The best SEO'd restaurant in Lansing

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 nor 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

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About Adam Henige

Adam Henige is Managing Partner of Netvantage Marketing, an online marketing company specializing in SEO, PPC and social media. Adam heads the SEO and link building efforts for Netvantage and has been a contributing blogger for industry publications like Search Engine Journal and SEOmoz.

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Tags: best restaurant in lansing, best seo'd restaurant lansing, clara's restaurant lansing, google map rankings, how local rankings are determined, lansing restaurant, local lansing listings, local listing factors, seo for local listings, the knight cap restaurant

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 17th, 2009 at 6:07 am and is filed under SEO. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.