Marketing a restaurant, and food service in general, is different than other types of businesses. In general, restaurant marketing is local. This is true even for large chains and franchises because individual locations always draw from a specific market radius.
While not a “chain” per se, Chihuahua’s Cantina & Grill has Locations in Reno and Winnemucca, Nevada. Their Winnemucca location was the first, having opened in Winnemucca in 2006. The restaurant is unique, serving traditional recipes passed through generations of family living in the small town of Riva Palacios in Chihuahua, Mexico.
Our relationship began several years ago when a Chihuahua’s approached us about branding and package design for some of their regionally famous drinks they sell in bottles for people to enjoy at home. Since then, we’ve been honored to develop their branding, two generations of websites and many other marketing initiatives. We’ve also enjoyed quite a few Happy Hours and can’t recommend their margaritas strongly enough!
Although Chihuahua’s Cantina & Grill is a great business with an established brand, their decision to open a Reno location came after we’d developed their drink labeling. At the time, the restaurant was relatively unknown in the Reno/Sparks market.
In many ways, our efforts would be no different than if we were tasked with promoting a brand new business. This would include reimagining their brand and building a foundation for growth in new, larger markets—not just Reno and Winnemucca.
Naturally, their first goal would be to fill tables. However, it would be nearly a year-long build out before the restaurant could begin serving customers. We’d use that time to manage the rebranding effort and develop the company’s website.
Chihuahua’s management had a LOT to do, and several major challenges to sort out prior to opening. Building codes, contractors, staffing, menu planning—it takes a lot to open a top restaurant.
Also, Chihuahua’s had been the location of Mexican restaurant and cantina that operated in that spot for decades. Fortunately, the previous restaurant was good and had a good reputation. Chihuahua’s planned opening generated a great deal of enthusiasm.
Our role, at that point, was to represent their ideas by creating visuals to build their brand and capture their ideal customer experience digitally—starting with a new logo.
Mexican fare is quite popular in Reno. Consequently, there are Mexican restaurants seemingly on every street corner. The reality, however, is only a handful are really good, and those are busy all the time. None of them offers the unique menu or a dining experience like Chihuahua’s.
Chihuahua’s Cantina & Grill offers an extensive menu in an atmosphere that took tremendous planning to create.
Chihuahua’s Cantina & Grill is positioned as exactly what it is—a great place to relax with great food, friends and family. The Reno location is quite large and has a great patio. It has something of a national feel, because the family invested in making every detail just right.
Our role isn’t to influence Chihuahua’s market position, but rather to reflect what comes naturally. Their restaurant is welcoming and comfortable in the same way as a popular bar and grill. It’s a place people naturally want to hang out.
Similarly, we didn’t set out to build a new brand. Our task was simply to design their logo. The overarching brand emerged out of that process. Through many discussions and our previous experience with package design and labels, we got to know the family and their vision became clear as part of the process.
The Chihuahua’s brand is really the Chihuahua’s story told through hundreds of details recorded in our reams of meeting notes. We just needed to reflect it in our imagery and messaging.
Of course, the focal point for the Chihuahua’s brand is the company’s logo.
Designing the Chihuahua’s Cantina & Grill logo was laborious—in a good way. We knew the brand instinctively, but making instincts tangible in the form of a logo takes a form of higher-plane imagination very few designers can relate to.
As a client, Chihuahua’s is a dream to work with. We went through literally hundreds of meticulous revisions. We arrived at the initial design very quickly. Most of the revisions were internal rather than in response to requests by the client.
We wanted the logo to reflect the history of the old world recipes Chihuahua’s chefs have passed through generations. We also needed to reflect a sense of what the Chihuahua’s dining experience would be like for people that might be experiencing it for the first time.
The logo needed—all at once—to be highly polished, yet casual and even a little playful. All by itself, we wanted a logo the convey the taste, the atmosphere and the Chihuahua’s experience. We think we nailed it.
Our messaging goal was no different than our branding goal—to let the Chihuahua’s story come out through imagery and a few choice words. Chihuahua’s Cantina & Grill doesn’t
need a word smith. It really doesn’t even need words.
We could easily say all that needs to be said with photos and headings. Chihuahua’s is such a cool place, you can’t take a bad picture.
But, search engines like words. Lot’s of words. For rankings, our de-facto standard word count is around 600 per page. In reference to search engine optimization (SEO), it can be said that a thousand words is worth a picture.
Generally speaking, we like words too. This case study is an obvious example of that.
Chihuahua’s Cantina & Grill isn’t a case study, so we decided against being too wordy just to satisfy Google. So far, we’ve been able to achieve top search engine rankings without a volume of text.
For most web design projects, we spend a great deal of time building a messaging strategy. This includes text as well as imagery and video. Chihuahua’s Cantina & Grill is a great restaurant with a unique menu and a super cool atmosphere. The message is that simple.
Our goal was, and still is, to show that there’s room for any size party, and that you’ll have a great dining experience every time. We did our best to build that message using images as much as possible.
Most of the website text is on the homepage and menus. There are captions throughout, along with descriptions of Chihuahua’s unique offerings. The language is casual, friendly and approachable.
The Chihuahua’s website is the centerpiece of the restaurant’s marketing effort. Our goal was to create a website that almost feels like an art gallery. We used a very dar gray for the primary background color, with reverse text using a limited color palette to avoid taking visitor’s attention away from the spectacular photography.
For that, we went outside to photographer Frank Haxton of Digiman Studio (https://digimanstudio.com/). We usually use our own team for photography, as well as videography, but we wanted an entirely fresh look and completely different approach.
The result is beautiful. Everything from the warm, rich lighting, to the vivid colors of each menu item is perfect. Food photography is art in every sense. Every preparation has to look perfect, fresh and table ready. To achieve that, some photographers use non-food items like lacquer, white glue and shoe polish to make food look more photogenic.
We’d like to point out that all of the food photos that appear on the Chihuahua’s Cantina & Grill website are 100% authentic. What you see in the photos are the same menu items that will be served at your table.
As a web design agency, it is very satisfying to craft big, beautiful designs to fill large, high-resolution computer monitors. But, that’s not how the majority of website visitors experience our work. On average, almost ¾ of visits to chihuahuasgrill.com are users browsing on their mobile phones.
This is the true for most restaurant websites. We always approach the mobile website design very carefully. “Mobile website design” is a bit of a misnomer. The website is what web people refer to as “responsive,” meaning that it is designed to adjust to the screen size and resolution of the viewing environment.
Responsive web design is challenging to get exactly right, because of they way we have to select and place elements on the page. The Chihuahua’s website is designed around all that beautiful photography. Tiny mobile views and bandwidth limitations make it difficult to create the same powerful experience we can with the desktop.
As is typical, we took a columnar approach, appropriately sizing text, changing to a mobile menu and adjusting images for the diminutive screen. We also eliminated elements that would lose their visual impact or slow down page loads.
As mentioned, we knew SEO would be a challenge because of the limited text volume. Even so, we location on our side. For any local business, we strongly recommend completely building out your Google My Business profile. This made it possible for us to solidify the connection between Chihuahua’s physical locations and the website.
That’s a big deal—especially for local search—because the connection between the GMB profile and earned Chihuahua’s positions in both the Google Local Pack (map links in the SERP) and the regular organic listings. On mobile, having that map link gives Android and iPhone users one-tap access to directions into the Chihuahua’s parking lot.
Less obvious, and a bit more work, we added detailed schema markup to every page. Schema is a programming standard Google and other search engines use to catalog what a website is really about. Without getting into the technical details, including schema in the page code provides a means for us to signal search engines that Chihuahua’s is a Mexican restaurant that’s local to Reno.
The schema standard gave us the opportunity to make up for the limited live text that would have otherwise seemed unnatural or “stuffed.”
Finally, since Chihuahua’s has locations in Reno and Winnemucca, we had a legitimate use for location-based (Reno & Winnemucca) keywords in text intended for human readers. So, while the amount of text is limited, it was still able to be focused on physical locations.
The combination of Chihuahua’s Google My Business profile, local focus and schema markup has resulted in top rankings for both the desktop and mobile devices.
Our marketing and branding efforts for Chihuahua’s Cantina & Grill have been successful by every measure. The restaurant is thriving and anyone using search engines to help decide what’s for dinner is likely to discover Chihuahua’s across multiple types of online listings.
On an ongoing basis, we are on the lookout for competitive threats, changes in rankings and, unfortunately hacking attempts.
SEO is always evolving, so we make frequent adjustments to code and content in response to changes in rankings. This is also true for the Chihuahua’s Google My Business profile.
We are excited to continue working with Chihuahua’s Cantina & Grill. It is a perfect example of doing all the right things, without requiring a giant marketing budget. And, if you haven’t been there, please go. We think it’ll soon be a favorite. It certainly is for us.
