Powder House Lodge

Challenge

For over 60 years, the friendly folks at Powder House Lodge & Restaurant outside of Keystone, South Dakota have provided an unprecedented base of out-of-town travelers and locals with exceptional lodging and dining experiences. As a well-established name, locally and regionally, Powder House Lodge & Restaurant had long provided their customers with a succinct website experience, providing all key information about Powder House Lodge and Powder House Restaurant underneath the same website umbrella. Given differing objectives and customer bases, the Powder House team sought out the expertise of the Robert Sharp & Associates web development team to develop a new website for Powder House Restaurant boasting the same aesthetic and visual appeal of the pre-existing Powder House Lodge website. Having built the current Powder House Lodge website, RSA’s web development team were tasked with overcoming the challenge of severing the two websites to contain segmented subject matter, while providing a seamless transition from site to site.

Analysis

In moving forward with the development of the new Powder House Restaurant website, the search engine optimization (SEO) professionals at RSA knew that removing the Restaurant content from the Lodge’s website would inevitably effect search engine results. Already continually adding content to the Powder House Lodge website via monthly blog content and the creation of new itinerary items for their convenient itinerary builder, we already had an opportunity to make up for changes in SEO performance.  In the same vein, we also recognized that the development of new website would provide an additional opportunity for Powder House to reach their customers via search results completely separate from Powder House Lodge – an opportunity that would later prove fruitful.

Furthermore, in the preparation stages of developing the new Powder House Restaurant website, RSA’s team recognized an important need to provide a simple, clean-cut experience for users to navigate between Powder House Restaurant’s variety of menus and other key pages. In this, the RSA team developed a website development strategy that accentuated industry best practices for SEO, user experience, and visual appeal – given the subject nature of enticing customers with brilliant photography of savory dishes.

Strategy

Balancing the needs of Powder House Lodge & Restaurant to create a new website experience that is conducive of separate, yet connected experiences for users, RSA’s web and content development teams went to work. Developing a simple, yet effective website for Powder House Restaurant, maintaining the aesthetic integrity and usability of the Powder House Lodge website, RSA created an end product that was certain to dazzle. Featuring attractive menu listings, rich photography of dishes, and a clear website navigation, RSA’s work strategically achieved all desired objectives at hand. Better yet, the RSA team created a seamless transition from one site to another via conveniently placed outbound links between the websites within each site’s navigation menu.

Results

Launched in mid-2021, the new Powder House Restaurant website made a splash with customers and online users looking for quality restaurants to visit on their trip to the beautiful Black Hills. Gaining SEO traction relatively fast, users easily navigated to the website, resulting in noticeable increases in combined traffic year over year.

Key Metrics From Our Efforts Can Be Found Below:

• Combined web traffic between the Powder House Lodge and Powder House Restaurant websites increased over 48% year-over-year.
• Combined page views leapt over 25% year-over-year
• Over 28,500 visits to the Powder House Restaurant website in the second half of 2021
• Over 105,000 page views on the Powder House Restaurant website by year-end

To this day, the Powder House Restaurant website continues to gain traction in users – even in the off-season. With the help of the RSA team, Powder House Lodge & Restaurant continues to gain notoriety for their businesses with websites that are feature-complete and cognizant of the real-time needs of their customers.