Make the guide your city uses

Nobody had made an eco-friendly restaurant guide for our city. So we did. Five years later, it's still pulling in traffic.

In May 2021, I typed "eco-friendly restaurants Omaha" into Google, my hometown in America. The results were scattered.

I thought, "Perfect.” This was an opportunity.

At the time, I was doing marketing and sales simultaneously for Hillside Solutions. The company provides recycling and composting services to local businesses. Meaning, any restaurant serious about sustainability was working with us. I had been in most of those kitchens and had first-hand knowledge of how full their bins were each week.

There was a lot of marketing collateral in that setup. The lazy use of that info would probably make a post about how amazing Hillside was for having all these accounts. Or a blog about how much food waste from restaurants goes to the landfill.

Nobody googles "why should my business compost" before they're ready to buy. But everyone loves a “best places to eat” guide. And since none existed for my specific category, I made it.

Showcase the results of our service. Let our audience find us authentically through that.

That post — Best and Most Eco-Friendly Places to Eat in Omaha — has been working ever since. Last year alone it pulled 1,211 unique visits. Time on page averages just under four minutes (which for a directory means people are actually reading it).

To keep it fresh, there's a section towards the top that names the top five most eco-friendly restaurants of the year. This gives a great excuse to keep it in rotation on social and signals to Google to crawl the page again.

It still ranks. Still converts. And every restaurant on it has had referral traffic flow their way for half a decade.

Here's the move, and how to copy it.

Don’t make it about your business

Nobody cares about what your company did or didn't do. What happened at your team-building exercise or even your new product feature.

Your buyer only cares about themselves.

As soon as you accept that, engagement gets a lot easier.

How to make it about them

“So happy we now work with (X) restaurant” now becomes, “Here’s a new place you can spend your eco-dollar at.”

You still get to brag that your company is growing, but you framed it as a benefit to them. Not a benefit to your revenue.

So your new customer (the restaurant that pays you money to pick up its food waste) becomes a destination they can have an experience at that further expresses their preferred lifestyle (being eco-friendly).

And if they happen to mention they came because of your marketing, then you just gave your customer (the restaurant) a real ROI.

So from this thinking, this is how the guide came about.

Why this format compounds

Four things happen when you write the city's missing guide.

Search engines love it. Someone googling "eco-friendly restaurants Omaha" finds your page because nobody else made it. Five years on, ours still ranks. Promotional content decays. Resource content compounds.

The businesses you profile send their customers your way. Half of the restaurants we wrote about shared the post when it dropped. A few still link to it from their own About pages. Free distribution from the people you wrote about.

Readers spend real time on the page. The four-minute average isn't a scroll-and-bounce. That's people picking where they're going for dinner. By the time they finish, they trust your judgement, which means they trust your business.

It gives you a reason to email the business owners and start a relationship. Cold-pitching another small business is awkward. Telling them they made your eco-friendly directory is not. We've picked up partners, customers, and friends from that one piece of content.

Adding the email capture

Six months later, in December 2021, we did the same thing for retail. We published a Zero Waste Gifting Guide — a seven-step pyramid for sustainable holiday shopping, with local businesses woven through every layer. Hand Me-Ups for second-hand. Exist Green for plastic-free goods. It's All About Bees for local honey. Artifact Bags for built-to-last leather. Each one a business that composts with us, recycles with us, or aligns with the ethic.

This guide had one upgrade the restaurant post didn't: a lead magnet at the top of the page. We turned the seven-step pyramid into a downloadable PDF, plus our favourite DIY toothpaste recipe and a homemade spray cleaner. Drop your email, get the bonus content sent to your inbox.

People want it. So they sign up. And then they're on our email list, getting a monthly newsletter from a brand that's spent the whole guide pointing them toward other small businesses they should support.

A directory that grows your email list while it sells someone else's products. That's the upgrade.

The traffic numbers tell the story. The restaurant directory pulls more visitors. The gift guide pulls fewer — around 240 across the last three years — but holds them on the page for over six minutes in a strong year. People aren't skimming a gift guide. They're working through it, picking which step fits their situation, looking up the local businesses I recommended. And every reader who finds the bonus content useful enough to download it joins a list we'll email for years.

How to copy this

If you're a small food, retail, or hospitality business and you want to run this play, here's how.

Find the gap. Open Google. Search what your customer would search. "Best vegan restaurants in [your city]." "Plastic-free shopping in [neighbourhood]." If the first page is thin, vague, or out of date — you've found your post.

Pick the angle you have skin in. We couldn't write "best restaurants in Omaha." We're not qualified to judge that. Eco-friendly restaurants? We literally pick up their compost. The skin in the game gave us the right to make the list.

Profile fifteen to twenty businesses, not three. Three feels like a top-list. Fifteen feels like a real resource. Length is part of what makes it rank.

Write each entry like you're texting a friend a recommendation. Skip the corporate description. One sentence on what makes the place worth a visit. A strong photo, ideally one you took yourself.

Add an email capture. Make the bonus content — a PDF, a checklist, a recipe, a printable — feel genuinely useful. Gate it behind a signup at the top of the page, not just at the bottom. Top placement converts higher.

The whole approach is one shift. Stop pointing the camera at yourself. Point it at the businesses around you. Your customers feel the same generosity. Your search rankings build over years instead of weeks. And every business you write about owes you nothing — but more than a few will remember.

That's the playbook. Now make the guide your city is missing.