SEO Case Study: How Did Local SEO Improve The Performance of A Local Small Busines Website
Posted by Winning Web Design on July 23, 2010 | No Comments
Sichuan Gourmet is a famous and top-rated Chinese restaurant chain rooted in Boston, Massachusetts. Recently, the business owner contacted us and wanted us to:
1. re-design the restaurant website to promote their business expansion, and
2. improve search engine visibility of their website.
SEO Situation
After analyzing the data in Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools for the client’s website, we found out that more than 70% of the search engine traffic was from people who already know about the restaurant. Most of them are existing customers who use the business brand name “Sichuan Gourmet” in the search terms (keywords) to find the address, hours, or menus.
In other words, less than 30% of the online visitors clicked on Sichuan Gourmet’s website when searching for general keywords, such as “chinese restaurant framingham ma” and “chineae restaurant in billerica”. The latter kind of traffic (those 30% visitors) is our targeted audience source of this SEO project, because they are the potential new customers for Sichuan Gourmet.
SEO Solution
In order to achieve Sichuan Gourmet’s goal of attracting more new customers from the Internet, we tailored a local SEO plan to promote the website in search engines for more general (broad) search keywords that have higher monthly search volumes. We did an in-depth keyword research and analysis, and uncovered the following keywords to target for the clients website. The total search volume adds up to 2,500 per month.
szechwan restaurant
chinese restaurant boston
boston seafood restaurant
szechuan cuisine
chinese restaurants boston
chinese restaurants in boston
boston chinese restaurant
chinese food restaurant boston
We helped the client to set up a Rankiac account (a third party application) in order to track the rankings in Google as we execute the local SEO plan. Rankiac checks Google rankings for top 64 positions (first 7 pages). Keywords past that position (#64) are rarely if ever clicked by online browsers.
SEO Results
Before the SEO was done for the client’s website, the website was not found in Google in the top 64 positions for all the targeted keywords. Click the image below to view the Goolge ranking report:
Day 1 (after the initial SEO was done)
The website is now ranked within 64 positions in Google for 5 targeted keywords. The keyword “chinese restaurant boston” even came in on the 2nd page (#16)!
The keyword “Chinese restaurant Massachusetts” jumped up 30 positions and now is on the 1st page in Google (top 10 listing).
Click the image below to view the Goolge ranking report:
Day 2
The rankings in Google fluctuate down a few positions for a few keywords. This is called “Google dance”. It happens when Google updates its results from more than 10,000 servers which cannot be proceeded at the same time on all those servers.
Day 3
4 keywords’ position jumped up in Google today and 3 of them now are on the 2nd page (top 20 listing). Click the image below to view the Goolge ranking report:
Day 12
The client’s website owns a few top 10 positions in Google for general keyword terms (without the brand name in it). Our next step is to promote the website for more general keyword terms, such as “Chinese food menu”, where the compitition is tougher – in return, the client’s website will see more targeted traffic from potencial customers who are searching for Chinese food/restaurants online.
Now www.laosichuan.com owns many Page 1 (Top 10) listings in Google organic search results.
For some of the keywords, the website owns double listings on Page 1.
Local Small Business SEO Case Study
Google Natural (Organic) Ranking Position Update
| Search Keywords | Before | After | Improvement |
|---|---|---|---|
| chinese restaurant boston | >#64 | #6 | 57+ |
| Chinese restaurant Massachusetts | #36 | #1 & 4 | 32 |
| chinese restaurants boston | >#64 | #8 | 55+ |
| boston chinese restaurant | >#64 | #6 | 58+ |
| boston seafood restaurants | >#64 | #17 | 47+ |
| Boston seafood restaurant | >#64 | #13 | 45+ |
| szechuan cuisine | >#64 | #11 | 53+ |
Stay tuned. More updates are coming soon…
Updated on August 24, 2010
Please note that this is a single case study. We can not and will not guarantee each and every client will achieve the same (if not better) results shown above. Every website is a live document with its own personality and we have no control over how search engines index and rank it.
Tags: local SEO, small business SEO
Filed Under: SEO