A Texas-style BBQ caterer in Normandy had no website. I designed and built one. Two months after launch he had ten confirmed jobs, from a site that had received roughly a hundred and sixty search visits in total.
Stone Smoke BBQ smokes brisket in Normandy and caters weddings, corporate days and private events. Before the site, someone planning an event forty minutes away had no reliable way to find them. I built the whole thing — design, copy, build and technical SEO: fast, indexed, structured data in place, pages written against the questions people actually type into Google rather than the ones the business wanted to answer.
The ratio is the interesting part. Ten bookings against 162 search visits is roughly one confirmed job for every sixteen people who arrived from Google — and because the bookings landed inside a shorter window than the traffic measurement, the real rate is likely higher still. Paid campaigns in most categories would take a fraction of that and call it a good quarter.
It works because the traffic is qualified rather than plentiful. Someone typing "brisket caterer Normandy" in September is not browsing; they have a date and a headcount. A site that loads in under two seconds, states the offer in one screen and puts a phone number where a thumb already is will convert a meaningful share of them.
From a standing start the site reached page one for the three main local queries — "barbecue normandie", "barbecue eure", "barbecue en normandie" — inside a few months, against competitors with years of history. It carries 7,685 impressions over the measured 90 days, PageSpeed of 97–100 on mobile, structured data for local business and reviews, and a sitemap that has been error-free since June.
On brand searches it sits at position 1.3, which matters more than it sounds. Most of this business travels by word of mouth: someone eats at an event, remembers the name, searches it that evening. Before the site, that search led nowhere. Now it lands on a page that can take a booking, and that conversion is where most of the ten came from.
Not more content. The site already converts at a rate that would make a paid campaign viable, and grinding from position six to position two on three local queries is months of work for traffic that Google and Instagram would sell him tomorrow.
So the question I put to him was whether he wants to put a budget behind paid search and social to fill a funnel that is already proven to convert — and it is genuinely his call. If the answer is no, the honest recommendation is to leave the site alone and keep the money: it is already paying for itself on brand searches, without any spend at all.
Sources and limits. Search figures from Google Search Console, domain property, 90 days to 13 August 2026. Performance from PageSpeed Insights, mobile. There is no analytics property on this site, so 162 search clicks is the only measured traffic figure — direct visits, Maps and social are not counted, which means the true visitor number is higher and the conversion rate correspondingly lower than the headline ratio. The ten bookings are the owner's own count of enquiries he attributes to the site; no form-to-contract attribution was in place, so that figure is reported as his rather than verified as mine. Revenue per booking is not disclosed.