CS-02Engagement file
Sumac & Salt: 3.1× reservation inquiries from Google
A three-branch Levantine group that stopped renting its diners from delivery apps — claimed map pack, native Arabic menus and a review engine took reservation inquiries from 68 to 211 a month. Data runs through 31 July 2026, sourced from GA4 and Google Search Console, reported exactly as our internal QBR deck reads it.
- Industry
- Restaurant group (3 branches)
- Locations
- Downtown Dubai · Jumeirah · Business Bay
- Engagement window
- Sep 2023 — ongoing
- Duration
- 35 months
At a glance — day one vs. today
Organic sessions / month
from 1,940 at day one
Monthly map-pack views
from 8,100 at day one
Reservation inquiries / month
from 68 at day one
Google rating across 2,900+ reviews
from 3.9★ at day one
01 · The starting point
A restaurant group renting its customers from the delivery apps
When we met Sumac & Salt in September 2023, the group’s Fridays belonged to Talabat and Careem. Delivery commissions ran at 25–30% per order, Instagram DMs were the de facto reservation desk, and the website was a one-pager with a 9 MB PDF menu — no booking path, no branch pages, nothing for Google to rank. The operations team knew roughly how many covers each branch did; nobody could say where the sit-down guests came from.
The Google Business Profiles were an open wound. All three sat at a 3.9★ average across 1,100 reviews, 214 of them unanswered — including a run of one-star reviews complaining about Ramadan hours that the profiles themselves had wrong. Two branches were invisible in the map pack outside Downtown; type “restaurant near me” in Business Bay and the group didn’t appear until page two.
And there was no Arabic at all — zero pages — in a city where the group’s own dinner reservations skew heavily Arabic-first. For the brand’s own name, Talabat and Careem listings outranked Sumac & Salt’s website.
Day-one audit findings
- One-page website with a 9 MB PDF menu; zero indexed menu pages, no reservation markup
- Google Business Profiles: 3.9★ across 1,100 reviews; 214 unanswered; Ramadan hours wrong on two of three profiles
- Map-pack impressions 8,100/month, 78% of them for the Downtown branch only
- 68 reservation inquiries a month — 71% arriving via untracked Instagram DMs
- Zero Arabic pages; delivery-app listings outranked the brand for its own name
02 · What we actually did
Five phases, in the order they happened
Months 1–2 · Sep–Oct 2023
Profiles, reviews, and a menu Google could read
- Claimed and rebuilt all three Google Business Profiles: NAP consistency, primary and secondary categories, reservation links with UTM tracking, and a Ramadan hours calendar after last year’s profiles showed the branches closed during iftar service
- Review engine v1: QR cards on tables and a post-visit WhatsApp nudge, with a 48-hour response SLA in English and Arabic — the 214-review backlog cleared in six weeks, rating 3.9★ → 4.2★
- Rebuilt the menu as 46 HTML pages with Menu, MenuSection and MenuItem schema; the PDF came off the reservation path and stayed as a download
- GA4 events plus a per-branch Looker Studio board: calls, direction requests, reservation clicks, review velocity — this board became the QBR spine
Months 3–5 · Nov 2023–Jan 2024
Native Arabic wave 1 and the brunch cluster
- Noor S. wrote 28 Arabic pages natively — menu sections, branch pages, a Levantine-ingredients glossary — not translated from English; hreflang en-ae/ar-ae shipped with them
- Built the “family brunch jumeirah” cluster: one landing page plus six support pieces (kids’ menus, terrace policies, a booking walkthrough), internal-linked from the Jumeirah pages
- CRO pass: sticky WhatsApp button, reservation links above the fold on every branch page, table-minimum and parking FAQs
- Arabic Google Business descriptions and Q&A seeds for all three branches
Months 6–9 · Feb–May 2024
Location intent: Jumeirah, Business Bay, and the Burj Khalifa shadow
- Area pages for “مطاعم قرب برج خليفة” and “private dining business bay” — walking times, valet details, capacity floors, sample set menus
- Private-dining hub with enquiry form and per-branch capacity sheets; first corporate catering inquiries logged in month 7
- Ramadan 2024 iftar page built five weeks ahead of the crescent — 1,900 sessions in the Ramadan month, concentrated in the 4–7pm window
- Review velocity system v2: 60+ new reviews a month across branches, with English and Arabic response templates signed by branch managers
Months 10–14 · Jun–Oct 2024
Summer defence and the reservation SLA
- Seasonal playbook: terrace content rotated out for indoor-dining and delivery-hybrid pages; summer menu schema refresh across all three branches
- WhatsApp Business API reservation line with a five-minute first-response SLA during GST hours, measured weekly by Sara A.
- August 2024 core update monitored across the group: no material movement in restaurant SERPs — the summer trough was seasonality, not algorithm, and the QBR said so
- Schema upkeep: acceptsReservations, priceRange and hasMenu refreshed per branch; Talabat/Careem brand-SERP share tracked weekly
Months 15+ · Nov 2024 — ongoing
Compounding: AI answers, seasonal engines, honest QBRs
- First AI Overview citations on Arabic iftar queries logged in February 2026; citation share now tracked on a fixed 60-query seasonal panel
- Ramadan and Eid playbooks are annual by default: iftar pages rebuilt each year with new hours, set menus and prayer-time notes
- Quarterly QBR format fixed: wins, stalls and parked keywords in the same deck — the “brunch dubai marina” retirement is presented every quarter
- Business Bay flagship branching page in discovery (see current focus)
03 · The trajectory
Quarterly checkpoints — including the dips
Organic sessions / month — 13 data points
Source: GA4 · Google Search Console
- Jul 24 — Summer trough — terrace season ends, delivery share rises
- Mar 25 — Ramadan — daytime sessions dip, iftar reservations spike
04 · Keyword movement
Where the rankings actually went
| Keyword | Lang | Volume | Day 1 | Best | Now | Δ |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| best levantine restaurant dubai | EN | 1,600/mo | #34 | #3 | #4 | +30 |
| family brunch jumeirah | EN | 720/mo | #22 | #2 | #3 | +19 |
| private dining business bay | EN | 210/mo | #57 | #9 | #9 | +48 |
| مطعم شامي في دبي | AR | 2,900/mo | #41 | #4 | #5 | +36 |
| مطاعم قرب برج خليفة | AR | 1,900/mo | #28 | #5 | #6 | +22 |
Average google.ae positions · Search Console · through 31 July 2026
05 · Results
What the client banked
Organic sessions grew from 1,940 to 5,880 a month (Sep 2023 → Jul 2026), and the map pack carried most of the lift: monthly pack views went 8,100 → 41,000 (+406%), with the Jumeirah and Business Bay profiles now drawing 58% of impressions. Before the engagement, three quarters of the group’s local visibility was the Downtown branch.
Reservation inquiries went from 68 to 211 a month — 3.1× — and the mix changed with them: Instagram DMs fell from 71% of bookings to 34% as Google became the primary channel, with the WhatsApp reservation line holding a 96% five-minute response rate during GST hours. The rating engine did the quiet work: 3.9★ → 4.7★ across 2,900+ reviews, a net gain of 1,800+ reviews over the engagement.
The seasonal engines now repeat without rebuilding. The Ramadan iftar play has run three years running — the March 2025 chart annotation (daytime sessions dip, iftar reservations spike) repeated in 2026, with iftar slots filled to capacity by mid-Ramadan — and the brunch cluster holds positions 2–3 for Jumeirah family terms that used to belong to hotel outlets.
The retainer maths, in the open
AED 4,500/month retainer (AED 54,000 a year). Of 211 monthly reservation inquiries, about 31% are table-qualified — party size, date and branch confirmed — which is 65 a month. At the group’s own 62% book-and-show rate that is roughly 40 tables a month. Average table spend across the three branches is AED 480, and reservation notes put return visits at 1.3 extra covers per converted table over the following year. 40 tables × AED 480 × 12 months × 1.3 ≈ AED 300,000 of influenced revenue a year — about 5.5× the annual retainer. We count first visits conservatively and walk-ins who mention Google not at all.
06 · Where it got hard
What didn’t work — reported the same way
Honest file note 01
The delivery apps still win our brand searches
Talabat and Careem pages for Sumac & Salt outrank the group’s own site for its brand name and close variants. Sitelinks, Menu schema and a Google Business Products push narrowed the gap, but a marketplace with a nine-figure domain budget is not a fair fight. We report brand-SERP share every QBR: it moved from 68% aggregator to 44% and has barely moved since.
Honest file note 02
“brunch dubai marina” is parked — and admitted in every QBR
Eight months of effort — a Marina-area page, both listicle-style competitors dissected, 14 referring domains — moved the keyword 71 → 19 and stalled. Two aggregator listicles and a Marina mall tenant hold the top five. We stopped spending on it in January 2025, marked it parked, and disclose it in every quarterly review.
Honest file note 03
The first Arabic menu pages were a machine-translation flop
The previous vendor’s Arabic menu pages — machine-translated, no hreflang — produced 2 reservation inquiries in 3 months and one complaint about wording. We binned them. Noor S. rebuilt all 28 pages natively in Gulf Arabic between November 2023 and January 2024; Arabic inquiries now run within 9% of English on quality, scored on the same inquiry form.
07 · The client’s words
“Before this, our Fridays lived or died on Talabat’s algorithm and whoever ran the Instagram account that month. Now the map pack sends us a family for brunch at ten, a private-dining brief at noon and an iftar booking by four — and I can see all three in one dashboard. When Karim’s team tells me a keyword is stuck, they show me why and what it costs to keep pushing. After three agencies, that honesty is why they still have us.”
08 · The desk & what’s next
The team on this file
- Layla H.Account Director
- Karim B.Local SEO & Profiles
- Noor S.Arabic Editorial
- Dana F.Content Strategy
- Sara A.Analytics & Review Engine
Current focus — Q3 2026
- Business Bay flagship branching page — property-level details (capacity, valet, private-dining floors) for the tower complex the branch anchors
- AI Overview citation share for “iftar dubai 2027” and Arabic seasonal queries, tracked on the fixed 60-query panel
- WhatsApp reservation SLA through the winter peak: holding the five-minute first response at 95%+ during GST hours
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