Texas Restaurant Supply

Texas Restaurant Supply is a family-owned and operated company bringing more than 35 years of combined experience in the restaurant, food service, and related industries to the internet sales marketplace. Texas Restaurant Supply offers a wide variety of quality, new, and used restaurant equipment, kitchen supplies, furniture, and decor. With store locations in Grand Prairie, TX, Irving, TX, their newest physical store in Arlington, TX, and a newly redesigned eCommerce website, Texas Restaurant Supply is ready to service your restaurant supply needs throughout Texas and nationwide.

Background

Texas Restaurant Supply became a client of ioVista in 2019. At the time, they had two physical stores and a website built on Joomla. Of their two existing retail locations, only one showed up on Google Maps. They had one keyword that ranked in the top three positions and three keywords that ranked 4-10 positions on Google SERPs.

Within one week of onboarding with ioVista as their Commerce Agency, both locations started showing up on Google Maps. After the first 90 days, Texas Restaurant Supply noticed increased physical store visits, phone calls, and sales. This was a direct result of ioVista's strategic SEO and digital marketing efforts. Their keyword rank and position had increased to 15 keywords in the 1-3 positions and 27 keywords in the 4-10 positions. The owners and store manager were pleased.

As Texas Restaurant Supply was ready to reinvest in its business and grow, ioVista stepped in with strategic recommendations. We suggested running PPC and building a new eCommerce website on a modern text platform. When they ultimately decided to open a new physical store, we used data from Google Search Console and Google Analytics to recommend Colleyville or Arlington as great choices. They opened their third location in Arlington in 2023.

By December 2023, their keyword rank and position had increased significantly, with 39 keywords in the top 3 positions and 141 keywords in 4-10 positions. They were ready to reinvest in their business, so they asked ioVista to recommend eCommerce website platforms that they could move to without harming their SEO.

Texas Restaurant Supply’s website was built with Joomla, with their first blog post in 2015 of just a few hundred words. Customers said they read their blog, so they began writing articles to educate people on the different types of commercial kitchen-restaurant equipment. Customers loved reading the blog, and the staff at Texas Restaurant Supply enjoyed writing it, so the blog section grew to blogs posted twice a week with an average word count of 800 words. However, the website, although functional, was outdated with a cumbersome User Experience, no buy online features, and lacked the ability to look good on mobile devices. These limitations were hindering their online growth and customer engagement. Although once popular, Joomla has lost many users, has a declining developer base and extensions are not being updated to be compatible with new releases of Joomla. So, redesigning the website on the same platform was not an option.

Since ioVista had been working with Texas Restaurant Supply with Local and Regional SEO for years, ioVista was consulted on which platform would suit their needs. After considering other platforms, BigCommerce was chosen for its outstanding native out-of-the-box SEO features like Optimized URLs, Rich Snippets, and speedy Content Delivery Network, to name a few. These features were crucial for improving their online visibility and user experience, which were key to their business growth.

The Challenge

Migrating from Joomla to BigCommerce without compromising SEO rankings, transferring 270 blogs, and migrating historical data. Joomla lacks the necessary tools for effective data management.

The absence of a data matrix in the backend and the presence of complex, disorganized data added to the complexity of migrating the website to the BigCommerce platform. ioVista leveraged the move from Joomla to Bigcommerce to redesign the user experience and functionality of the website. While optimizing the SEO strategy for enhanced performance and user engagement

Since some of their products are huge in size, bulky in weight, and irregularly shaped, ioVista introduced a trusted technology partner, ShipperHQ, that would remove shipping issues from their business processes.

With a past history of only selling regionally, they were not familiar with other states' tax regulations and tax nexus and did not want to learn about them. We introduced them to our partner Avalara, whose Avatax app, added to their new BigCommerce website, removed all the tax hassles so they could concentrate on selling restaurant equipment.