The rub
Google Business Profile
- Category fix: Barbecue restaurant + Caterer
- Catering services with prices and minimums
- Weekly posts of real cooks, not stock
- Q&A seeded from the 20 most common enquiry questions
Hickory Rook Smokehouse
Texas BBQ restaurant & catering · Austin · 12-month cook · Local plan
How a single-pit Austin smokehouse beat the famous names for BBQ catering searches
Off the pit, month 12
+212% catering leads from organic
Brisket stalls, gets wrapped, and is rested before it is sliced. So did this campaign. Read the probe log month by month.
Probe log · 12-hour cook
1 hour = 1 month · pit 275°F
Month 12 · The rest
Slice
Month twelve. 44 catering leads a month from organic, position three, a 4.8 average rating.
- Probe
- 199°F
- Catering leads
- 44/mo
- Position
- #3
- Map pack
- +290%
- Rating
- 4.8
01 · Before the fire
Best brisket on the block. Invisible for the order that paid the bills.
In a city full of famous pitmasters, the smokehouse ranked nowhere for catering, which was its most profitable line. Its Business Profile listed the wrong category and it had no catering pages.
Austin has more celebrated pitmasters per square mile than anywhere in Texas, and the queues to prove it. Hickory Rook runs one offset pit off East 12th Street. Its walk-in trade was fine; its catering, the line with the best margin per pound, came almost entirely from word of mouth.
Anyone searching for a caterer for a wedding, an office lunch or a tailgate met the famous names first and never reached a smokehouse that Google filed as a generic restaurant. The goal was narrow on purpose: own catering searches, not the brisket-tourism queries the giants have locked up.
02 · Pit inspection
Six findings from the audit, ranked by how much heat they were losing.
Local · Content · Technical · Reviews
- 01 · LocalHot
Primary Business Profile category was “Restaurant”, with no Caterer category at all, so the listing was never eligible for catering map packs.
Fix → Barbecue restaurant as primary, Caterer and Food delivery as secondary, 14 catering service items.
- 02 · LocalHot
41 of 63 citations still carried the old food-trailer address and a disconnected phone number.
Fix → One canonical name, address and phone, pushed to aggregators and corrected by hand on the rest.
- 03 · ContentHot
Catering existed only as a 4 MB PDF linked from the footer. No URL could rank for a single catering query.
Fix → A /catering hub plus event pages, with an HTML menu, per-head pricing and minimums.
- 04 · TechnicalWarm
Every page titled “Home”; no Restaurant or FoodEstablishment schema; a 9 MB hero video pushed mobile LCP to 4.9 s.
Fix → Unique titles, Restaurant + Service schema, a poster frame instead of autoplay video.
- 05 · MeasurementWarm
The quote form sent email but fired no event, so catering leads were counted by memory.
Fix → Tracked form and call extension, with headcount and event date as required fields.
- 06 · ReviewsWarm
4.3 average from 212 reviews, 3% answered, and none mentioned catering, the line Google needed evidence for.
Fix → Post-event review cards, a 48-hour reply rule, prompts that name the event type.
03 · The recipe
Four tactics, cooked low and slow on one plan.
Built on our Local plan (Local SEO). Fix the entity first, give Google pages to rank, then feed it the reviews and local links that prove a single pit can cater a 300-guest wedding.
The bark
Catering landing pages
- /catering hub with a crawlable menu
- Weddings, office lunches and tailgates as separate pages
- Per-head pricing tables and a headcount calculator
- Quote form tracked as a conversion
The smoke ring
Review strategy
- QR review card in every catering order
- Prompts that name the event and the venue
- Owner reply to every review within 48 hours
- Negative reviews answered with a fix, publicly
The burnt ends
Local link building
- Preferred-caterer pages at nine Austin venues
- Two neighbourhood cook-off sponsorships
- Local food press pitched with the single-pit story
- Chamber and wedding-directory listings
04 · The smoker log
12 hours on the pit, one entry per month.
- 01Month 1 · Fire-up
Light the pit. Full audit. Primary category moved to Barbecue restaurant, Caterer added, 14 catering service items written.
84°F · 15 leads - 02Month 2 · Fire-up
Clean smoke. 41 citations corrected, most still carrying the old food-trailer address on East Cesar Chavez.
118°F · 17 leads - 03Month 3 · Fire-up
Bark sets. /catering hub launched with a crawlable menu, per-head pricing and a quote form that is actually tracked.
143°F · 19 leads - 04Month 4 · The stall
The stall. Rankings flatten while Google re-weighs the new entity. Event pages for weddings, office lunches and tailgates go live.
157°F · 21 leads - 05Month 5 · The stall
Hold the line. Review cards packed with every catering order; owner replies to every review inside 48 hours.
160°F · 22 leads - 06Month 6 · The stall
Wrap it. Butcher-paper moment: nine Austin venues list Hickory Rook as a preferred caterer, with links.
162°F · 23 leads - 07Month 7 · The wrap
Push through. Stall breaks. Catering pages enter the top 15 for six event queries; Profile posts weekly cook photos.
173°F · 27 leads - 08Month 8 · The wrap
Rendering. Sponsorship of two neighbourhood cook-offs earns local press links and branded searches climb.
185°F · 31 leads - 09Month 9 · The wrap
Jiggle test. Catering FAQ and schema refreshed from real enquiry questions; map pack shows on “bbq catering near me”.
195°F · 36 leads - 10Month 10 · The wrap
Probe tender. Page one, position four. Quote requests now arrive with headcount and date filled in.
203°F · 40 leads - 11Month 11 · The rest
Into the cooler. Rest phase: no new pages, just consolidation, photo refresh and review momentum.
201°F · 42 leads - 12Month 12 · The rest
Slice. Month twelve. 44 catering leads a month from organic, position three, a 4.8 average rating.
199°F · 44 leads
05 · Sliced
Probe tender at month ten. Rested and sliced at month 12.
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
Catering keywords, month 0 vs month 12
| Query | Searches / mo | Before | After |
|---|---|---|---|
| bbq catering austin | 1,900 | #31 | #3 |
| brisket catering austin | 590 | #24 | #2 |
| bbq catering near meMap | 2,400 | — | #2 |
| wedding bbq catering austin | 320 | — | #4 |
| corporate lunch catering austin | 880 | #47 | #9 |
| texas bbq near meMap | 6,600 | #9 | #3 |
| smoked brisket by the pound austin | 260 | #18 | #5 |
| tailgate catering austin | 170 | — | #3 |
“—” = not in the top 100. Volumes are modelled Austin estimates.
The map pack, before and after
- 1Pecan Line Smokehouse4.7 · Barbecue restaurant · Catering
- 2Big Ember BBQ Co.4.6 · Caterer
- 3Mesquite & Mortar4.5 · Barbecue restaurant
Hickory Rook not shown: no Caterer category.
- 1Pecan Line Smokehouse4.7 · Barbecue restaurant · Catering
- 2Hickory Rook Smokehouse4.8 · Caterer · Barbecue restaurant
- 3Big Ember BBQ Co.4.6 · Caterer
Listed between the famous names, with a catering menu link.
Low and slow works.
Get a plan like this
The Local plan: Business Profile, location pages, reviews and local links, run month by month.