Do you think ego kills your business?
If your answer is, "obviously Areena, ego kills everything." You're probably right. But I don't think you've guessed the context I'm saying this in yet.
The backstory
When I started my own learning curriculum to build real digital marketing skills on real brands, the first skill I had to learn was SEO. To implement it, I did a full SEO audit on a real local business from Kolkata — Mitra Cafe.
If you're from Kolkata, you probably already know it. And if you're not, here's what you need to know.
Mitra Cafe was founded in 1910, before India even got its independence. It was one of the earliest cabin restaurants in Kolkata, born out of a culture that is deeply specific to this city. In the early 1900s, during British colonial rule, Indian men weren't always welcome in formal European-style restaurants. Cabin restaurants emerged as an alternative — small, partitioned spaces with wooden booths that gave ordinary Kolkatans privacy and dignity while dining.
They became a cultural institution, famous for fish fry, cutlets, and kabiraji — dishes that became synonymous with Kolkata's food identity. Mitra Cafe is one of the oldest surviving examples of this culture. A living piece of the city's pre-independence history that somehow made it to 2026 with 15 branches, thousands of loyal regulars, and a reputation built entirely on the quality of what they serve.
On the ground, all of that is genuinely impressive.
But the moment you look at their digital presence, you wouldn't know any of it.
SEO audit revelations
I ran their official website through a free audit tool called SEOptimer. It rated the site a D+.
For a restaurant that has been standing since 1910, that is a striking number.
No header tags. No meta descriptions. A website load time of 27 seconds when it should be under 3. A blog page last updated in 2017. Every single image on the site is missing alt text. No analytics tool installed, meaning they have no idea how many people visit their site, where those people come from, or what they do when they get there. And 4 of their 15 branches don't even have a Google Maps listing — which means if someone in those areas searches "Mitra Cafe near me" or "cabin restaurant near me," Mitra Cafe simply doesn't show up.
All of that is bad. But here's the part that genuinely made me stop.
When I searched "cabin restaurants in Kolkata," Mitra Cafe ranked 11th. With 4.2 stars and 7,500+ Google reviews. The restaurants ranking above it? Most of them don't even hit 4 stars.
So I went to check the top-ranking competitors. And I found something that I honestly didn't expect.
None of them have a website.
Not one. They rank purely because the word "cabin" appears in their business name, and Google has nothing better to work with. Mitra Cafe — with 115 years of history, 15 branches, and the only functioning website in its entire category — is being outranked by businesses that aren't even showing up to the game.
And they're still not winning.
The thinking behind it
I could move on to their social media and tell you everything that's going wrong there too. But before this blog starts feeling like a Gen Z kid publicly roasting a century-old local restaurant (which is not what this is), I want to talk about why I think this keeps happening.
Because Mitra Cafe isn't the only one. There's a pattern I keep seeing with legacy businesses. The older and more successful they are offline, the more resistant they tend to be to the idea that anything needs to change digitally.
And I understand the logic — if something worked for 100 years, why wouldn't you trust it? If your restaurant has survived independence, partition, political upheaval, and the rise of Zomato, maybe you feel like you don't need to explain yourself to an algorithm.
But the rules of how customers find businesses have fundamentally shifted. And the brands that don't adapt don't disappear overnight. They just slowly become invisible — even while they're still serving 500 people a day and carrying a century of culture inside their walls.
The hidden cost of ego
I've made six videos about Mitra Cafe's digital gaps on my Instagram page. I tagged them. I genuinely hoped someone would see it and find it useful. I never heard back.
I don't know if that's intentional or just the noise of running a large operation across 15 locations. I'm genuinely not sure. But I've also met enough legacy business owners to know that sometimes the advice lands and the response is still — "we've always done it this way and it's worked fine."
Which brings me back to ego.
Not the dramatic, villainous kind. The quieter kind. The kind that says the way we've always done things is proof enough that we're doing them right. The kind that mistakes survival for optimisation. The kind that doesn't notice it's leaving real money on the table because the table still feels full enough.
Nobody is saying that what got Mitra Cafe here was wrong. What got them here was extraordinary — the food, the culture, the community trust built over generations. That's real and it matters.
But times have changed. And now there are more opportunities, better tools, and easier ways to strengthen the connection between a brand and the community it already belongs to.
Why not take that opportunity?
Why not choose better when you can?
Why stay stubborn in old ways when new ones don't ask you to give up anything that actually matters — but rather to just show up where your customers are already looking?
Maybe that's what ego really costs you in the end.
Not your pride.
Just your Google ranking.