppliers, provenance, regulars) sitting in a drawer while their website leads on a photograph of the front door. Put the proof on the page, make it load fast on a phone, and make sure the owner can change a price without phoning anyone.
Brand & Positioning Define what you stand for, who you’re for, and why you’re the right choice.
Marketing Strategy Positioning, audience, channels, and a roadmap connected to revenue.
Marketing Audit An honest view of what’s working, what isn’t, and what to fix.
Restaurant marketing for independents This engagement, offered whole: the diary read, being found and booked fixed, the seasonal calendar run, measured monthly in bookings.