Context
Pepsi Dig In is PepsiCo’s platform for supporting and celebrating Black-owned restaurants across the United States. As part of this initiative, PepsiCo partnered with Hudson Creative to run the Black Restaurants Deliver (BRD) program, an 8-week consultancy designed to help participating restaurants improve their digital presence, drive online ordering, and grow revenue.
I led all SEO and web strategy for the program as the digital marketing lead on Hudson Creative’s side, working across dozens of clients simultaneously in short, focused sprints.
The Problem
The clients in this program were talented operators, but most had little to no digital infrastructure. Many had outdated or broken websites, unclaimed local listings, and no visibility in search. They were effectively invisible online at a time when digital discovery was driving a significant share of revenue.
The challenge wasn’t just fixing individual assets; it was building a system that could move quickly and deliver consistent, high-quality results across a large, diverse group of businesses with different starting points, different needs, and a shared deadline.
Approach
The core insight was that for local restaurants, search visibility is revenue. A customer who can’t find you on Google or doesn’t see accurate hours and an ordering link on your listing is a customer who orders somewhere else. So rather than starting with design or content, I anchored the strategy in local search fundamentals: make every client findable, accurate, and clickable before anything else.
From there, the work scaled outward into on-page SEO, website optimization, content, and conversion rate improvements, all designed to compound over time.
Because we were running multiple restaurants in parallel, I built the program around short sprints that prioritized the highest-impact work first and could be applied consistently across clients with different starting points.
Execution
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Led SEO strategy and project management across 90+ restaurant clients simultaneously, running work in structured sprints to deliver results across a compressed timeline.
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Built a structured sprint framework to manage parallel workstreams across dozens of clients simultaneously, ensuring consistent delivery without sacrificing quality or missing deadlines.
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Conducted keyword research and competitor analysis to inform the overall strategy, ensuring every deliverable, from on-page optimizations to content and listings, was built around the terms and topics most likely to drive results.
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Oversaw website updates and redesigns to improve usability and conversion, including online ordering integration and cleaner menu presentation.
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Coordinated cross-functional execution across SEO, web development, copywriting, and design, keeping all workstreams aligned and on track.
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Built and maintained performance reporting across the portfolio, analyzing search and traffic data to double down on what was working and rethink what wasn’t, keeping the strategy sharp as results came in.
Results
Across the program, clients gained more than 7 million search engine impressions year-over-year, with an average YOY increase of nearly 59% in search visibility.
Thousands of online listings were created or updated, dozens of restaurants were set up with proper website tracking tools, and more than 70 programs were optimized or rebuilt. The improvements translated into meaningfully higher website traffic, more online orders, and stronger local presence for restaurants that had previously had almost no digital footprint.
Reflection
Running a program like this taught me that the hardest part of managing at scale isn’t the work itself, it’s the system behind the work. The clients that saw the biggest gains were the ones where we got the fundamentals completely right before moving on to anything more sophisticated. And the only way to do that consistently across 90+ clients at once was to build a process that didn’t rely on heroics.
That’s a lesson I’ve carried into every complex program I’ve run since.