From invisible online to top-five in Google.
A new restaurant trying to compete against the casino-restaurant gravity well next door — with no website and a Google listing that locals were maliciously marking "Closed." We built the site, the brand, and locked the listing down.
EXHIBIT A OPEN · EXHIBIT What was actually broken.
A new restaurant. A casino-restaurant town. No website. And someone was telling Google they were closed.
Sopris had been open a few months when they reached out. The food was working — locals were finding them, ordering, coming back. The internet wasn't working. They had no website, no real online identity, and a thin Google Business Profile that did most of the talking on their behalf.
In a market dominated by the polished restaurants tucked inside nearby casinos, "show up at all" was the floor — and they weren't even at the floor. Then it got worse: locals were maliciously editing their Google listing to mark them as "Closed," sometimes for entire weekends. Walk-ins would check their phone, see "Closed," and drive past.
What we'd actually do about it.
Treat the website and the listing as one product. Defend both.
We refused to ship a brochure. The actual product was Sopris' digital surface area — the site, the listing, and the relationship between them. If we won on one and lost the other, walk-ins still drove past on a Saturday night.
We audited the local market first. Most competing restaurant sites looked like they were built in 2005, which was the opening: a modern, fast, brand-true site would beat them on first impression alone. Then we paired it with active GBP ownership — replying to every review, locking down hours, and pushing fresh photos so the listing stopped being a free-for-all.
- PHASE 01 / WK 1–4Brand pull from the room (wall art, seating colors, menu typography). Sitemap, content, and a tabbed interactive menu architecture.
- PHASE 02 / WK 5–9Build, performance pass, mobile-first QA. Auto-updating events page so specials retire themselves. Launch.
- PHASE 03 / ONGOINGGBP management: hours locked, every review answered, photos refreshed, malicious "Closed" edits caught and reverted within hours.
What we actually shipped.
A modern site that ran fast and a listing that finally fought back.
The site is built around two pieces of functionality that match how real customers actually decide where to eat. First, an interactive menu with tabbed categories — the entire menu lives on one page, but you only see what you came for. Second, an auto-updating events page for weekly specials and live music; expired events retire themselves so the site is never lying to you about a Tuesday that's already gone.
We pushed every page past 95 on Google Lighthouse — Performance, Accessibility, Best Practices, SEO. That was the easy half. The harder half was the Google Business Profile: we took ownership, set verified hours, replied to every review (good and bad), refreshed photos on a schedule, and watchdogged the listing for malicious edits. The "Closed" flags stopped sticking.
OPEN · EXHIBIT 
OPEN · EXHIBIT 
OPEN · EXHIBIT 
OPEN · EXHIBIT 
OPEN · EXHIBIT 
OPEN · EXHIBIT 
OPEN · EXHIBIT "We were getting marked closed on Saturdays by people who didn't want us here. Gio fixed the website, fixed the listing, and started replying to every review himself. We stopped losing weekends and started filling tables."
The receipts.
Want this for your business?
Tell us what's broken. We'll tell you what we'd actually do about it — and what we wouldn't.