Case Study: Cunningham Restaurant Group — SEO and Ads at Scale

The Client

Cunningham Restaurant Group (CRG) is one of Indiana's largest and most recognizable restaurant groups. The portfolio spans 30+ locations and over a dozen brands — BRU Burger Bar, Mesh, Union 50, Nesso Italia, Vida, The Lawrence, Shin Dig, and more. Each concept has its own identity, its own audience, and its own website — which makes centralized SEO and ad work both messier and more impactful than working with a single-brand client.

The Engagement

We provide ongoing SEO optimization across the CRG brand portfolio, drone and video production via our sister company Daring Drones, and digital ad campaign management on Google and Meta. Over the last five months we've also produced pre-launch keyword strategy reports for new concepts — mapping opportunity before a new restaurant's website goes live so it launches with the right pages and the right language baked in.

The Numbers

• 16,105 monthly organic visits across the CRG portfolio — combined search traffic across brands we work on.

• +36% organic traffic growth at BRU Burger Bar (Feb–Apr 2026), with top-3 keyword rankings climbing from 56 to 66.

• #3 for "burger restaurants near me" — a keyword with 15,000 monthly searches across the US — pulling traffic into BRU from across the country.

• $5,566/month estimated ad value from BRU Burger's organic traffic alone — i.e. what it would cost to buy the same visitors through Google Ads.

• +78 position climb for "restaurants downtown indianapolis" — crgdining.com moved from #88 to #10. Page nine to page one.

• +216% traffic at Shin Dig after on-page and structured-data improvements.

• +75% traffic at Nesso Italia after we fixed a missing "Italian" keyword in the homepage title. Small changes, big results.

What We Actually Did

Full-portfolio SEO audits and ongoing optimization

Over five months we delivered in-depth SEO strategy reports for six CRG properties, each with keyword research, competitive analysis, and page-by-page recommended titles, headings, and descriptions. At BRU Burger alone we audited all 59 indexable pages across 17 locations — turning generic headings like 'Home' into location-and-intent-targeted alternatives like 'BRU Burger Bar | Burgers & Craft Beer in Carmel, IN.' Every one of those rewrites is a small signal to Google about what the page is actually about. Stacked across 17 cities, it moves the needle.

Pre-launch keyword strategy for new concepts

This is the work SEO-savvy restaurant groups never skip and everyone else wishes they had. For The Lawrence in West Lafayette, we mapped 4,000+ relevant monthly searches before the site went live — and quantified CRG's authority advantage (DR 47 vs. local West Lafayette competitors at DR 5–31). That gave the launch team confidence to build pages targeting competitive terms the domain could realistically win. For the upcoming Japanese Steakhouse in Fishers, we identified 700 monthly searches for 'hibachi indianapolis' with 9,900 traffic potential on its parent topic — and found local competitors as low as DR 3 already ranking top three, confirming CRG can take #1.

Ad campaigns on Google and Meta

We design and manage targeted Google and Meta campaigns across CRG brands, tuned to each restaurant's audience and location — downtown specials at Union 50, weekend drive at Mesh in the suburbs, reservation pushes at Nesso. We handle creative, targeting, budget management, and monthly performance reporting.

Video production and drone footage

Through Daring Drones, our sister production company, we shoot cinematic drone footage, event coverage, and social-media video for CRG's restaurants and events — everything from Thanksgiving community gatherings to grand-opening reveals for new locations like The Lawrence in West Lafayette.

Why It Worked

Restaurant groups at this scale have a specific problem: every brand wants local authority in its specific market, but all of them share a parent domain and an overlapping customer base. The wins here came from treating each brand like its own SEO project — distinct keyword maps, distinct on-page work, distinct local signals — while still leveraging CRG's shared domain authority where it made sense (looking at you, crgdining.com's #10 ranking for the most competitive restaurant keyword in Indianapolis).

And the pre-launch work is where restaurant groups quietly compound. Every new concept that launches with its keyword map already in hand is a 6-month head start over concepts that launch and then hire an SEO later.

The Takeaway for Other Restaurant Groups

If you operate more than one restaurant concept, you're almost certainly under-investing in SEO per-brand. Generic 'group-level' SEO won't move individual restaurant traffic. Brand-level on-page work, location-specific page titles, local structured data, and pre-launch keyword research for new concepts are where the wins live. None of it is glamorous. All of it compounds.

Want a Similar Audit?

If you're a restaurant group — or any multi-location business — curious what an audit like CRG's would surface, get in touch. We'll show you where the opportunity is before asking you to sign anything.