Hungry Horse: Enterprise Local SEO Strategy

Hungry Horse, the national pub and restaurant chain with sites across the UK and part of the Greene King portfolio.

The Challenge

Hungry Horse operates in one of the most competitive local search categories in the UK. With restaurants spread across the country and well-funded competitors investing heavily in SEO, the brand was losing visibility on the highest-intent queries customers actually use to find a pub: "pubs near me", "Sunday roast near me", "steak near me" and the long tail of city and town variants behind them.

The brand had strong fundamentals and significant equity, but the site wasn't doing the heavy lifting it should have been. Important pages hadn't been refreshed in over a year, key pages were cannibalising each other, technical issues were hiding pub links from search engines, and the dynamic location and category pages that should have been capturing "near me" demand simply weren't there at the scale required.

The opportunity was clear: rebuild the SEO foundations of the site around how customers actually search for a pub and do it fast enough to beat competitors to the punch.

What We Did

I embedded as a full-time consultancy partner and ran a comprehensive local SEO programme covering content, technical, internal linking and information architecture. The work was structured to compound, with each fix unlocking the next.

Content and page strategy

- Added 30+ new pages targeting specific high-intent queries such as "steak near me", "Sunday roast near me" and category-led "near me" terms

- Built out a dynamic page system targeting cities and towns at scale, capturing local demand the site had never indexed for

- Refreshed a large volume of existing pages that hadn't been updated in over a year, bringing them back into the algorithm's good books

- Consolidated key pages that were cannibalising each other, concentrating equity onto the pages most likely to rank

Technical and on-page

- Resolved technical issues that had been hiding pub links from search engines, unlocking the full estate for indexing

- Moved critical NAP (Name, Address, Phone) information above the fold on key templates to strengthen local relevance signals

- Added mini sitemaps to important pages to surface related locations and categories for both users and crawlers

Internal linking

- Designed and rolled out dynamic internal linking blocks across complementary pages, distributing authority to the pages with the strongest commercial intent

The Outcome

Three months in, the programme delivered standout results on the queries that matter most for a pub chain:

Search visibility

- +1,257% clicks in three months to the most important "pubs near me" pages

- +982% increase in clicks from queries containing "near me"

- +1,800% increase in queries ranking in positions 1 to 3

Business outcomes

- £12 million in total trackable sales, up 9.8% year-over-year

- +37% increase in walk-in sales

- +33% increase in walk-ins

- +22% increase in direction requests

- +12% increase in total conversions

- Action rate improved from 3.45% to 4.76%** - a 38% efficiency gain

This was achieved on a major UK brand, in a fiercely competitive category, with no shortcuts and no black-hat tactics. Just thorough, well-prioritised SEO executed at pace by a client who moved quickly on every recommendation.