Growing a DC Café Without Ads: Local SEO, Google Reviews & a Human Brand Voice with Tessa Velazquez

Thanks for having me, Marc. I’ve grown up in this business since I was eleven years old. My parents opened a tiny bakery called Baked & Wired in Georgetown in Washington, DC, in 2001. It focused on American baked goods and coffee, and it was a community spot for Georgetown. This was before independent coffee shops were on every corner. My brother and I grew up there, and I learned everything from washing dishes to making cookies to working the register.
What I saw there was how important these third spaces are for people. Baked & Wired has had amazing food and drink for 25 years, but we’ve also put time, effort and energy into marketing it as an authentic community place, where you can meet friends, go on a date, have a birthday. Experience goes hand in hand with food and drink.
I didn’t intend to stay in the family business or expand it. I studied psychology, and right after college, at 23, I wrote my parents a resume and cover letter saying why I was a fit to learn about small business, and they hired me, so to speak. I gave myself a year before deciding on grad school. I got into the operations, the finances and the behind-the-scenes work, and two years later we decided to open Bake Joint.

People had been asking us for years to expand all over the world, but Baked & Wired is a very DC-centric neighborhood spot, and we didn’t want to muddle our own brand. If we opened a second one, people would compare it to the first, and we’d water down what makes it special. It felt like a tiny hole-in-the-wall with the most delicious baked goods, the nicest staff and the coolest music, and you can’t write a script for that. We’ve been offered franchising, and you see the dollar signs, but that’s a different kind of business.
We wanted to ask what problem we were trying to solve. In 2015, no one in DC was making real artisanal bread, and my family loves bread. So Bake Joint was much bigger than Baked & Wired, with a full kitchen, bread, coffee and baked goods, plus homey menu items my mom made for us growing up, like a really good BLT on good bread. I led all the marketing, social media and events for it. It was a learning curve, a lot of throwing spaghetti at the wall, and not everything worked, but a lot did.

We originally opened la Betty next door to Bake Joint in 2019 as a full sit-down restaurant, featuring my mom’s recipes. My mom is German-Irish and my dad is Puerto Rican, so it was a mix of worldly flavors. Then the pandemic hit. We had three bustling businesses and had to triage, so we decided to focus on the other two and shut la Betty, even though we were locked into a ten-year lease and had taken out loans. It was a huge sacrifice.
It takes a while to develop a community, especially the way we do it. We’re interested in regulars, people who trust us and come every day, not the person who sees us once on TikTok, crosses it off their list and never comes back. Because we don’t do paid advertising, we don’t have a marketing budget and we don’t have a PR team, the trade-off is that it takes time. One year wasn’t enough to gather the right community for a new concept, so we would rather close it and figure it out than do something less than excellently.
During that time I became a private chef and hosted dinner parties with small plates, records playing from turntables on my kitchen island, and natural wine, which I’d gotten really into. I love that it’s usually organic and supports small family farming businesses. People wanted invites, and I’d fill my tiny apartment. That gave me the idea for how to reopen la Betty: a café in the morning, and a vinyl listening station and natural wine bar at night.

We have an extensive record collection, and we wanted records that sound good from start to finish, which is an older craft. Most of it is from the seventies and eighties, though we have nineties and two-thousands too, from all over the world: boogie, disco, Brazilian, house. We want it to be a place of music discovery, where you might Shazam something you haven’t heard, but it’s not a dance floor. You should be able to have a conversation, like at a dinner party.
During the week, our bartenders pour wine and flip the records themselves, which feels like you’re at someone’s house. On weekends we bring in DJs from DC and beyond who spin their own records for a proper set, from eight until eleven or midnight.

We’re open every morning, from about 7 a.m. to 2 p.m. or 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., depending on weekdays versus weekends. In the evening we’re only open Wednesday through Saturday, from 5 p.m. to either 11 p.m. or midnight.
Even for a bar, we’re not open that late. We didn’t want a certain type of clientele that comes in after midnight, because nothing really good happens after midnight.

When we closed Bake Joint, which was beloved in the neighbourhood, and opened the new la Betty, we had to be very intentional with our marketing, and there were a lot of arms to it. First, social media, especially Instagram, which is a great place to show your personality and have a conversation with your customers. We were very transparent on social media about why we were closing Bake Joint and opening la Betty. If we pride ourselves on being your neighbourhood spot, we don’t want to pay lip service. We want to tell you what’s going on.
Second, a newsletter. We’d collected so many emails over ten years at Bake Joint, and we’d had a newsletter for Baked & Wired, so I gathered those and also had people sign up for la Betty. And lastly, good old word of mouth. We’ve never paid for advertising, never had a PR firm, and we don’t pay to play to get into magazines. We build all of our reviews ourselves, by talking to our neighbours and getting to know them, and hoping they tell a friend and then another friend.
That isn’t on ethical grounds. It’s just our brand. Our sales come from people coming multiple times a week, so if you want to be someone’s neighbourhood breakfast spot or bar, you have to do a lot more than have good wine and food. You need atmosphere, experiences, a good staff and good music. We feel it’s more authentic to connect with people, and that translates into Google and Yelp reviews.

When I first reopened la Betty, I opened it on a Squarespace site and learned it wasn’t optimized for SEO. So we scrapped the whole website and worked with web developers to build it on WordPress with the right keywords. DC is a very transient city, so if someone new to town Googles “coffee Washington DC,” we want to show up too. We want new customers, not just the people down the street who already know us.
It’s an ever-going process. Email marketing helps SEO, and engaging on Google reviews helps too. I’m not opposed to paid advertising, and maybe we’ll do it, but for now we haven’t. I’m still learning a lot about SEO. What I’ve learned is that if you’re doing it organically, there’s no guarantee, so you just put the name out there as much as you can and hope it sticks.

I made little cards with a QR code that links to our Google review. If we have a good interaction with someone, we can say, thank you for being such a loyal supporter, we’re a small business, could you write a Google review? Most people who have a great experience don’t write reviews. It’s the people with bad experiences who run to write one. Most people just need a reminder, and they’re happy to do it. And I’d much prefer someone write us an email or call us so we can make it right quickly, rather than running to a Google review without giving us a chance.

Yes. Every business, my personal account and my chef work each has its own voice and brand identity. I manage them, so you might see some overlap because the voice is me, but I try hard to keep each distinct. My mom is on Instagram too, and she bakes everything for us, so her account gives a behind-the-scenes look at baking for these businesses.

The SEO has been really big for us, and I’m glad we invested the time, money and energy to get our site set up properly. Just before this call I got a notification that we’d had a big jump in views on our la Betty page on Google. I have it set up so I can see how we’re tracking.
On Instagram, we’ve always been engaging, but I’m trying to engage with our followers even more, even though it takes more work. I comment back, like their posts, and repost and thank them for posting. We gained over a thousand followers this month, all natural and organic. We don’t pay, and we don’t have bots. I also talk to them in la Betty’s voice, with the same emojis, always typing in lowercase, because she’s a very casual woman. It’s not corporate and super polite.
In the age of AI, with so many AI bots responding for brands, I think people can really tell the difference now. They think, cool, that’s a real person who responded to me, not an AI bot.

Thanks, Marc. This was a really fun chat. Thank you so much.