How we helped Australia's favourite PERi-PERi chicken brand dominate search across 150+ locations, launch a new revenue stream, and stay ahead of the competition.

Nando's is home to the legendary flame-grilled PERi-PERi chicken, with over 150 restaurant locations across Australia and a growing presence in New Zealand. Beyond dine-in, Nando's has expanded into delivery, catering, drive-through, and retail grocery products, each requiring a distinct digital strategy.

The brand's strength lies in its loyal customer base and distinctive product offering. Our job was to make sure that when Australians searched for chicken - whether for dinner tonight, office catering, or a bottle of PERi-PERi sauce at Woolworths - Nando's was the answer they found.

When we partnered with Nando's in 2021, the immediate focus was capturing the surge in delivery demand. But as the business evolved, so did the challenges.

Managing SEO for a single website is one thing. Managing it for a brand with 150+ physical locations, multiple product lines, and expansion into new markets and channels? That's a different game entirely.

• Scale: 150+ individual restaurant locations, each needing local search visibility
• Competition: Grill'd, El Jannah, and other chicken chains investing heavily in digital
• New channels: Launching a catering division, drive-through restaurants, and grocery products - all needing organic visibility from day one
• Multi-market: Expanding SEO strategy to New Zealand while maintaining AU dominance

Local search is where restaurant decisions happen. Someone's hungry, they search "chicken near me", and they pick from the results. If Nando's isn't showing up in that moment, they're losing customers to whoever is.

With 150+ locations, we couldn't treat each restaurant as a one-off project. We built a systematic approach that could scale, ensuring every location had the foundations to compete in its local market while maintaining brand consistency across the network.
This included unique, optimised landing pages for every restaurant, Google Business Profile management across the entire network, Apple Maps listings claimed and optimised nationwide, and location-specific content targeting "[suburb] chicken restaurant" queries.

When someone searches for "nandos menu" or "nandos delivery", they've already decided they want Nando's. The only question is whether they'll find what they're looking for, or get distracted by a competitor ad or a third-party site scraping Nando's content.

We focused on owning every high-intent branded search, ensuring Nando's controlled the narrative and the click. That meant menu pages optimised for "nandos menu" (33,100 monthly searches), delivery pages targeting "nandos delivery" and "nandos order online", product pages capturing "nandos sauce", "nandos marinade", and "perinaise" searches, and recipe content for "nandos recipes" and "peri peri chicken recipes".

In 2025, Nando's launched a dedicated catering offering, a new revenue stream targeting corporate events, office lunches, and large gatherings. New products need visibility from day one, and we were there to build it.

We conducted competitive analysis against Grill'd, Guzman y Gomez, and Red Rooster catering to understand the landscape. From there, we developed a keyword strategy targeting "corporate catering", "office lunch catering", and event-based searches, along with seasonal campaign pages for Christmas and Easter catering.

Success in Australia created the opportunity to expand into New Zealand. But what works in Melbourne doesn't automatically work in Auckland, different search volumes, different competitors, different compliance requirements.

We extended the strategy to Nando's New Zealand with a localised approach: menu category optimisation for the NZ market (burgers, wraps, chicken), localised restaurant pages for Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch, technical SEO alignment across both markets, and nutritional information pages built for NZ compliance.

Owning branded search means controlling your customer journey. When someone searches for Nando's, they should find Nando's - not aggregators, not competitors, not outdated third-party content.

Here's what the numbers look like:

• 12,000+ new monthly visits from "nandos menu" alone
• 110% increase in monthly visits to careers page from organic search
• 60% monthly visits to PERi-PERi sauce product pages
• Top 10 visibility for 100's competitive non-branded terms like "peri peri chicken"

The real test of local SEO is whether individual locations see the benefit. Across the network, we've seen consistent improvements in visibility, traffic, and revenue for restaurants that previously struggled to compete in local search.

Locations in competitive suburban markets have seen double-digit revenue growth year-on-year. The New Zealand expansion delivered +90% traffic growth and +180% revenue growth for the Auckland restaurants page. These aren't isolated wins, they're the result of a systematic approach applied consistently across 150+ locations.

Since 2021, Optimising has worked as an extension of the Nando's marketing team, supporting everything from day-to-day optimisations to major launches.

Our structure pairs dedicated technical specialists with strategic leads, ensuring both the details and the big picture are covered. For Nando's, that means a team who understands the business inside and out,  from the nuances of local search in suburban Perth to the compliance requirements for nutritional content in New Zealand.

Whether it's a new drive-through opening, a seasonal catering push, or maintaining #1 rankings against hungry competitors, we're in the kitchen with Nando's every step of the way.