Before they walkthrough the door.
Value created for the team
Identified friction in the discovery-to-booking journey and handed the team a prioritised list of fixes rather than a general critique.
Achievement
Produced a search-to-booking review of three venues, plus menu redesign work that made the group's menus consistent and readable.
On Day 2 I worked on the websites and SEO for Chicco, Casa Mori and Il Toro. I expected a checklist exercise. What I actually found was a customer journey with gaps in it.
Being found is not the same as being chosen.
A restaurant can rank, get the click, and still lose the customer at the moment they try to work out whether the place suits their evening.
The seven steps between a search and a booking
Search result
The title and description are the first sentence of the brand. If they say 'Italian restaurant Singapore' and nothing else, they have described a category, not a reason.
Expectation
By the time someone clicks they already expect something. Chicco needs to have promised approachable everyday pasta; Il Toro needs to have promised woodfire.
Landing page
The homepage has seconds to confirm the concept. If a visitor cannot tell what kind of evening this is, they leave and compare elsewhere.
Information
Location, hours, price level, whether it suits a group. Practical questions that decide the visit are often the ones buried deepest.
Menu
Menu design is branding. Spacing, font size, layout and image placement change whether a menu reads premium, casual or simply hard to read — and if it is not easy to reach and read on a phone, the rest of the page does not matter.
Trust
Photography, tone and consistency with the social accounts. If the website and the Instagram feel like two different restaurants, the customer believes neither.
Booking
The reservation step should be visible without hunting. Asking someone to commit before giving them a reason is the most common way to lose them at the last step.
The trade-off inside SEO writing
Writing for the phrases people actually type — Italian restaurant, pasta, woodfire, the neighbourhood — makes a page findable by people who have not heard of the brand.
The tone that makes a premium venue feel premium is rarely the tone of a search query. Keyword-stuffed copy reads generic, and generic copy makes a distinctive restaurant look like every other listing.
The resolution I came to is that keywords belong where a search engine reads and a customer scans — titles, headings, menu and dish descriptions — while the brand voice keeps the space where the customer is being persuaded. I applied the same logic later on TikTok: match real search demand, but only where it matches what the venue genuinely is.
A website is where information lives.
A website is where a decision gets made.
Evidence from the internship
The specific moments this case study is built on.
I reviewed how Chicco, Casa Mori and Il Toro communicated positioning, menu highlights, unique selling points and the reservation process.
I began by listing technical fixes — title tags, meta descriptions, headings — because those were the things I could name.
The technical items were real but secondary. The bigger gap was that a first-time visitor could not always tell quickly what kind of restaurant this was or why to choose it. I reordered my recommendations around customer questions rather than tags.
I updated restaurant menus and saw how much spacing, font size and layout affected the feel of the document.
I thought of the menu as an operational file that needed to be accurate and legible.
The menu is one of the few pieces of design a customer reads closely, on the website before arriving and at the table afterwards. It is a branding surface, and inconsistent menus quietly contradict everything the site says about the venue.
Learning BistroChat Manager showed me the reservation and customer-communication layer sitting behind the public pages.
I had been thinking about the website as the endpoint of marketing.
The website is a midpoint. Discovery, messaging, reservation and follow-up are one continuous path, and a strong page attached to an awkward booking or messaging step still loses the customer.
The trade-off
What pulled against what
Search language versus brand language; completeness versus clarity — every extra piece of information on a page makes the important one harder to find.
Why the obvious answer was not enough
Traffic only converts if the page answers the question that made someone search. Visibility and usefulness are separate problems that get solved with different work.
Why I chose this approach
Prioritise the recommendations by where a customer is most likely to drop out — concept clarity, menu access and booking visibility first — rather than by how easy the fix was.
Going deeper
The question I now ask of a page
Not 'is this optimised?' but 'what was the person trying to settle when they searched, and does this page settle it?' Someone searching for a Friday dinner spot, a birthday venue and a quick lunch are three different visitors arriving on the same homepage.
Where I could be wrong
A page can look unclear to me and still convert well, because regular customers arrive already knowing the brand. Without data I cannot separate a genuine gap from a page that simply is not aimed at me.
My initial assumption
Improve the keywords and the ranking, and more customers will arrive.
What the evidence showed
Traffic only converts if the page answers the question that made someone search. Visibility and usefulness are separate problems that get solved with different work.
The decision rule I now useProposed next test
I would look at search terms the sites already appear for and where visitors leave, then re-rank my recommendations against that evidence instead of against my own reading of the pages.
What I contributed
Identified friction in the discovery-to-booking journey and handed the team a prioritised list of fixes rather than a general critique.
I reviewed the websites and search presence of Chicco, Casa Mori and Il Toro and produced positioning-led recommendations — clearer concept communication, more visible menu and booking pathways, stronger keyword use in titles and descriptions — alongside menu redesign work that made the group's menus more consistent and readable.
Decision rules I would carry forward
Pages are audited against the two or three questions a customer needs answered, ranked by drop-out risk, not by how easy the fix is.
Map the discovery journey for one venue and time how long it takes a stranger to find opening hours, a menu price and a booking link on a phone.
Mobile is the first review surface for anything a customer reaches from search or social.
Run the next audit phone-first and log every task that takes more than two taps, then re-test after the fixes.
Search and behaviour data is requested before judgement-based review begins.
Pull search terms and landing-page exits for one venue and check how many of my judgement-based recommendations the data actually supports.
Structure future site reviews around the customer question at each stage — search, expectation, landing, information, menu, trust, booking — and validate the priority order with data before recommending work.