The Family Bakery That Finally Appears on Google: How We Did It Without Time or Enthusiasm

I start work at four in the morning

That's not a complaint. It's an explanation. When someone talks to me about "managing your digital presence" at six in the evening, after I've already been on my feet for fourteen hours, I understand the words but I can't make it fit into something I actually need to do.

My grandfather Evaristo opened this bakery in Burgos in 1971. My father kept it going. I've been running it for fifteen years with my husband Rodrigo. We have lifelong customers who come to buy the same bread their mothers bought. That was enough for me, and it still is.

The problem was there was another type of customer who wasn't arriving: the one who searches Google for "sourdough bread Burgos" or "artisan bakery Burgos" before visiting. And those customers, who are becoming more numerous, couldn't find us because we had nineteen reviews.

My nephew Alejandro, who is twenty-two and studying marketing in Madrid, explained it to me one afternoon when he came home for Holy Week. He told me there was a real trend, that people were searching for artisan bakeries like ours, that we had a product that deserved to be visible. And that he'd set it all up himself, that I wouldn't need to do anything.

That last part is what convinced me.

Alejandro got it running. Customers started receiving a WhatsApp asking how their purchase had gone. If they responded well, the system guided them to Google. I didn't have to do anything except keep kneading.

Three months later I had fifty-two reviews.

But what really got to me was a review left by a man from Valladolid. He explained that he'd seen a comment by someone else talking about our cristal bread, that he was an enthusiast of thin-crust breads, and that he'd driven eighty kilometres to buy a loaf. Eighty kilometres. I would never have imagined that.

That same review mentioned that our bakery's cristal bread was "the best in Castile." I don't know if that's true, but now those words are on Google, and people searching for cristal bread in the region find us.

Rodrigo says I'm always the last one to believe the good things that happen here. He's probably right. I still think the most important thing is the bread coming out of the oven. But it's good that now the people who don't know us yet can also find it.