Nando's SEO Case Study

Nando’s is synonymous with excellent peri-peri chicken. With over 150 restaurants across the country, Australians are hungry for Nando’s locally sourced delicious chicken and plant-based meals. Nando’s have successfully made healthy food interesting and continue to expand their PERi-PERi offerings with a range of hot sauces. However, the iconic restaurant chain does more than serve its customers with delicious food. 

Nando’s continues to inspire with their purpose to change lives. They give back to the South African communities which they were founded from, as well as helping local Australians. 

Every SEO campaign presents its own set of challenges. For Nando’s, the need to adapt to rapidly changing customer behaviour meant rethinking how they attracted and converted local traffic. A significant portion of their business relied on in-store visits, but changes in user expectations and purchasing habits created new complexities.

To support their growing focus on delivery, Optimising developed a strategy that leveraged Nando’s existing assets, particularly within local search. This involved building out their presence through Google Business Profile (GBP) and improving visibility for non-branded search terms. Ensuring a seamless website experience was also key. The scale and technical complexity of this campaign made it a particularly interesting challenge for our team.

Optimising worked with Nando’s Australia to develop a national SEO campaign to increase brand visibility and online orders. The campaign involved improving Nando's website so it would enhance user experience and engagement. These improvements also resulted in Google being able to successfully crawl, index and rank the site higher in search results.

To respond to the complexity of the campaign, we utilised our Pods offering to successfully achieve the intended results. Pods put together a specialised team with a range of skills and backgrounds to work together on a comprehensive campaign. 

The team for the Nando’s campaign included the following:

• Senior Technical SEO Specialist: Responsible for the campaign strategy and results
• SEO Specialists: Responsible for the campaign management and implementation of strategies
• Delivery Lead: Responsible for timelines, delivery, and client communications

For specific tasks on the Nando’s campaign, we brought in developers, content specialists and other required SEO resources.

The next step was ensuring Nando’s would improve ranks for related keywords. So, we targeted menu, restaurant and product-related search terms to boost Nando’s rankings across different categories. 

We tackled both branded search terms (such as “Nando’s”) and non-branded (like “chicken restaurant”). We also included an emphasis on non-branded keyword restaurant searches and increasing rankings with search terms such as “food near me”, “delivery” and “takeaway”. 

A boom in online orders saw our thoughts change, we knew that promoting the products Nando’s offers was important. In order to increase the visibility of their PERi-PERi products and recipe dedicated pages, we elevated the title and meta descriptions to read clearer and instantly engage users. 

Nando’s wanted to target hungry customers looking for a local restaurant or food option so we utilised Google Business Profile. The “map pack” on Google includes all businesses listed at a specific location and will prioritise websites in the map pack over organic search. 

Inlight’s challenge was to build a fast, scalable, industry-leading platform that enabled immediate delivery for new and existing Nando’s customers. The final site included a number of industry-leading features such as using a Headless CMS with Craft, React & React Native (which extended to the app as well), and an insightful and data-driven menu powered by Redcat.

Whilst the new platform had already started to garner impressive results following its release, Optimising’s focus now looked at how we can take this even further using the new systems and platforms, and work with Inlight and Nando’s to continue improving the site technically in the ever-evolving ecosystem that is digital.

Here are a few statistics to dazzle you. Since February 2021, Nando’s SEO campaign has resulted in:

• Overall 44% growth in organic traffic to PERi-PERi product pages
• 30% increase in organic traffic to the recipe pages
• Over 10,000 impression difference for keywords “food delivery near me” and “food near me”
• Some restaurant locations have seen click and impression rate double
• Non-branded search queries have improved by 1.4 (150%)