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How to Avoid Making The Same Mistake As The Texas Restaurant Chain “Big Madre” When Launching a New Website

By Joe Youngblood

A Texas restaurant chain had their marketing agency spam one of our Facebook Groups. Since we are also based in Texas we decided to take a look at what was happening behind the scenes. What we found is a horrifying lesson for any business.

It appears that the restaurant in question hired an India-based agency to design their website, deploy it, and do all of their “marketing”. Which from what we can see, essentially amounts to spamming Facebook groups and posting on Instagram.

Since we care about local businesses we contacted the restaurant, Big Madre, immediately and notified them of the issues we uncovered. I then posted about this on my Twitter in a thread which you can read here as a warning to others:

What Makes a Great and Effective Restaurant Website and Marketing Campaign

Before we get into the issues uncovered, let’s first examine what great restaurant marketing looks like for a small chain of restaurants.

1. Clear, Quality, Food Photography – One the most important aspects of marketing a restaurant today is being able to take high-quality and clear photos of your food.

2. Sleek, Modern, Cohesive Website Design – A website design that matches your brand aesthetics and brings the feel, atmosphere, and vibe of your restaurants to life can go a long ways to helping your brand grow locally.

3. Accurate Hours, Location, and Contact Information – Your website needs to accurately portray your locations and contact information just in case consumers can’t find what they were looking for. If there are any parking issues or other things new customers need to know before arriving make sure that is all included too.

4. A useful menu – The menu on your website needs to have the food and beverages your provide with good photos, descriptions, and if possible pricing.

5. Social media that targets your audience – A social media presence that ensures your brand gets in front of real consumers is absolutely critical.

6. Great SEO – Your website should have useful title tags, meta descriptions, fast loading images, great text copy where possible, and local pages that can rank for local searches. Your Local SEO should focus on gathering reviews, being locally relevant, posting great photos of your food, and sharing your deals/specials.

7. Digital PR – Connecting to local journalists about upcoming LTOs, new dishes, and hosting special events will drive more word of mouth and more foot traffic while also helping lift your SEO efforts.

8. Email List for Superfans – Get your Superfans to join an email list then send specials, LTOs, news, and events to them from time to time. These are most often your most loyal fans and will help you spread the word if you give them the information and the ability to do so.

Combined, all of this can make for an effective marketing campaign for a restaurant chain. Now let’s look at what is going on with Big Madre and just how broken things are.

Here is What We Found

Note: We are not affiliated with Big Madre or ZebaqWeb in any way. The following account includes my professional opinions from over 20 years of experience which are based on factual evidence as recorded via screenshots posted to Twitter and is being provided here to make an argument for hiring locally and thoughtfully not in an attempt to disparage either the India-based agency or the restaurant chain under examination.

Sometime in 2022 (we estimate around March of 2022) Big Madre, a Texas-based Mexican restaurant chain with just under 30 locations hired the Chandigarh / Bhubaneswar, India based agency “ZebaqWeb” (they also go by Zebaq) to manage all of their design, SEO, email, and social media marketing needs. What they got instead was a hard lesson in getting what you pay for and why you should consider hiring locally for this type of work even if it is a little more expensive.

ZebaqWeb claims to have offices in India, London, and right here in Irving, TX. We discovered the Irving, Texas location was actually an apartment complex called The Oaks at Valley Ranch Apartments and that their London office was a virtual office provider called Your Virtual Office London. Essentially, these locations are fake. Meaning in effect that ZebaqWeb only has offices and staff in India but could have tricked this local restaurant business into believing they were doing business from Irving, TX.

Website Design / Launch Fails

According to Archive.org records the site could have been launched anywhere between August 17th and December 3rd of 2022 and it appears it was launched in the same state we discovered it on March 1st, 2023 – utterly broken.

The largest problem is that the site did not work over HTTPS and was being served over HTTP:

This caused many of the elements on the website to appear to be broken since their URL paths were not functional:

The logo and other images on the site were being served from the dev server where the site was built before launching it:

All of the links in the main navigation menu were linking to the dev server, which had largely been wiped out leaving a non-functioning site behind:

Links to their food items in the menu also went to the broken dev server:

The homepage of the new Big Madre site includes a map of South Africa instead of Texas and claims they have to follow GDPR which neither South Africa nor Texas would have to do:

Their email newsletter signup feature did not work:

If you were able to somehow find the interior pages of the site, they were completely broken. For example the logo on their Locations page refused to load:

Their locations page also has weird announcements for location grand openings in July of 2022. The site doesn’t appear to have been launched until at least Mid-August of 2022 and these graphics were still there as of March 1st, 2023.

The locations page also has a map like the homepage which appears to be for a store locator. The problem is that it has no locations and is centered on Midtown Atlanta, Big Madre only has restaurants in Texas.

On the contact page in the copy, which was poorly written, they get their own branding wrong and then highlight it in a different color.

Social Media Marketing Fails

When it comes to social media marketing, things look a little better but not much. Most of the engagements on their Facebook page come from fake accounts likely owned by Zebaq from parts of the USA not in Texas and from ZebaqWeb’s staff in India. None of this will help Big Madre reach potential new customers in Texas.

Their idea of marketing on Facebook appears to be making posts and then spamming Facebook Groups like ours.

This is so extremely low effort; they don’t even bother to fix small formatting errors from what is likely copy+paste of copy sent over by Big Madre but keeping hidden characters making paragraphs appear broken.

The restaurant is paying to post to Twitter but has 0 followers. Their Instagram is a little better sometimes even generating double-digit like counts on posts. We found most of these likes were from other ‘brands’, a typical marketing tactic to try and gain exposure by liking and/or commenting on the posts of other brands. Many of these were not relevant to Texas or Mexican food.

SEO Fails

Having a broken website is already a pretty big SEO fail. But somehow ZebaqWeb and Big Madre found even more ways to fail here.

The biggest is a common issue. Big Madre’s lack of attention is allowing ZebaqWeb to steal link value from them via a footer link. This likely causes harm to Big Madre and might help Zebaq rank higher so they can get more business. A big loss for one and a big win for the other.

The phone number to Corporate is disconnected but it is not really. It is off by one-digit. We found this by looking up the address listed below the phone number on the site and discovering it mapped to a company called GHRA which has a nearly identical phone number with one digit being different. Either a typo by Big Madre or a big miss by ZebaqWeb.

big madre corporate info

After discovering this, we found multiple other incorrect phone numbers on the website for various locations. This is most likely causing a lot of pain on their local rankings which is in exchange leading to reduced business.

The business name is spelled wrong MULTIPLE TIMES in the meta data of the website, including as the first word of the homepage title tag.

big madre metadata

The site has local pages which you can get to via the Locations page and Site Map page. These are decently designed and a good idea for a chain like this to have. However, the title tags suck, the content sucks, and each page has a “featured menu” which is blank.

big madre broken featured menu

On some pages they have cloaked text, it does not appear to be on purpose but more a lack of attention to detail by the design team.

big madre cloaked text

They even have a completely blank Terms & Conditions page linked in their footer.

blank terms and conditions page

Finally, for Local SEO Big Madre’s Google Maps listings are just haphazard. There is little consistency between them except for their main category. My guess is they have put little to zero effort into these. The screenshot shows the few with at least 1 review, most don’t even have that.

big madre google maps

How to Avoid Making The Same Mistakes As Big Madre

While Big Madre is a restaurant and as such wins some business simply based on their locations, visible signage, and foot traffic they most definitely have suffered lost business during the time their website was not functional and that business could have been the different between making a profit and taking a loss for each location.

How could you avoid these painful and costly mistakes when building your business website?

1. Hire Local – We highly recommend that local businesses hire locally whenever possible. Even if you are in a budget crunch and using a site like Fiverr or hiring an India-based agency sounds like a good idea to save money you should at the very least get a quote from someone local or a local design agency. If a foreign-based company claims the have a local office ask to see photos, look it up on Google Maps, or search for the address to see if it is a real office or a fake one (fake offices are often in apartment complexes, virtual offices, or coworking spaces). Being skeptical, especially if the price estimate is really low compared to others, is a great way to ensure you get the best design quality and service.

Yes, even when we are in on a pitch we always hope we are going up against an agency that might be more local to the business.

2. Demand a Pre-launch Analysis – We offer a service called SEO Website Design as part of our SEO packages which allows us to review a site on a dev server before it launches to make sure things are ready to go and address any potential problems a designer might be unaware of or could have missed. You might even demand a Post-launch Analysis to double-check for errors. While we do not do website design, this service has allowed us to work with clients during a design phase and launch effective and highly optimized websites with ease while preventing future problems.

3. Outline Specific Objectives and Test Your Site – Your website launch should align to your broader business goals. What purpose does the site serve? How does it help customers find you and decide to do business with you? Knowing the answers to these questions instead of just checkcing boxes and looking for the lowest cost will inevitably help you not just select a high-quality provider but will also keep you focused throughout the design and launch process. In our example case above if the restaurant cared about phone calls for example, someone would have at least tried calling each phone number to make sure they work correctly.

4. Remember That Design, SEO, and Marketing are Investments in the Future of Your Business – Website design, marketing, and SEO are not just boxes on a checklist for you to move on from. They are important and necessary investments for a growing and thriving company. In the case we examined above it is obviously hard to tell how the local business viewed these things, however, a reminder for you to consider your actions and hirings carefully is in order. Think about it like this. If someone in another country promised to double your savings if you only placed the cash in a cardboard box and shipped it to them, would you? Probably not, at least, I would hope not. If a website designer in another country promises the same quality of design for 1/16th of the price, you might start seeing dollar signs quickly. However, as examined in this case not only is Big Madre suffering from a broken website, they are also struggling to reach actual, real, local customers through digital channels. If those things are important to them, then the money they are spending on it is being wasted or to repeat the analogy, being placed into a box and shipped overseas without any hope of returning.

Joe Youngblood

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Joe Youngblood is a top Dallas SEO, Digital Marketer, and Marketing Theorist. When he's not working with clients or writing about marketing he spends time supporting local non-profits and taking his dogs to various parks.

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