SEO Case Study – 600% Increase in Foodzo Daily Orders

We worked with Foodzo from Jan 2017 to Aug 2018 to make it known and discoverable in the city.

Foodzo is a Bhubaneswar, India-based online food ordering platform with its own app and web interface. Foodzo was not the first such platform in the city but it definitely stood out from the competition at the time. It’s still fully operational.

Here’s what the founder and COO of Foodzo, Ayush Mohanty says:

In the first few months, there wasn’t much growth visible but later I was blown away by how it turned out to be. Foodzo is still profiting a lot from its Google rankings.

How we approached

When we started working with the company, the sharks like Zomato and Swiggy were not present but we had some serious local competitors like Biryani247, BookMyFood, and LastHunger.

When we started, Foodzo had:

• Zero organic visitors
• Zero search visibility, and
• Around 100 daily orders

Primary goal

The client’s primary goal was to increase the number of people who found Foodzo online while searching for online food delivery.

However, Foodzo was functional even before the website and app were ready. They were already getting around 100 orders through phone calls via directory websites like JustDial.

Our goal was to establish an online presence.

The plan

The main areas that we had to focus on were:

• the mobile app, and
• the web interface

We had to attract more and more users to the web interface as well as get lots of app downloads from the Google Play Store. And for that, we created a robust local SEO and ASO (App Store Optimization) plan.

• We researched all the local competitors, understood their strategy, and noted down what keywords they are ranking for
• We optimized all the website pages around the researched keywords and started building guest posts links, but at a very slow speed
• We also optimized the app store listing, all the social media pages, GMB, Justdial, Odisha Club, and other local listings
• We got some local online news portals to publish a post about us which got us a lot of traction
• Not just that, we also helped them improve the user experience and flow on the website and in the app as well

After this initial boost, people started recognizing us and we noticed Foodzo being mentioned in multiple Facebook groups and local forums, organically.

For local SEO, we created location-specific pages too to target the local areas (like Khandagiri, ITER, Kalinga Vihar, etc.) within the city. And it really helped.

In fact, The Times of India, one of the biggest newspapers in India featured the brand in print media. We did not even reach out to them, they recognized and they mentioned. You can see the photo of the newspaper below.

After The Times of India article went live, we started receiving 2000-2500 visitors every day for a week, after that it slowly went down.

The sharks came

In the third quarter of 2018, Zomato, Swiggy, and Uber Eats came to the city. They immediately outranked Foodzo in the app store but still, after 4 years, Foodzo is outranking them in the organic search for some highly competitive keywords.

You can see the screenshots below:

The Results

Now, let’s take a look at what results we were able to achieve:

For almost all the online food ordering keywords, Foodzo still ranks in the top 5 or rather in the top 3. By the end of 2018, Foodzo was receiving more than 700 orders per day which was just around 100 orders per day.