Cantábrico: #1 for "paella catering Houston", bilingual, zero ad spend

The client

Cantábrico Spanish Food is a Spanish catering business in Houston, founded and operated by Cristina Fernández (from Asturias) and Blanca Bernabéu (from Catalonia). They serve authentic Spanish cuisine — paella, tapas, jamón ibérico, empanadas — for weddings, corporate events, and private parties across Houston, The Woodlands, Sugar Land, and surrounding metro areas.

Visit the live site → cantabricosf.com

Our role

AI Beacon designed and built Cantábrico's digital and marketing stack — website, bilingual SEO, content workflow, schema, Google Business Profile, AI search positioning. Cantábrico runs the catering side. Every pattern that worked here is what we apply with other clients.

The starting point

The Hispanic catering market in Houston is competitive. Search results for "paella catering Houston" and "tapas catering Houston" were dominated by established restaurants, Yelp aggregators, and big-event-platform listings. Cantábrico needed to:

• Establish topical authority in a niche where most competitors are restaurants, not caterers.
• Compete in both English (mostly local non-Spanish-speaking clients) and Spanish (Hispanic and second-generation Houston market).
• Generate leads without ad spend — the founders preferred organic growth and direct relationships.
• Avoid the Yelp/Eventbrite middleman tax.

What we built

• Site architecture. Vite SPA + Vercel Edge Middleware that injects per-route metadata, schema, and canonical pre-hydration. 14 routes total. All server-rendered for crawlers; no JavaScript dependency for first-paint SEO content.
• Bilingual from day one. Parallel EN at / and ES at /es/... with full hreflang reciprocity, separate keyword research per language, and native rewrites (not Google-translated copy). Voice files written separately for each language.
• Service pages. Dedicated landing pages for each catering vertical — paella, tapas, Spanish wedding catering — built around clustered keyword sets verified via SERP comparison. One page = one intent.
• Long-form blog. Voice-anchored posts on Spanish cuisine. Each post anchored on a founder story — e.g. the Spanish tortilla post built around Blanca's WhatsApp memory of her grandmother's recipe. Real voice, not AI slop.
• Google Business Profile. Claimed, verified, fully optimized — logo, phone, hours, photos, primary category 'Catering Service' + 8 secondary categories. Service-area-business setup (no fixed storefront).
• Schema markup. Full LocalBusiness, FoodEstablishment, Service, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList, Organization JSON-LD on every page — bilingual inLanguage per route.
• Off-page cleanup. Identified a 23-domain toxic PBN backlink network targeting the site. Disavow file uploaded to Google Search Console. Recovery monitored on a 60-day cycle.

Results

• #1 organic for 'paella catering Houston' — top spot, no featured snippet competition.
• AI search visibility. Perplexity cites Cantábrico for 'best spanish catering in houston' — top recommendation, 'best by event' categorization, and opening-paragraph citation. AI search is the new front line, and Cantábrico is winning it.
• 14 indexed routes , bilingual EN+ES, each ranking somewhere for its target query set.
• $0 paid acquisition. All traffic is organic search + GBP + AI search citations. No Google Ads, no Meta Ads, no boosted Instagram.

Why this matters for your business

Most agencies that "do bilingual" build English-first and run the EN copy through Google Translate. The result reads as foreign to native Spanish speakers in Houston and ranks for nothing in Spanish search. We build bilingual from day one — separate keyword research, native rewrites per language, separate hreflang clusters, separate schema inLanguage. The result is two sites that both rank, not one site that ranks badly translated.

If you sell to Houston's bilingual market and you're tired of agency retainers that produce English-only output dressed up as "we do Spanish too" — that's what we do at AI Beacon.