Search Marketing Insomniac…The Blog of Adam Henige

Lots of people can debate what the best restaurant in Lansing is, and I don’t want to step into that argument.  However, while searching for some ideas for a place to eat the other day I decided to Google “Lansing restaurant” and as a professional SEO I couldn’t help but take notice of the order of the local listings.  Not that Google gives away their secret recipe, but I figured it’s worth a look at some of the elements that likely determine the rankings so you local business owners out there can take steps to climb the rankings for whatever it is that you do.

So let’s take a look at the search results:

And the winner is...Clara's!

As of 1am on Tuesday, November 17th, Clara’s comes out on top.  But what puts them in front of the Knight Cap?  First, let’s look at some purely local business center elements.

• Most experts agree and evidence seems to show a correlation between business location and distance from the center of the search geography.  In this case, the Knight Cap is actually slightly closer, so in terms of sheer geographic location, the Knight Cap has the edge (albeit a slight one)
• Reviews can also be an important element - showing user interest and usage of the local business.  Here we see Clara’s is the clear winner among pure restaurants.  The Sheraton may have the most reviews, but suffers in terms of relevance (most of the listing details refer to the hotel, not the restaurant).
• In terms of the actual listing information, it appears that neither Clara’s or the Knight Cap have taken ownership and verified their listings, so the details have been provided by the public, who seem to have done a slightly better job with Clara’s.  Though, to be honest, they both could use some work in terms of completeness.

Clara's has more "restaurant" related information in its listing.

The Knight Cap has very few details when it should be as descriptive as possible.

• The new and improved local business center also has details on the number of related websites for the local business, another strong indicator of its importance.  On this metric Clara’s wins by a count of 70 to 43.

So from a purely local business center standpoint, Clara’s seems to have a pretty significant advantage in ranking out for the term “Lansing restaurant”.  But beyond just the local elements, more traditional SEO elements come in to play as well.  So let’s take a look at those factors.

• In terms of on page optimization, both sites leave a lot to be desired, but Clara’s does utilize unique page titles and makes sure to fit in the words “Lansing” and “restaurant” within the page title.  There’s not much in terms of other on page elements like consistent keyword usage, header tags, alt tags, and meta descriptions.  The Knight Cap is in much worse shape, as the title doesn’t even mention the word “restaurant” though it does contain the Lansing address.  However, the site’s content is done in Flash, so it’s basically unreadable to a search engine, meaning it has no idea what the page is really about aside from the non-Flash content.
• As far as off page issues, Clara’s has a massive advantage.  I’m not going to dig into anchor text or the quality of each individual link, but according to Yahoo Site Explorer, Clara’s domain has 1,011 links compared to the Knight Cap’s 60.  Google’s PageRank is usually a pretty good indicator in terms of its determination of a site’s importance, and Clara’s home page currently has a 4 compared to the Knight Cap’s 2.

So without a doubt, Clara’s takes it home as Lansing’s best SEO’d restaurant, regardless of your tastes.  Without some major work by the other local establishments, this won’t be changing any time in the near future.  My official scorecard is as follows:

The final Lansing restaurant SEO tally

Netvantage doesn’t market itself as a social media company, but we end up in a LOT of conversations about it, and Twitter in particular.  Small businesses are still trying to figure out Twitter, and without knowing a lot of detail about a company or industry it’s hard to just start throwing out universally valuable tactics that someone can use to start gaining value from Twitter.  Today I was catching up on Twitter and browsing through some of the folks I follow, I realized that Pubcon was underway (Pubcon is a big Internet marketing conference, for those that don’t know).

I wasn't at Pubcon, but this is what it felt like on Twitter.

I saw a Tweet from Chris Hooley that had the hashtag of #pubcon, and I hopped on over to Twitter search (or feel free to use another tool like Tweetdeck) and ran a search for #pubcon and let it run.  The result?  Boatloads of information, summaries of presentations and generally distilled goodness that would have cost me time away from the office that I just can’t afford at the moment.  I do this for any industry conference or event, and fortunately our industry is chock full of people who love to Tweet.  The truth is, though, that regardless of your industry, there are people sharing information at important events that you can benefit from.  So even if Twitter doesn’t act as a direct revenue tool, it can be your ticket to insights from thought leaders in your industry, and THAT can be valuable for small businesses dealing with limited resources.  So, if I was in a position of authority at a small business, I would make sure my company was doing the following:

• Identifying a handful of the most important individuals and companies (particularly competitors and key players up and down the value chain) and following them
• Keeping a calendar of major industry events (trade shows, conferences, training events, etc.) and running searches leading up to the event to identify hashtags of interest
• Run searches during and post event and have someone scan through and create a summary document of links to relevant presentations, blog posts and other summaries of key information on industry trends, competitors, etc.

From there your organization can streamline processes and figure out the most actionable way to use this information - whether it’s addressing changes to your own processes, new marketing opportunities or new competitive information.  But as more and more people jump on the Twitter bandwagon, it gives the little guy the opportunity to have a virtual ticket to almost anything…so why not open some doors that have long been unavailable?

I do worry, however, that there will be some sort of attempted crackdown at some point - particularly for paid conferences.  How long will people want to front big fees and travel costs to sit in on events that they can largely get the clif notes of for free?  Sound like Napster/file sharing to anyone else?  But the dams have already opened, so trying to stop the waters will be an effort in futility.  I think it will start putting the onus on the event coordinators to continually add value to fill seats, but that may well benefit everyone.