How Hollow Oak Coffee Used Local SEO To Grow Their Syracuse Coffee Shop

Note: This is a fictional case study created for portfolio purposes to showcase my SEO writing and content strategy skills. All business names and results are hypothetical.

Hollow Oak Coffee Company started with one goal in mind: To supply the best local coffee that their shop could. Of course, a typical part of this for any local coffee shop is sourcing the best beans, roasting them in house, grinding them, and producing the best quality coffee possible. Hollow Oak Coffee had it sorted, the business front beautiful, a reliable local staff, and quality beverages. But something had been falling through behind the scenes. Hollow Oak had tried their best to pin it exactly—business started fast and declined as months passed after their opening.

The Coffee Was Great, But Where Was The Foot Traffic?

Hollow Oak did it all right, they had the storefront, they had some regulars, and they had a staff that cared as much about their coffee as Hollow Oak did. So what gives? Business was on a consistent downward trend. They were spending more on payroll than they were earning. Business was looking a bit daunting moving forward. How was it that a business like this, beautifully orchestrated on almost all fronts, faced imminent closure?

They were practically invisible online.

A Coffee Shop In Need of SEO

Hollow Oak Coffee Company had all their bases covered, but failed to meet one major piece. SEO (Search engine optimization)—Their company website reflected no SEO practices, their presence on Google was practically non-existent. For anyone not living in the neighborhood, Hollow Oak Coffee did not exist. A user online looking up ‘local coffee shops near me’ would have been surprised to find that Hollow Oak Coffee Company did not appear anywhere. Their business suffered at the hands of a lack of exposure, they had no interaction on their website, and they ranked lower than all their neighboring competitors on Google Maps, despite searching terms like ‘How to rank higher on Google Maps for my coffee shop’ delivering no clear fix. Their initial traffic fell to the surrounding competition, Starbucks, Dunkin’ and all the mid-sized local cafés with larger marketing budgets.

Optimizing Their Google Business Profile

The first step for Hollow Oak Coffee was to optimize their Google business profile—They lacked any notable company images, their Google business profile consisted of pictures submitted with the seven reviews they had gained within the 5 months they had been open. A simple, but unknown fix: they took clean professional photos highlighting the warm, welcoming vibe ruminating from within, prepared a few of their signature beverages and posted those as well. They added photographs of their menu board, a barista preparing a beverage, and the welcoming exterior of the building.

Hollow Oak Coffee had not updated their business hours since opening. They had been running on reduced hours to ease into staffing for their first week, and as far as their locale knew, their business hours were still 10am-2pm, a small but fatal flaw for their business as their true hours were now 7am-5pm. This small update to their hours and their company photos began surfacing them in more relevant “open now” searches, helping them reconnect with the early-birds and morning commuters they had previously missed.

Using Keywords As A Local Coffee Shop

With their business profile fixed, the next step was assuring that Hollow Oak Coffee was appearing on relevant Syracuse area searches. Visiting their website yielded some attempts at optimization, but lacked many of the essentials. Their homepage: “Locally Roasted Coffee—Right Here In Syracuse”, strong, but not effective as the rest of their site lacked individualism or keyword appeal. Their biography lacked a coherent structure, offering little optimized wording and mentioning things like “Our Drinks” rather than “Coffee Roasted Locally in Syracuse”. They had a clear problem in their site optimization, and the solution was simple. With some slight rewording, updates to their biography, landing page, and their menus to reflect their company brand, and voice here in Syracuse, traffic increased substantially.

Before: “We’re a coffee shop local to Syracuse, offering freshly roasted blends, a warm environment, and the best baked goods on the block!”

After: “We’re a small-batch coffee shop serving downtown Syracuse from right here on Clinton Square with craft espressos, and baked goods made here in-house”

Crafting Engaging Blog Content and Capitalizing On Seasonal Drinks

Blogging often remains an underdog in optimization and customer appeal, Hollow Oak Coffee utilized their blog sparingly, offering insight to their coffee making processes, and general industry insight, which by no means is bad, however it is limiting. In the coffee industry, seasonal beverages are a huge selling point, the big companies do it already. Why wasn’t Hollow Oak?

Some simple adaptation to their existing posts and word swaps, assuring to hit important keywords worked to turn a simple “Behind The Scenes at Hollow Oak” post into “From Bean To Cup: Behind The Scenes At A Syracuse, NY Coffee Shop”, driving traffic substantially higher.

Of course one of the biggest missed opportunities was seasonal content. While they focused more on behind-the-scenes posts and educational blogs, they weren’t tapping into one of the highest traffic drivers in the café world: limited-time, seasonal drinks. A simple post here and there was all that was needed to increase online engagement, and drive more foot traffic as a result of Google exposure.

Titles like, “Best Fall Coffee Drinks In Downtown Syracuse”, “Holiday Brews: The Best Local Peppermint Mocha” helped to align Hollow Oak with what customers were searching for on a seasonal basis.

The Results

Within just 60 days, Hollow Oak Coffee Company witnessed relevant and measurable improvements in both their digital metrics, and in-store activity. From increased web traffic and more online orders, to local visibility, the results only proved that small changes made a substantial difference.

Key Results:

• Google Maps visibility increased by 89%, with Hollow Oak appearing in the top 3 searches for “coffee near me” and “Syracuse coffee shop”.

• “Get Directions” actions on their Google Business listing rose by 74%

• In-store foot traffic increased by an estimated 32%, based on new customer interactions and POS tracking.

• Website homepage visits grew by 57%, largely by organic Google searches.

• Online pickup orders more than doubled during seasonal drink promotions.

• New reviews jumped from 7 to 38, helping to boost their Google rating to a consistent 4.7 stars.

How Local SEO Changed Everything

All in all, Hollow Oak Coffee Company had a strong start, they established themselves as a business, but faced optimization struggles, and it was evident. A business start up like them did not deserve the lack of recognition they had throughout their city. They did not need a complete brand overhaul, they just needed to show up where the customers already were—online. Through local SEO, strategic content updates, and some intentional keyword use, they turned their quiet downward trend into steady foot traffic—and built a real, lasting impact online, and in their local community.

Need SEO-driven content like this for your business? I specialize in assisting small brands boost their visibility with writing that converts. Let’s work together!