From losing ground
to beating
the market.
How a city centre steakhouse went from declining at four times the market rate — to outperforming 205 competitors by 20 points. In 15 months, without changing the menu, the team, or the price point.
A strong restaurant
watching its covers slip.
When Moolah Media was engaged in November 2024, premium city-centre steakhouse venue was already one of Dublin's most recognisable steakhouses. The product was strong. The brand had weight. The covers were going the wrong way.
In the ten months before the engagement, the venue had lost ground against the local city-centre market every single month. Domain Authority sat at 33. Local citations were unmanaged — the business appeared inconsistently across the directories that feed Google's local ranking algorithm. The Google Business Profile had not been optimised. There was no map pack presence on any high-intent search term.
The digital infrastructure that connects "someone searching for a steakhouse" to "that person finding this venue" had not been built. The restaurant was competing on brand recognition alone, in a market where that was no longer sufficient.
The venue was not struggling because the food had gotten worse, or the service had slipped, or the location had changed. It was struggling because a layer of digital visibility that its competitors had built — whether deliberately or through accumulated time — was missing. That was a fixable problem.
10 months before engagement began.
Three periods.
Three very different outcomes.
Performance tracked against the city centre restaurant market across three distinct windows. All figures from the venue's own OpenTable account — platform-verified, no estimates.
The number that matters
is not the percentage —
it's the comparison.
Seven percent looks modest in isolation. Here is what it looks like in context.
Infrastructure first.
Covers follow.
Local SEO is not advertising. Ads stop the moment the budget stops. What was built here — domain authority, citations, map pack positions — is owned infrastructure that compounds.
What this looks like
as a business outcome.
Attribution is stated honestly — not all of this growth is digital marketing. The restaurant's team, product, and brand carried significant weight. Here is what digital contributed specifically.
Annual retainer cost: €7,800 → 37× return
The market fell 13%. the venue grew 7%. That is a 20-point outperformance gap. We claim half of it — approximately 10% of prior year covers as attributable to improved digital visibility: walk-ins who found the map pack, phone bookings from GBP, OpenTable Network discovery reservations, and website visits that converted.
The restaurant's quality, team, and brand name earned the other half. That is the honest position — and it still produces a 37× return on the retainer.
Is your restaurant
losing ground to
the market?
A 15-minute audit call will tell you exactly where you stand — domain authority, citation score, and map pack coverage — against your competitive set. Whether we work together or not.
15-minute call. No pitch. No commitment.