Learning
Training in web development. Motion, interaction, and the crossover with design.
Overview
Shawarma Palace is an established, family-run restaurant chain in Ottawa. It has been open since 1997, runs more than 10 locations, and already had strong traffic when the work started. The goal was to improve its SEO.
I worked on it as a developer over about five months. I fixed the site's technical foundations, then designed and built new pages aimed at searches that don't include the brand name. The site runs on WordPress and Elementor, with Rank Math handling metadata.
Problem
The site worked, but it was never built for search. Pages were missing H1s, images were large and unoptimized, and a few meta titles and descriptions were duplicated. Individual menu items had no pages of their own to rank for.
What I did
I fixed the technical basics first: a proper H1 structure, images converted to WebP and resized to about 50–150 KB with alt attributes, deduplicated meta in Rank Math, and Organization and LocalBusiness schema markup. Then I designed, built and keyword-targeted 12 menu item pages. The copy was drafted with AI help; my part was the keyword targeting, on-page optimization, design and build. I added FAQs and local information to the location pages, built a location hub that links to each one, and linked menu and location pages to each other on purpose.
Technical Fixes
Semantic H1s
One H1 per page and a clean heading order
WebP images
Resized to about 50–150 KB, with alt attributes
Unique metadata
Duplicate titles and descriptions removed in Rank Math
Schema markup
Organization and LocalBusiness structured data in JSON-LD
Menu page structure
Each menu item got its own page under /menu, and every one links back to the main menu page. That gives each dish a page that can rank for its own search, while the menu page ties them together.
Menu page designs
I designed each menu page around one dish: a hero photo, the plate and sandwich options with prices, a short section on the dish, and an order call to action for Ottawa. Mixed, Beef and Chicken Shawarma are shown here.
Location page structure
The contact page links to a location hub at /locations, which links out to a page for each restaurant, from Barrhaven and Orleans to the ByWard Market and Carleton University. Each location page can rank for its own local searches, while the hub ties them together.
Location page layout
Every location page follows the same template: an H1 title, a store photo with alt text, a Google Maps embed, store hours as a list, and a description with parking, address and phone. Call and Get directions buttons follow, and FAQs plus links to nearby locations and online ordering close the page.
Result
Several of the menu pages I built rank as the first organic result for their non-branded searches. For example, "beef shawarma ottawa" and "mixed shawarma ottawa" both return my page at the top, using the titles and descriptions I wrote.
The location pages are starting to rank locally too: the ByWard Market page is the first organic result for "shawarma ByWard Market," above competing restaurants' own sites.
1 / 3
Google search: "beef shawarma ottawa"
