Seafood Restaurant Web Design on Seattle’s Waterfront

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A ship docked this morning and none of its passengers know your name

From May to September, the cruise terminals at Pier 66 and Pier 91 turn over ships bound for Alaska every weekend, and a large share of the passengers spend a night in the city on either end. They come down to the waterfront, they walk the new Overlook Walk from the market to the water, and they want salmon, chowder or Dungeness within ten minutes of where they are standing. They have never heard of any restaurant on Alaskan Way. They search, on a phone, and they pick in about a minute.

A waterfront seafood restaurant lives on that customer for five months. The restaurant that wins them is not the one with the best kitchen. It is the one whose site loads instantly on a phone, shows a real menu with prices, says plainly where the fish comes from, and appears when the visitor searches with the market or the waterfront attached.

A waterfront rebuilt, and a crowd that does not know the old landmarks

The viaduct is gone, the Waterfront Park has replaced it, and the connection between Pike Place Market and the piers is a promenade instead of a highway underpass. That has changed how people move: they linger, they walk further, and they choose dinner while standing in a place that did not exist a few years ago. The old rule that a restaurant on a given pier got the foot traffic on that pier is weaker than it was. The decision is happening on the screen, and the screen does not care which pier the restaurant is on.

That is good news for a restaurant that describes itself well online and bad news for one that has coasted on location. A site that names the market, the piers, the ferry terminal at Colman Dock and the walk down from First Avenue is telling a search engine and a visitor exactly where it is in the new geography. A site that says “in the heart of downtown Seattle” is telling them nothing.

The questions a stranger asks about fish

A visitor deciding on seafood in a city known for it is looking for a few specific reassurances. Is the salmon wild, and from where. Is the Dungeness local. Is there geoduck, and will someone explain it. What does the chowder cost, and what does the king crab cost, because the difference is a hundred dollars. Are the tables actually on the water. Are they open now, and can a party of six sit in twenty minutes.

A menu as real text with prices answers most of that in one screen. A page about sourcing answers the rest. Owners tend to think the visitor is judging the food; the visitor is judging whether they can trust the menu from the sidewalk, and the site either earns that trust in seconds or the family walks to the next door. Content written plainly about the fish, the boats and the room is also what a search engine rewards, which is why the honest sourcing page does double duty.

Two seasons and the neighborhood in between

Summer on the waterfront is visitors. Winter is locals, and the locals come from Belltown, Queen Anne and the office towers along Second and Third when there is a reason: a holiday dinner, a game at the stadiums to the south, a night out before a show at the Paramount. A restaurant that ignores the winter customer has a five-month business paying twelve months of rent. A site with pages for the occasions locals plan, and search visibility in the neighborhoods they live in, gives the winter something to work with.

The cruise passenger searches on the sidewalk. The local searches on a Wednesday for a Saturday. The site has to serve both, and most waterfront sites serve neither, because they were built to look good on a laptop and never revisited. The cruise season pays the rent. The winter local is the difference between a restaurant that closes in January and one that does not, and the site is the cheapest way to reach them.

Coasting on the view

Speed is the first failure. A homepage video of the harbor that takes six seconds to load on a phone in the market’s cell shadow is a visitor lost before the name renders. Stale hours are the second, because a search engine and a visitor both treat wrong hours as a closed door. Generic copy is the third. “Fresh Pacific Northwest seafood with stunning views” is on every site from Ballard to Tacoma and ranks for none of them. The specific ranks: the name of the boat, the name of the pier, the fish that is in season this week.

A website built for a seafood restaurant on this waterfront is fast, current, specific about place and price, and built so the reservation and the walk-in question are answered in the first ten seconds. It should look like the room and the view, and it should get out of the way of a hungry family standing under the Great Wheel.

How North Sea helps

We build fast websites for restaurants in visitor-heavy markets and write the local content that gets them found. For a Seattle waterfront seafood restaurant, that means a site that loads in a second on Alaskan Way, a menu and a sourcing page in real text, reservations that work from the sidewalk, and local SEO aimed at the market and the piers in summer and the neighborhoods that carry the winter. If the ship docked this morning and your restaurant is not in the first search its passengers ran, start a project with North Sea Strategic.