Off Facebook, and twice the bookings

Barrelhouse Statia is a restaurant and bar in the lower town on St Eustatius. Chef Iwan and his team cook from scratch, and the building they cook in was put up in the eighteenth century, which is half the reason people walk in. For years all of that lived on a single Facebook page.

Facebook could not do the job. There was no real way to take a reservation, so bookings arrived as messages and some of them were missed. Tables that should have been full were not.

The bigger cost was invisibility. A Facebook page barely registers on Google, so a visitor searching for somewhere to eat on Statia found almost nothing, and ate somewhere else.

We built them a proper website, fast on a phone and with booking built into it. You can see what is free and reserve a table without messaging anybody, which is what a visitor deciding on dinner at five o'clock actually wants.

Underneath it we did the search work: local keywords, structured data so Google understands what the place is and where it sits, and the Google Business Profile and island directory listings brought in line so the same details appear everywhere.

• A mobile-friendly website with a booking system built in
• Search optimisation around local keywords and structured data
• Google Business Profile and local directory listings brought in line
• Menu, opening hours, gallery and contact all in one place

Reservations doubled, and they now come in directly through the site rather than through Facebook messages.

Better Google rankings brought in people who had never heard of the place, and Barrelhouse became one of the first names that comes up for dining on the island.