“Why are those folks outranking me in Google’s local pack?”
If you or a client is asking this question, the answer lies in competitive analysis. You’ve got to stack Business A up against Business B to identify the strengths and weaknesses of both competitors, and then make an educated guess as to which factors Google is weighting most in the results for a specific search term.
Today, I’d like to share a real-world example of a random competitive audit, including a chart that depicts which factors I’ve investigated and explanatory tips and tools for how I came up with the numbers and facts. Also included: a downloadable version of the spreadsheet that you can use for your own company or clients. Your goal with this audit is to identify exactly how one player is winning the game so that you can create a to-do list for any company trying to move up in the rankings. Alternatively, some competitive audits can be defensive, identifying a dominant player’s weaknesses so that they can be corrected to ensure continued high rankings.
It’s my hope that seeing this audit in action will help you better answer the question of why “this person is outranking that person,” and that you may share with our community some analytical tips of your own!
The scenario:
Search term: Chinese Restaurant San Rafael
Statistics about San Rafael: A large town of approximately 22 square miles in the San Francisco Bay Area with a population of 58,954 and 15+ Chinese restaurants.
Consistency of results: From 20 miles away to 2000+ miles away, Ping’s Chinese Cuisine outranks Yet Wah Restaurant in Google’s local pack for the search term. We don’t look closer than 20 miles, or proximity of the searcher creates too much diversity.
The challenge: Why is Ping’s Chinese Cuisine outranking Yet Wah Restaurant in Google’s Local Pack for the search term?
The comparison chart
*Where there’s a clear winner, it’s noted in bolded, italicized text.
Basic business information |
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NAP |
Ping’s Chinese Cuisine
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Yet Wah Restaurant
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GMB landing page URL |
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Local Pack rank |
1 |
2 |
|
Organic rank |
17 |
5 |
|
Organic rank among business-owned sites
|
8 |
1 |
|
Business model eligible for GMB listing at this address?
|
Yes |
Yes |
|
Oddities |
Note that Ping’s has redirected pingschinesecuisine.com to pingsnorthgate.com. Ping’s also has a www and non-www version of pingsnorthgate.com. |
A 2nd website for same business at same location with same phone number: https://yetwahsanrafael.com/. This website is ranking directly below the authoritative (GMB-linked) website for this business in organic SERP for the search in question. |
Business listings |
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GMB review count |
32 |
38 |
|
GMB review rating |
4.1 |
3.8 |
|
Most recent GMB review
|
1 week ago |
1 month ago |
|
Proper GMB categories? |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Estimated age of GMB listing
|
At least 2 years old |
At least 6 years old |
|
Moz Local score (completeness + accuracy + lack of duplicates)
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49% |
75% |
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Moz Local duplicate findings
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0 |
1 (Facebook) |
|
Keywords in GMB name |
chinese |
restaurant |
|
Keywords in GMB website landing page title tag |
Nothing at all. Just “home page” |
Yes |
|
Spam in GMB title
|
No |
Yes: “restaurant” not in website logo or street level signage |
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Hours and photos on GMB? |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Proximity to city centroid
|
3.5 miles |
410.1 feet |
|
Proximity to nearest competitor
|
1.1 mile |
0.2 miles |
|
Within Google Maps boundaries?
|
Yes |
Yes |
Website
|
||
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Age of domain
|
March 2013 |
August 2011 |
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Domain Authority
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16 |
8 |
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GMB Landing Page Authority
|
30 |
21 |
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Links to domain
|
53 |
2 |
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DA/PA of most authoritative link earned
|
72/32 |
38/16 |
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Evaluation of website content *This is a first-pass, visual gut check, just reading through the top-level pages of the website to see how they strike you in terms of quality. |
Extremely thin, just adequate to identify restaurant. At least has menu on own site. Of the 2 sites, this one has the most total text, by virtue of a sentence on the homepage and menus in real text. |
Extremely thin, almost zero text on homepage, menu link goes to another website. |
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Evaluation of website design |
Outdated |
Outdated, mostly images |
|
Evaluation of website UX |
Can be navigated, but few directives or CTAs |
Can be navigated, but few directives or CTAs |
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Mobile-friendly
|
Basic mobile design, but Google’s mobile-friendly test tool says both www and non-www cannot be reached because it’s unavailable or blocked by robots txt. They have disallowed scripts, photos, Flash, images, and plugins. This needs to be further investigated and resolved. Mobile site URL is https://pingsnorthgate.com/#2962. Both this URL and the other domains are failing Google’s test. |
Basic mobile design passes Google’s mobile-friendly test |
|
Evaluation of overall onsite SEO
|
Pretty much no optimization |
Minimal, indeed, but a little bit of effort made. Some title tags, some schema, some header tags. |
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HTML NAP on website? |
Yes |
Yes |
|
Website NAP matches GMB NAP? |
No (Northgate One instead of Northgate Drive) |
Yes |
|
Total number of wins: Ping’s 7, Yet Wah 9. |
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Download your own version of my competitive audit spreadsheet by making a copy of the file.
Takeaways from the comparison chart
Yet Wah significantly outranks Ping’s in the organic results, but is being beaten by them in the Local Pack. Looking at the organic factors, we see evidence that, despite the fact that Ping’s has greater DA, greater PA of the GMB landing page, more links, and stronger links, they are not outranking Yet Wah organically. This is something of a surprise that leads us to look at their content and on-page SEO.
While Ping’s has slightly better text content on their website, they have almost done almost zero optimization work, their URLs have canonical issues, and their robots.txt isn’t properly configured. Yet Wah has almost no on-site content, but they have modestly optimized their title tags, implemented H tags and some schema, and their site passes Google’s mobile-friendly test.
So, our theory regarding Yet Wah’s superior organic ranking is that, in this particular case, Yet Wah’s moderate efforts with on-page SEO have managed to beat out Ping’s superior DA/PA/link metrics. Yet Wah’s website is also a couple of years older than Ping’s.
All that being said, Yet Wah’s organic win is failing to translate into a local win for them. How can we explain Ping’s local win? Ping’s has a slightly higher overall review rating, higher DA and GMB landing page PA, more total links, and higher authority links. They also have slightly more text content on their website, even if it’s not optimized.
So, our theory regarding Ping’s superior local rank is that, in this particular case, website authority/links appear to be winning the day for Ping’s. And the basic website text they have could possibly be contributing, despite lack of optimization.
In sum, basic on-page SEO appears to be contributing to Yet Wah’s organic win, while DA/PA/links appear to be contributing to Ping’s local win.
Things that bother me
I chose this competitive scenario at random, because when I took an initial look at the local and organic rankings, they bothered me a little. I would have expected Yet Wah to be first in the local pack if they were first in organic. I see local and organic rankings correlate strongly so much of the time, that this case seemed odd to me.
By the end of the audit, I’ve come up with a working theory, but I’m not 100% satisfied with it. It makes me ask questions like:
- Is Ping’s better local rank stemming from some hidden factor no one knows about?
- In this particular case, why is Google appearing to value Ping’s links more that Yet Wah’s on-page SEO in determining local rank? Would I see this same trend across the board if I analyzed 1,000 restaurants? The industry says links are huge in local SEO right now. I guess we’re seeing proof of that here.
- Why isn’t Google weighting Yet Wah’s superior citation set more than they apparently are? Ping’s citations are in bad shape. I’ve seen citation health play a much greater apparent role in other audits, but something feels weird here.
- Why isn’t Google “punishing” Yet Wah in the organic results for that second website with duplicate NAP on it? That seems like it should matter.
- Why isn’t age factoring in more here? My inspection shows that Yet Wah’s domain and GMB listing are significantly older. This could be moving the organic needle for them, but it’s not moving the local one.
- Could user behavior be making Ping’s the local winner? This is a huge open question at the end of my basic audit.* See below.
*I don’t have access to either restaurant’s Google Analytics, GMB Insights, or Google Search Console accounts, so perhaps that would turn up penalties, traffic patterns, or things like superior clicks-to-call, clicks-for-directions, or clicks-to-website that would make Ping’s local win easier to explain. If one of these restaurants were your client, you’d want to add chart rows for these things based on full access to the brand’s accounts and tools, and whatever data your tools can access about the competitor. For example, using a tool like SimilarWeb, I see that between May and June of this year, YetWah’s traffic rose from an average 150 monthly visits up to a peak of 500, while Ping’s saw a drop from 700 to 350 visits in that same period. Also, in a scenario in which one or both parties have a large or complex link profile, you might want additional rows for link metrics, taken from tools like Moz Pro, Ahrefs, or Majestic.
In this case, Ping’s has 7 total wins in my chart and Yet Wah has 9. The best I can do is look at which factors each business is winning at to try to identify a pattern of what Google is weighting most, both organically and locally. With both restaurants being so basic in their marketing, and with neither one absolutely running away with the game, what we have here is a close race. While I’d love to be able to declare a totally obvious winner, the best I could do as a consultant, in this case, would be to draw up a plan of defense or offense.
If my client were Ping’s:
Ping’s needs to defend its #1 local ranking if it doesn’t want to lose it. Its greatest weaknesses which must be resolved are:
- The absence of on-page SEO
- Thin content
- Robots.txt issues
To remain strong, Ping’s should also work on:
- Improving citation health
- Directing the non-www version of their site to the www one
- A professional site redesign could possibly improve conversions
Ping’s should accomplish these things to defend its current local rank and to try to move up organically.
If my client were Yet Wah:
Yet Wah needs to try to achieve victory over Ping’s in the local packs, as it has done in the organic results. To do that, Yet Wah should:
- Earn links to the GMB landing page URL and the domain
- Create strong text content on its high-level pages, including putting a complete dining menu in real text on the website
- Deal with the second website featuring duplicate NAP
Yet Wah should also:
- Complete work on its citation health
- Work hard to get some new 5-star reviews by delighting customers with something special
- Consider adding the word “Restaurant” to their signage, so that they can’t be reported for spamming the GMB name field.
- Consider a professional redesign of the website to improve conversions
Yet Wah should accomplish these things in an effort to surpass Ping’s.
And, with either client being mine, I’d then be taking a second pass to further investigate anything problematic that came up in the initial audit, so that I could make further technical or creative suggestions.
Big geo-industry picture analysis
Given that no competitor for this particular search term has been able to beat out Ping’s or Yet Wah in the local pack, and given the minimal efforts these two brands have thus far made, there’s a tremendous chance for any Chinese restaurant in San Rafael to become the dominant player. Any competitor that dedicates itself to running on all cylinders (professional, optimized website with great content, a healthy link profile, a competitive number of high-star reviews, healthy citations, etc.) could definitely surpass all other contestants. This is not a tough market and there are no players who can’t be bested.
My sample case has been, as I’ve said, a close race. You may be facing an audit where there are deeply entrenched dominant players whose statistics far surpass those of a business you’re hoping to assist. But the basic process is the same:
- Look at the top-ranking business.
- Fill out the chart (adding any other fields you feel are important).
- Then discover the strengths of the dominant company, as well as its potential weaknesses.
- Contrast these findings with those you’ve charted for the company you’re helping and you’ll be able to form a plan for improvement.
And don’t forget the user proximity factor. Any company’s most adjacent customers will see pack results that vary either slightly or significantly from what a user sees from 20, 50, or 1,000 miles away. In my specific study, it happened to be the third result in the pack that went haywire once a user got 50 miles away, while the top two remained dominant and statically ranked for searchers as far away as the East Coast.
Because of this phenomenon of distance, it’s vital for business owners to be educated about the fact that they are serving two user groups: one that is located in the neighborhood or city of the business, and another that could be anywhere in the country or the world. This doesn’t just matter for destinations like hotels or public amusements. In California (a big state), Internet users on a road trip from Palm Springs may be looking to end their 500-mile drive at a Chinese restaurant in San Rafael, so you can’t just think hyper-locally; you’ve got to see the bigger local picture. And you’ve got to do the analysis to find ways of winning as often as you can with both consumer groups.
You take it from here, auditor!
My local competitive audit chart is a basic one, looking at 30+ factors. What would you add? How would you improve it? Did I miss a GMB duplicate listing, or review spam? What’s working best for your agency in doing local audits these days? Do you use a chart, or just provide a high-level text summary of your internal findings? And, if you have any further theories as to how Ping’s is winning the local pack, I’d love for you to share them in the comments.
First of all, this case study is marvelous! It covers every point of local competitive auditing. Through the help of this, we can easily analyze our and our competitor's business audit that where we are strong or weak. I think this is going to help all who are still finding a single point because of that they are not at the top of Google local pack. Thanks for sharing it.
Thank you so much Pratibha! I really hope the downloadable spreadsheet will be something lots of the wonderful folks in our community can fire up this week to start investigating ranking questions. You are so right that it's seldom going to be just one point ... it's likely going to be many!
Thank you so much Miriam, I'm glad to have your responce. And I'm also sure this tactics is definitly going to help a lot to everyone as me.
Great audit breakdown Miriam, it is interested to see one business winning in the local Maps, and one business winning organically, with different strengths and weaknesses both. Great metrics and analysis, thanks for sharing and this is definitely important for anyone in local SEO to give a thorough read!
Appreciate the kind words, LureCreative, and I thought that aspect of this scenario was really interesting, too, as I so often see organic rankings correlating so closely to local ones! Thanks for reading.
This is truly a fantastic audit from a local business perspective and great job doing so. I was in the same thought as you with the Yet Wah presumably being ahead of the other in the local pack. If you think about it though organically and also local pack wise Yet Wah still holds the highest value. If you are searching outside of just the local pack you will see the organic listing of Yet Wah at number 5 while still being in the local pack. I do think that the issue of the robots.txt file preventing the mobile site from being reached is a big issue and probably why their organic listings are so bad.
There is a lot of mystery with the value of the local pack and why some businesses will show up there vs others not even if they are better optimized. I do think the local pack is affected by the spam of the "restaurant" term you mentioned along with with that term in the GMB listing instead of Chinese. With so much machine learning going on in the algorithm's I do believe that the search engines are attempting to serve the most logical results in the local pack which would cause for some oddities there as we are seeing.
Great job again on this and keep up the good work.
So happy you took the time to look at all the aspects of this one, in depth, Tim! Yeah, I agree the robots.txt issue matters ... it was an a-ha moment for me, seeing that. This was a fun one to do, and I hope the download is one our fellow Local SEOs can put to work for them. Thanks for the lovely comment.
Woah!!!!!!!!! this is by far the best post that I ever read here at MOZ. Each paragraph answer one of my day to day questions and I have a lot. I think this a really starting point to start to learn Local SEO
Well, I'm incredibly honored by your praise, Roman. Wow - thank you! Sounds like it really "hit the spot" for you today. I appreciate the kind words very much.
Great Audit Miriam! Thank you. The problem with audits like this in 2017 is they generate profound mysteries that might cause the smartest Local SEO's to quit and get a job at Starbucks. Seriously. I used to live in Marin so I found this result bizarre since Northgate is over-the-hill-and-far-away from downtown and there's got to be truly a better reason why Google is suggesting folks make that trek to eat Chinese. My initial hunch is that Pings simply has better food. And this matches up with What folks are saying in their reviews on Yelp & TripAdvisor, and thus Ping's ranks ahead on those two directories also. https://www.yelp.com/search?find_desc=chinese+food...
And the mystery deepens since I'm seeing different local pack results from my desktop here in Oregon. Mostly I've stopped doing this type of evaluation since so many local pack rankings make no sense. Listings that should not rank well do. Listings that are powerful & awesome take forever to break into the lucky 3. Any deep study might be futile since rankings are so fluid and dynamic. At the end of the day hopefully the Chinese Food restaurant that is the very best will get to the top of the rankings - but I believe that's more up to the chef and the servers than it is up to us marketers.
Hey, Jeffrey - a genuine one-time Marinite! I enjoyed reading your comment and can understand exactly how that feels to look at rankings and go, "Well, what the heck!". My feeling is that conversion analysis is likely to be of most assistance to local businesses that are struggling, but I still find that the ability to look at rankings in detail like this yields a ton of things for to-do lists. It's the best way I know of to identify problems, even if (as this little study shows) you can't totally solve rank mysteries to your own 100% satisfaction. You can at least get a gut-check on what is going on, and sometimes there are genuine "Eureka!" moments.
That's an interesting idea about food quality. I'm not sure Google is yet at the point where they are deeply analyzing sentiment on 3rd party platforms like Yelp and TripAdvisor, particularly as they seem still in a nascent stage of analyzing review sentiment on their own platform, but I wouldn't be surprised if patents exist for this very thing.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment!
Miriam, I want to thank you for your analysis and your SEO Audit tool. I found it very well thought out and I've had some similar experiences that make me scratch my head as well. I have a wide variety of different clients in different industries. I believe I'm going to do your analysis on all of them over the next year. I think it might be interesting if I could share the results with you in a confidential type of arrangement. Although I guess it doesn't even have to be confidential as I could just black out the names. I'm not sure if this would be interesting to you or not, but I think we could gather some interesting Local & Traditional SEO Trends.
Hey Matt!
What a nice offer! What I'd love is if, after you've done some of these audits over the next year, you notice some interesting patterns from the data and might share with me what you see. I'd definitely be interested in that. Please, feel free to DM me or email me if you'd like to share insights gained. I really appreciate the kind offer! Thank you.
Miriam,
Using your Audit checklist and analysis I'm going to attempt to run this on several clients. I will attempt to gather some "interesting" info. I think after I practice a little with your format I will start to see some things that might even be some Ah Ha moments. If I find any patterns I will share it with you. I think it would be cool if a lot of different Local SEO's did this exercise to see if we can "figure" out a little bit more about what works and what doesn't work. Thanks again for your time and effort I always enjoy reading your work.
I'd love that, Matt! Thank you for the generous offer. Good luck with the study ahead!!!
Miriam: This is a very thorough post. It covers so many, if not most perspectives on ranking in google. Its a wonderful guide for SEO practitioners of local. Its extremely thorough.
2 points of note.
A. There is an unusual situation in San Rafael, Cal for Chinese restaurants. There are 2 Pings. One is Ping's Chinese Cuisine, the restaurant you studied. BUT there is also a Pings Mandarin Restaurant https://www.pingsmandarinsanrafael.com/
Oh my. I wonder if there is any confusion in either or both of the local and organic results? Could be. Could skew the results in one or both. Possibly a review of two restaurants with entirely different names in the same city might show a different package for the analysis.
B. If I'm an owner/operator of these restaurants or other businesses my analyses need to be different. I act as both seo and owner operator of a number of businesses. I need to look at other metrics to ascertain how we are doing, let alone figure out why we are ranked first in one type of serp and 2nd in another. On top of that restaurants are a different breed. You referenced above that results for restaurants sometimes appear different than expected from a local/organic perspective. Maybe smb's and their SEO's need to be more vertical/industry smart. --Maybe.
For instance just to name some elements of marketing a restaurant, or a Chinese Restaurant, or a restaurant with tremendous amount of to go deliveries, etc etc.
1. Social media can play a big or significant part in generating sales.
2. Restaurants can actually do real well with very old fashioned paper marketing. Distribute flyers. Hand out flyers. I've seen that work ENDLESSLY and well. I've seen it in pretty urban environments and in very suburban environments. (How OLD FASHIONED--but it works) How unwebbiesh.
3. How much delivery do these two do off of their sites, others, delivery apps etc. Of many types of restaurants Chinese restaurants are GREAT delivery options. Always have been. Still are. If I blasted a ton of delivery options on every delivery service imaginable in the region would that up my business and improve the bottom line even as the delivery services take big %'s off the top??
4. Getting back to Pac results/local search. Here is something I noted a while ago. I'll try it again and send you a screen shot if it generates similar results.
I had searched on the topic restaurants for a popular shopping/dining destination in the Washington DC suburbs. It draws people from an enormous region wide perspective. I used the adwords tool to identify results.
When I chose a destination pretty far away and used a general Southern search location the PAC results showed one set of top 3 restaurants in the area. When I searched from a generally Northern distance the PAC results showed DIFFERENT results for the top 3.
Whoa!!! Different PAC/local results that I suspect were a function of "distance" but possibly drive time. Oh my. I wonder how much impact that has. The two starting points were within the Washington DC metro region but were maybe 20-30 miles from the general destination. OH MY. How much and how far a reach on the PAC results can proximity or distance cause an effect????
5. Back to the business perspective: If I'm an owner of the restaurant I need to take in all the google data and then measure it with all the other potential impacts on sales.
The article is a great resource for SEO's. If I were focused on restaurants I'd want to look at a lot more to help generate more sales.
BUT... a great analysis.
Update: I just redid that search for restaurants using the adwords tool. I looked at restaurant results in a major shopping dining destination in the greater dc area. I used starting destinations that were possibly 10 to 30 miles away. Got 3 different sets of PAC results on a screen shot I'll send to you. My gut is that it has to do with "distance" but also possibly driving time. Now as I tried the local results in adwords from further directions the pac results seemed to standardize.
Anyway...maybe not that germane to the nuts and bolts of this very thorough analysis but the pac remains very responsive to proximity and can seriously impact results.
Dave
Hi Dave!
What a bountiful comment with many excellent pointers for restaurant owners and marketers. I've seen what you've seen, Dave, within about 20 miles of destinations, but I have NOT seen what you've seen beyond that point. That's extremely interesting that you have a gut feeling this may have to do with driving time, if not with distance. I wonder! I wonder if a patent exists that covers that.
I did notice the Ping's Mandarin phenom and it could be that Google is confused (haha - yep, that could be!). What interested me most about the results I was seeing in the case study is that the playing field was rather weak, not in terms of choice, but in terms of Local SEO basics, resulting in Google having to choose between players that weren't especially outstanding in their SEO. It's cutting things down to a very basic level, which can be instructive in seeing how small efforts impact rankings. When everyone is a tough competitor, it can be harder to judge why someone is winning.
Really appreciated your thorough remarks and that you've taken the time to share your experienced view with the community. Thanks, Dave!
Drive Time: Bill Slawski wrote about this patent some months back: https://www.seobythesea.com/2017/02/ranking-local-b...
I took screen shots of the pac from 3 different somewhat distant locations. A. I have to send the screen shots to you and B. I'll measure the distance. They might all fall within the 20 mile parameter you reference
A-ha! A patent. So, isn't that fascinating? I'll look forward to seeing your screenshots, Dave. Thank yous o much.
I just loved that post. It's a bit surprising to me that links are winning the local pack in this case. Definitely, I'd like to see a correlation study.
In the meanwhile, let me gently steal that spreadsheet, it's going to be very handy. Thank you again! :)
Use it with my blessings, Angel, and thanks for the nice comment!
Excellent post Miriam!
Where do you think there is more competition? In local businesses or national or international?
It is easy to ruin an SEM campaign to a local business, right?
Hi Javier,
That's a smart question, but not an an easy one to answer. On the one hand, local is less competitive, because instead of a business competing with the nation or the world, each location of a local business is competing within a single city or service area. So, this might be seen as narrowing a field down from thousands of competitors to, perhaps, 100, or 50, or 20 or however many other local businesses have the exact same business models. In smaller towns, there might be only 20 attorneys, or 10 pizza places, or 3 pharmacies, right?
On the other hand, Google's local pack results have just 3 spots in them. Instead of the 10 pizza places competing for display on a page of 10 organic results, only 3 of the 10 will make it into any given local 3-pack. So, in a way, we might say that this is tougher. But, then, from a national/global perspective, there aren't just 10 pizza brands competing for organic recognition. So, it all kind of evens out. Both forms of marketing represent challenges, but at the end of the day, I feel that local requires a somewhat more intimate form of outreach, because the pool is smaller and closer to home.
I'm not quite sure I understand your last question: It is easy to ruin an SEM campaign to a local business, right? Please, explain that a bit more. Thanks!
Interesting article! One thing that rings a Bell. Note the search term was "Chinese Restaurant San Rafael" and therefore Google clearly is treading Ping’s Chinese Cuisine better than Yet Wah Restaurant because the later has a Chinese name in the Brand name. Adding my 2 cents, the Local listings should be unique in content and not copied from your website. The content should resonate to the listing category and should have good descriptive reviews. So if your clients are happy, ask them to post good long reviews that provide more insight into the product or service. The NAP details should be perfect and there should not be any mismatch. Keep posting exciting stuff about the business and that should do the trick!
Thanks for taking a look and adding your suggestions, Paulha!
I was about to post much of what Paulha just said. So I'd like to just pitch in my 2cents into the bucket. :P
Fantastic concept for a post Miriam - more more more please.
Hi Brendon!
Comments like yours are an inspiration to me! I will definitely keep at it :)
Thanks for the helpful info regarding local competitor analysis. It's funny that you mention things that bother you. For a while now I've been noticing discrepancies mostly niche by niche, and restaurants in particular is a sector where things seem more removed from the norm than in any other. For example, I wonder if you did a similar audit for plumbers, would you see the contrary indicators as in this audit? I doubt it. It makes me wonder if there's something specific to this niche which makes it harder to draw conclusions from competitor analysis.
Hi James,
That's a good point about the restaurant industry (and I'd say hotels, too) where things sometimes feel a bit "different". Thanks for letting me know you're seeing oddities all the time. I'd love it if some of our readers here would do their own audits using the spreadsheet in other industries and see if they yield predictable patterns. If anyone does this, it would be awesome for them to share the outcomes of their findings here in the comments!
Looks like quality links are more of a factor to ranking in the Google Maps than I previously thought. I wonder which is a better Maps factor- having more consistent NAP listing, or having more better quality inbound links? Great post and tips as always Miriam and thanks for sharing!
Hey Nicholas!
The hefty role links seem to be playing as a local ranking factor has made me wonder whether this has always been the case, and our industry is just now noticing it, or if Google has turned up the dial. In any case, yes, the link-earning aspects of a Local SEO campaign have become fundamental in competitive scenarios, necessitating the use of further creativity and more serious tools. Thanks for your thoughtful comment.
Great analysis of how to increase rankings in the local pack along with a template which is a very good starting point. I would like to add that strong on-Page and technical SEO along with great local content on the website will further strengthen the position of the local business. It is also better if the appropriate schema is added on the website as also the address and phone number on the footer of each page.
Spamming the listing to try and increase the local rank should be avoided as it may prove detrimental. Business can add the word they want to their business name and then redirect their old website.
Thanks for taking the time to add your thoughts, Joseph, and for sure ... spam is a dead end street, but proves a tempting one for too many folks.
Wow. This is pure gold. Thank you Miriam.
Thank you! Lovely to hear that.
Where I can find really good tutorials about Local SEO, did anyone know some useful training?
Hi Roman,
Is there a particular area of Local SEO you'd like to learn more about, or is it just beginner-level, general Local SEO knowledge you're needing?
Good stuff here. Quick question, w/o the usage of content and not counting listing/citation building, how would you obtain back links pointing to a restaurant?
Hey there, sviner0! Good question. The answer is likely to lie in the specific details of the restaurant. Something almost any business can consider is building supportive relationships within the community it serves. Let's say the restaurant is a sports bar. How about sponsoring a local sports team? Or, let's say it's an Italian restaurant. It could cater an annual event at the local Italian cultural center. A barbecue restaurant might man a stand at a town founders' day event, contributing part of the proceeds to the town council. A family-style restaurant might sponsor construction of a children's rec center. The chef at a fine dining establishment could contribute a recipe column to the local online news.
In other words, if the restaurant isn't going to create content on their own website, they should explore opportunities for doing something that makes others create content, or create the opportunity for content, on their own platforms. Sponsorships, scholarships, event hosting or participation are all real-world ways to prove community involvement, leading to links. Restaurants tend to be a good bet, too, for mentions in local lifestyle/travel publications, particularly if they're fortunate enough to be located in a somewhat tourist-y area. It's just a matter of thinking through the best ways to be helpful or notable on a local level.
At an industry level, the field is somewhat wider. For a restaurant, an exceptional level of dining can create the kind of fame that results in links from all kinds of industry and general publications. For an exercise that might prove useful, search for "Brennan's Restaurant New Orleans" and look at the variety of publications citing it in the first 5 pages of Google's organic results, including news sites, Forbes and the New York Times. This restaurant might not have to rely as much on the create-content-earn-links scenario (though they shouldn't overlook it) because they have attained the kind of fame from which publicity and link opportunities flow.
Hope this helps!
Helps a ton, thanks so much!
So glad to hear it!
Good stuff!
I am glad to find out your article, it was really nice and very well explain by you. So, people can easily understand and analysing his competitor's business audit that also help to get what's going wrong in your website and improve it.
Thank you, Deepak!
This is an amazing case study. Thank you so much for sharing. So many SMBs have trouble understanding their local rankings and SEOs don't always have the best tools to explain it. Hopefully this goes a long way towards more local ranking understanding
That's exactly my hope, too, Nick. So glad you feel it will be useful!
You never disappoint!
Interesting. I'm searching from a Philadelphia suburb and Yet Wah comes up #1 in the local pack and Pings Chinese doesn't show up until I pull up the map and then it's number 6.
A couple of additional items I tend to look at that you didn't specifically mention (or I missed your mention):
Yet Wah has keywords in it's business and domain name, although it's cheating by using "restaurant" in its GMB listing and "chinese" in its domain name (covering both bases) when signage indicates it's actual name is plain 'ol Yet Wah.
This is a stretch but I wonder if Google looks at industry comparisons of how much time people spend at restaurants as an indicator of visitor satisfaction. We know it has some data because it publishes "people typically spend x minutes to y hours here" metrics. No doubt they've tested it.
I love how your case study wasn't cut and dried. Real life never is.
Hi Donna!
All excellent points. I did mention a couple of these but not all of them. Thanks for letting me know you are seeing different rankings today. I pulled the data together for this story about a month ago, so it could be that the rankings have changed a bit since then and now. At the time, I reached out on Twitter and found results agreement from Twitter users from the west coast to the east, and up in Canada as well. But, things change!
I like your query regarding time spent at a place. Yes, Google definitely knows this information. I wonder if Bill Slawski has covered a patent regarding this, and how Google might use as a determination of relevance. On the one hand, a fast food restaurant might be seen as being "better" if people spend the least time at it, vs. something like a fine dining establishment where a leisurely pace and longer stay might indicate superior service and atmosphere. Thanks for asking about that. Now I'm wondering!
Thank you so much for share, really you don't know how many question you answer to me with this post, thanks for share Miriam Ellis
Thank you for the time you spent researching and writing this post, Miriam - I was literally at the edge of my seat while reading!
Very cool to hear that, Julie. Thank you! Hopefully the time I put in will save others time, having all the fields of inquiry organized into a single spreadsheet. You can just open that sheet and start plugging away :)
Really helpful, practical advice. The comparison in the case study elucidates all the issues.
Thanks for the pleasant comment, Toby. So glad you found this to be practical advice!
I've actually never heard about this type of audit and been always conducting the classical tech one. Really cool stuff.
Awesome post! I use to do audit with the help of some tools but this is something different. Really beneficial in many terms. Thanks for this nice study and share it with us.
Hi Sanahyat! So glad if this gave you some new ideas to use for your work. Thanks for the kind words.
Great post.
One question: Do Google ratings carry much weight in Google's local positioning or is it more of a visual aspect?
Thank you
Hi RichardOB!
That's a really interesting question. If I'm understanding correctly, you're asking about Google star rating (without accompanying review text). My gut feeling on this is that, as they are counted toward the overall star rating, yes, they do impact local pack rankings, but I have never seen a study done as to whether they have the exact same amount of influence as reviews with text do. It would probably be hard to measure that unless you could somehow do you could truly control a study in which you had two businesses with all of the same metrics and somehow managed to get, let's say, 20 reviews w/text for one and 20 ratings without text for the other and were able to look at the rankings. Unless you did this artificially (setting up fictitious businesses for the sole purpose of the study), I'm not sure how else we could measure this. I really like the question, though.
Richard and Miriam,
If I'm not mistaken the Google ratings and reviews do have an impact but that impact has lessened over time as more people have "gamed" the system to get reviews. They count, but they used to count for more value in the Local Pack rankings.
Matt - do you feel there is a difference in the impact a review with text has vs. just a rating without accompanying review text? I can't remember ever seeing a study about this. Have you noticed anything?
Miriam - I honestly don't feel there is a difference between ratings with reviews and just ratings. But I want to be very clear that is just a feeling and backed by absolutely zero evidence. I haven't seen a study on this subject either so I don't know the answer. I guess you could say this is more of a "gut feeling". I would be interested in the answer to your question but I think actually doing a test on this would be difficult
Thanks for replying, Matt, and for letting me know you've not seen such a study either. It would be hard to conduct one, honestly.
For my limited experience, the star ranking is one of the main factors to consider, along with the amount of reviews.
I believe that the text reviews can help boost the position in the pack, mainly because it is more text in the GMB page, so there is more to index, more keywords, etc.
I really like the audit format for this post. It poses a real question that is surprisingly hard to answer. I love how you give suggestions to each of the business as hypothetical clients too.
My takeaway is the need to create quality content on high level pages. This makes some sense with the PA of your root page having valuable link juice to pass down. I just didn't think of the lower pages' quality passing back up to your root. Fascinating idea and I'll have to explore it a bit.
Good Morning, ColemanConcierge! Thanks for the positive feedback on the way this post was put together. I appreciate hearing that!
I am glad to see your article on the basic local business topic about restaurant local business listing. Now user can very easily understand & optimizing by the comparison chart and your unique article that how to audit a competitor business for local business.Thanks a lot for sharing here Miriam Ellis.