dana@lobstervine.comPetaluma, California & often in Maine
Designed from scratch, and #1 on Google when hungry people search.
The client
El Rayo is a much-loved taqueria with two Maine locations, in Portland and Scarborough. Each has its own full menu, bar menu, specials, take-out and catering.
The challenge
El Rayo had no website at all. Restaurant visitors want three things, fast: the menu, the hours and directions. With two locations and several menus each, El Rayo needed a site, built from nothing, that sends people to the right location in a tap, works perfectly on a phone and is easy for the staff to keep current.
At a glance
| Client | El Rayo Taqueria |
|---|---|
| Location | Portland and Scarborough, Maine |
| Type | Food, farm & hospitality |
| Platform | WordPress |
| Services | Website design, development, hosting, website care, monthly reporting |
| Launched | Late 2019 |
What I did
- Designed and launched the site from scratch in late 2019, around El Rayo’s bright, casual personality.
- Built it around two locations. Each restaurant has its own page and its own full menu, bar menu and details, so visitors land in the right place.
- Made menus easy to update. Specials, take-out and catering menus the team can change without calling me.
- Built for local search, with location details, structured data and pages Google can match to searches for each town.
- Kept it running. Hosting, weekly updates and backups ever since, and now a monthly report on how the site is doing.
Results
Seven years after launch, El Rayo’s site still draws between about 4,300 and 6,100 visitors every month. Most arrive straight from Google. People who come almost always go straight for the menu: the Portland and Scarborough full menus were two of the four most-viewed pages in October.
October 2026 at a glance
Visitors
5,555
▲ 16% on September
Page views
15,775
▲ 23% on September
Clicks from Google
3,796
▲ 18% on September
Times shown in Google
25,265
▼ 3% on September
Where El Rayo ranks for the searches that matter (October 2026)
| Search | Clicks | Average Google position |
|---|---|---|
| el rayo scarborough | 749 | 1.2 |
| el rayo portland maine | 293 | 1.4 |
| el rayo portland | 269 | 1.6 |
| el rayo menu | 68 | 1.4 |
The site even gets visitors from ChatGPT, a small, new source that matters more as people start asking AI tools where to eat.
Run a restaurant and want a site that fills tables?
Whether you run one location or several, I’ll build a site that gets hungry people to the right menu in a tap and keep it current so you don’t have to think about it.