Spaghetti Incident

Giovanni came to me for help with Spaghetti Incident, his restaurant website in New York.

At the time, he was working with a social media marketing agency. They had built the website and were running Facebook and Instagram ads, but he was not seeing much return on investment. The website also had several issues that were making it harder for visitors to book a table.

The design did not feel as professional as the restaurant itself. The calls to action were confusing, there were too many pop-ups, and some forms took users away from the website and onto another platform. For paid traffic, that kind of friction matters. Every distraction creates another chance for someone to leave before making a reservation.

The homepage had a large hero video, but the first few seconds showed the exterior of the restaurant. The idea made sense: take the visitor on a journey from outside the restaurant, into the dining room, and eventually to the food.

But restaurant visitors make decisions quickly. Within the first few seconds, they need to feel like they are in the right place. If someone lands on a restaurant website, they want to see the food, the atmosphere, the location, and how to book.

I edited the video so the page gets straight to the food. Instead of making visitors wait, the site immediately shows the beautifully prepared dishes people are coming to the restaurant for.

I also made the main call to action much clearer. The original “Reserve a Table” button was white with black text, so it blended into the page. I changed it to a vibrant orange with stronger contrast, making it the clear next step.

The header had around 12 links, including careers and social media icons. That made the navigation feel crowded and gave users too many ways to get distracted. Links like careers and social media belong in the footer, where users expect to find them.

I simplified the header and kept the focus on the main user journey. The goal was to keep people on the site and guide them toward reserving a table, not send them away to social media where they could easily get distracted.

I also made the logo more central to the design. The Spaghetti Incident logo is a strong brand asset, designed by Luigi Scarsella of HalfSumo, so I placed it prominently in the header with balanced menu items on either side.

I moved the menu content higher up the page so visitors could get to the food faster. The site was reorganized to make the main sections easier to scan. I used stronger visual contrast between sections, with white and black backgrounds helping separate the different parts of the page. This made the site feel more polished and helped users understand where they were as they moved through the homepage.

Spaghetti Incident already had excellent social proof, but the old website was not making enough use of it.

The restaurant had over 850 Google reviews with a 4.5-star rating, plus over 680 Yelp reviews with a 4.1-star rating. I added review integrations to highlight that trust directly on the website.

I also replaced the existing map with a branded Google map integration that matched the rest of the design. The map used a bright orange pin to clearly show the restaurant’s location while staying consistent with the visual style of the site.

The site also had accessibility problems.

Users could not reliably navigate the site with a keyboard. Pop-ups were especially problematic because keyboard users could get trapped or end up tabbing through content behind the pop-up instead of staying inside it. The Escape key also did not close the pop-up properly.

I reviewed the site against WCAG 2.1 AA guidelines and made accessibility improvements at the code level. That included improving keyboard navigation, focus behavior, pop-up handling, and general accessibility structure. I also added an accessibility statement.

Accessibility is not as simple as installing an overlay widget. In many cases, those tools create additional barriers instead of solving the underlying issues. For this project, the accessibility work was handled properly in the code.

The website was only one part of the problem. The advertising strategy also needed to change. Giovanni stopped the social media campaign, and I set up a Google Ads campaign instead. For a restaurant, this made more sense because we could target people who were already searching for somewhere to eat.

The campaigns were targeted by location and built around search intent. I set up campaigns around spaghetti and pasta keywords, which were a strong fit because those terms appeared naturally throughout the website. These campaigns performed well and achieved a good cost per click.

I also created campaigns around high-intent searches like “Italian restaurant near me.” These searches are valuable because the person is already looking for a restaurant in the area.

One of the most important parts of the campaign was the negative keyword strategy. Google Ads increasingly pushes advertisers toward broad match keywords. Broad match can work with very large budgets, but for a local restaurant with a smaller budget, every click matters.

To keep the campaign focused, I used a script that analyzes search terms. If a search term does not include the keywords we actually want to show up for, it gets added to the negative keyword list. That helps prevent the ads from showing for irrelevant searches or other restaurant brand names, which usually convert poorly.

This allowed us to use broad match while still keeping the campaign tightly controlled. Instead of letting Google spend the budget too widely, the negative keyword strategy helped make sure the ads were showing for searches that were much more likely to lead to a booking.

Google Ads often pushes advertisers toward ROAS-based bidding or Maximize Conversions. Those strategies can be useful in the right situation, but they are not always the best fit for local restaurants working with a realistic budget.

I have seven years of experience running Google Ads campaigns for small and medium-sized businesses, including restaurants in New York City. Across that work, I have found that Max Clicks often performs better for restaurants because it helps drive more relevant local traffic at a more efficient cost.

For Spaghetti Incident, I used a Max Clicks campaign instead of following Google’s default recommendations. The campaign produced a cost per conversion below the industry average and delivered a much stronger return than the previous social media campaign.

The final result was a cleaner, more professional website paired with a stronger advertising strategy. The website now gets visitors to the food faster, makes the reservation button easier to see, highlights real customer reviews, improves accessibility, and removes distractions from the main booking journey.

The Google Ads campaign also gave Spaghetti Incident a better way to reach people actively searching for Italian food and restaurants nearby. Instead of paying for social media traffic that was not producing enough return, Giovanni now had a focused search campaign and a website built to support it.