Transcription
It's peak summer in Portland, Maine. The wharves are slammed. Lobster boats are coming in at 4 in the morning. And there's a line down the block at every shack on the water. Tourists are driving in from four states away for one specific reason. They want a lobster roll.
And right now, somewhere in Portland, a place that does it better than anyone else, is sitting at position 15 on Google because the owner set up their Google business profile in 2019 and never touched it again. So today I'm going to search for the best lobster roll in Portland, Maine, and break down the search results that we see. So here we go.
Lobster roll, Portland, Maine. I haven't even had a drink today. All right, so there's no ads, which is kind of a surprise. It is I don't know. It's like I guess it's an hour later in Portland than it is here. So it's 12:30, so right around lunchtime. And what we have here, this is what we call the map pack, the top three results. Often you'll hear people say, "If you're ranked number four, that means you're invisible. This is why you can't see the fourth ranked business." But what I'm going to do is hit more places because I want to see the fourth ranked business.
So here we have the High Roller Lobster Co. 5,400 reviews, 4,300 reviews, 3,700 reviews. And now this is weird. The first loser, the fourth place business has more reviews than anyone who's ranked ahead of them. And their review average is better than the second rated company. But let's start by taking a look at the number one ranked business, the High Roller Lobster Co. and see what we have.
Love the image. Just this is a classic lobster roll. You can see Lobster overflowing. This is the first image. The reason this is so important, it used to be that you could click and call directly from here, but now you actually need to click on it first before the call button comes up, which means this image needs to get people to want to click on your GBP. Okay, then the first video we have is somebody walking in and enjoying a lobster roll. That sounds great. Uh, what else do we have? Outdoor seating, great cocktails, wonderful. Doesn't accept reservations. Pretty common for lobster roll spots. And then we have a review summary. People say delicious lobster rolls, fresh, tender, highlight the fun, lively atmosphere, and the friendly, helpful staff. Wonderful.
So, I am interested in seeing some of these negative reviews, but it looks like they're 4.6es because they get a lot of fours. But let's see lowest. See what we have. 9 months ago. So that's pretty good. 9 months ago was the first low review here. This is much better than if their low reviews were like yesterday. During our visit, the fire alarm went off. Oh no. Wow. That is I mean, come on. Like, okay, so Mark here, he's got to calm down. This clearly was not the restaurant's fault. The fire alarm went off. The fire department came. Okay, so that one tough to blame the restaurant. What else? Service and food disappointing. Likes lobster and has had of them. Excellent. Uh, excellent grammar there, Jack. But he must have been This is only his second review, so he was really pissed off about this one. It was too expensive. Not enough lobster. And he left no tip. All right. I'm not sure how much I want to believe Jack there. You know, he he's the type of person that goes to a restaurant, orders a lobster roll, and doesn't leave a tip because he didn't get enough lobster in the roll. That's obviously not the staff's fault. Most people seem to love it. All right. What does Lisa say? Unimpressed. Way too expensive. Mostly bread, could barely taste the lobster. She liked the atmosphere, you know. Three out of five. TN absolute ripoff and tourist trap. Okay, so pretty similar feedback overall. People are saying it's too expensive. I mean, lobster rolls are expensive, right? You can't serve decent lobster roll for, you know, five bucks.
Here you go. High Roller Lobster Co. Take a look at their website. Now, obviously, they are focused on the lobster roll, which I would expect that's what their entire header image is here about. And I wanted to start on their homepage because even though this is a restaurant, the website has a massive effect on how well they're ranking. What we look for on the title tag is the target keyword and the place. So probably something like lobster roll main and they don't have it. They just have their brand, the high roll lobster co. So a bit of a missed opportunity there, but again they're ranking number one. So they're doing some other stuff right. They don't This is their logo. Bony Classic Galleries. So, this is they're highlighting the disc golf tournament on their homepage instead of lobster rolls. That is a strange choice. I got to say that that's a that's a weird choice. This clearly should be on an inner page. The homepage, the GBP landing page should be about the business, what they offer, what they serve. In this case, it should be about lobster rolls. Again, they're ranked number one. thought if I clicked on this and I was trying to find the best lobster roll and I clicked through to the website, this would be kind of weird, right? Like why am I looking at a website that seems to be about disc golf tournaments?
Okay, then we actually get into the restaurant. Obviously, this should be higher. Check out the menu. Check out our story. Deliver and pickup. Okay, I would like to see more content on the homepage. It's pretty thin. I would like it to talk about why I should choose their lobster rolls. I would instead of talking about disc golf, I would like to talk about the awards that they've run. Maybe they've have some reviews that they can highlight. Things like that just to get me to convince me that this is a place worth going to in Portland. Lobster rolls are not super hard to find. Convince me that this is the right place to go.
If I look at the menu, this is not a very user-friendly menu if I'm on this menu, right? Because I have to now I don't know how much things are. I have to actually click through and there's still no pricing. So this and I have to click to get. So, this is a horrible design menu that like just not very effective. It's really hard to navigate and figure out. Like, so it says crab roll. So, this hover over where it tells me what the object is is just horrible UI. Could you imagine going to Amazon's website and everything is blurry and you can't see what anything is until you hover over it. I mean, this is like, what is this? Oh, it's bisque, but it's showing I mean, it's just it's not great. And then I click on it and it says crab roll and nothing else and bisque and nothing. This is not very well designed. they really need just, you know, to put their menu in a much simpler format. They can have links on the specific items. Like what I would do for like the lobster roll is have a link to a page. So you have the menu and it has lobster roll that has a link to a page that talks in great detail about the lobster roll, right? Because if I come back to the homepage, we can see check out our story and there's so much interesting information. This is designed feels like it was designed by someone who doesn't know anything about SEO if I'm being honest. Uh 81 results, so it's a very large website. They I think they can do a lot here to actually try to improve some of the conversions that they're seeing. Again, they're ranked number one, so I can't be too upset about it.
So, with how many errors I saw on their site, ranked number one, I'm really interested to see what Dillows is doing wrong because they're ranked number four, which means if I'm searching for lobster roll, I'm not going to see them. They're losing a lot of business by just being in the fourth spot. Let's see what we could pro improve about their uh GBPN website. So, let's take a look here. I want to see the reviews, but outdoor seating private great long 25 long warfar. So, they are right on the water. All right. So, let's take a look at some of the reviews. Similar to what we saw in High Roller, not very many like just negative reviews. A lot of fives and good deal of fours, which is driving the four and a half, not fives and ones. Uh so, let's just take a look what people are upset about. 5 months ago. Not bad. Place has a great view. Then that's the only thing they have. Eekes. It's always rough, slow service, and the food is bad. The Applebees of Portland, man. Sick burn, Jeff. Sick burn. Wow. Food was pitiful. Understaffed. All right. So, he he just thought the novelty of eating dinner on a boat in the water. Yeah. I mean, this is a novelty, right? And okay, so she's upset that server was saying that she could split the bill. Okay, that's fine. What do we have here? Came from NYC and exp came especially for this restaurant. Was blown away by the food. Wow. Delicious and fresh. Enjoyed the drinks. However, the reason I g this place one star is because of the three hosts that ruined our experience. They told us 45minut wait and we waited with bars an hour and we weren't called. We asked try to see us and we told blah blah blah. So they waited for, you know, an hour and a half instead of 45 minutes. I mean, that's frustrating but at the same time it can be really tough if you're running a restaurant to estimate how long the actual wait will be. So that's it. So they loved the place, but they didn't like that they had to wait an extra 45 minutes, so they gave it one star. And we're waiting at the bar. I Okay, I don't get one star for that. That doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Again, rude. Got waited at the bar. No one served. Table sticky. Okay, so again, not terrible.
Let's take a look at their website, cuz this is what I'm interested in. I want to see how the website is structured, why they're not ranked higher. Now, just like I did with the High Roller Lobster Co, I'm going to start by looking at the homepage title tag. And remember, what we want to see is the city name and the core service they're offering. If I hover over it, we have So, sometimes I get flak uh in the comments on this channel because I say that a lot of local businesses use the word home on their title tag. We've run multiple surveys of this. A lot of localo businesses do this. It's the most common homepage title tag that we see on businesses that aren't ranking. They went with home as their homepage title tag. The homepage title tag is the most important words of content on your entire domain for Google rank position. Google takes the 60 characters or so on your homepage title tag as a massive sign for what your page is about and what you want to rank for. Home is the default for so many website platforms. That's why it's the most common one we see. This is an embarrassing embarrassing mistake. I can almost guarantee that they would pop into the top three if all they did was change their homepage title tag to lobster roll in Portland, Maine, Dillows on the Water. Literally, it would take them 45 seconds and they would rank in the top three for a huge additional group of people than what they're doing right now. This is such a fundamental embarrassing error. This is a sign that they hired a web designer who knows nothing about SEO. I get really hyped up when uh there's such simple mistakes.
Okay, now H1 tag. What we want to see in the H1 tag is not the exact words in the title tag, but we want to see core service category and the city name listed again. In this case, lobster roll main. What we see waterfront dining at its finest. This is another fundamental error in how to build a website designed for local SEO. These two things are why they're not ranked in the top three. This should talk about how they have one of the highest rated lobster rolls in Maine. Over 6,000 reviews and they're on the water. Something like that. The the H1 tag is your opportunity when you're building a website. You want to talk to Google. You want to talk to the AI systems and you want to talk to users who are actually on your website. In this case, because it's a restaurant, I would guess that they get less traffic than most other local businesses. Most of the people are just going to stop on the GBP. So most of this should be focused on talking to Google and the AI systems and the AI systems will repeat word for word what businesses put on their H1 waterfront dining at its finest. That is not doing the trick. Okay, let's see. Okay, so then reservations fine maybe. Again, what we really like to see is more social proof. Okay, let me take a pause for a second. What what's really wild about this style of audit work, every Tuesday afternoon, I sit down with the people in my AI SEO Mastery Pro community and we do this exact same thing, but we do it on their websites. They're share their screens. I pull up their Google business profile, their website, their rank maps, the whole thing, and we figure out what's actually wrong and what to fix first. It's not pre-recorded. It's not generic advice. It's a real diagnosis on the real businesses of people who are members every single week. If that sounds like something that you'd be interested in, there's a link to join in the description. The people in there are quietly outranking competitors, spending 10 times more than they are on local SEO. Come hang out with us.
But what I'd like to see right here, just below the fold, is social proof. And a restaurant with over 6,000 reviews has social proof in spades. Before they say reservations, maybe convince someone to make a reservation there. Show some social proof. Uh, order online. Fine. gift cards. Fine. This I don't like this that I see this quite a bit. I vastly prefer local businesses to actually embed the GBP and embed GBP reviews. That can be done. It's very simple. It's very easy to do. And the reason for that is it's much more trustworthy for your visitors if they're looking at a GBP embed instead of content like this. Now, I don't think they lied about Roland's review here. if they did, they did a horrible job because this is uh not not a very this isn't a good enough review to justify lying about. So, I don't think they did, but we don't know that they did. If it was an embed of their GBP, then we would know that they weren't lying. Okay? And that's the that's the end of the homepage. So, we're missing a lot of content calling out what they have, what they serve that talks about the different entities, right? Remember, Google works based on entities. So, it's looking to connect the entity of what food people are looking for uh or that they're looking for a restaurant entity against the service and against the place entity of Portland, Maine. This is doing none of that. They don't even talk about I mean, they say Portland here, iconic views, but they barely talk about the fact that they're located in Portland. Okay? And it's just a huge missed opportunity. They're not talking to Google at all. This needs to be updated to talk to Google, to talk to AI systems. just a massive a massive gap in what they're doing.
Let me just take a look at how their menu is laid out. Okay, this is what I wanted to see the high roller do just uh like it's a plain text menu. Uh it's easy to read, easy to go through. What I would also do to this menu, like I was talking about with High Roller, is for some of the big name items like lobster roll that people are actually searching for and to see if people are searching for it or not, you can check in your Google search console. Uh you'll be able to see what people are searching for, what you're showing up for. If you see a couple of different dishes showing up frequently on that list, then we would do like clam chowder might be one uh is we would link this to a page that goes into detail about the clam chowder. How long you've had the same recipe, even give the recipe, maybe embed a YouTube video of the chef making the dish behind the kitchen. All of this thing is massively helpful in establishing trust and authority for that entity of that specific dish. Right? So, if we come to lobster roll, they could do the same thing. They could have a whole page talking about their lobster roll, what makes theirs special, what makes theirs different, a video of the chef assembling it, a video of somebody tasting it and talking about it. All of this would do a lot to help them rank higher for those types of searches. This is not a very competitive search. Dillows is ranking because they're not trying. the high roller is ranking even though they're actively trying to hurt themselves by by by making their website about disc golf.
All right, let's take a look at another one. I often like to take a look at somebody who's all the way down in the bottom to see what we have. So, I like finding decent reviews. I'm not going to choose closed is weird. Oh, they they're only open at night. I like to find decent reviews that aren't that isn't ranking very well because getting reviews is typically harder than doing the things that will get you ranked, especially in a search like this one that's relatively low in competition. And here we have 8,100 reviews. Becky's Diner, they did the hard part, right? They got 8,100 reviews, 4.6 rating. Uh let's see what their review distribution looks like. Yeah, even fewer one and two star reviews than we saw in the other players. They're at a 4.6 six because of the, you know, quantity of four-star reviews, which is pretty good. In our experience, you're typically shooting for 4.6 to 4.9. A perfect fivestar rating, generally speaking, converts worse than a 4849.
Okay, so let's take a look at the website. What do we have? Uh what do we have for photos? All right, so we have a bunch of photos, so they're not missing that. They have a bunch of images. Pretty common for restaurants cuz a lot of users will add photos. We got some popular menu items. Nice summary. It's busy right now, which I would expect. It's roughly lunchtime. But let's take a look at their website.
All right, so same problem. Homepage title tag is the brand. That's it. Uh, they need to improve that. And again, it doesn't need to be lobster roll. It could be whatever they're trying to rank for the hardest. It might be local diner in Portland. It could be waterfront restaurant Portland. Anything like that would definitely help them rank for what they're trying to instead of just their brand. And same thing, uh, H1 also missing an opportunity. And there's nothing on the homepage. They have nothing on the homepage. Seriously, I mean, seeing stuff like this, it just makes me sad. Okay, they almost certainly paid someone to build this website for them, and this is what they got. They paid someone money, and this is what was delivered. There's There's nothing here. There's nothing here. This is why they're not ranking. Google needs to have content on the website in order to know what to rank you for. If you don't have any content, it can't rank you for anything. All the only content they have is their brand name. Any idiot SEO can rank you for your brand name. That's not impressive. But without any other content, Google doesn't know what this site is about. That's why it's ranked so low. It's sad to see that with how many positive reviews they have.
Okay, if I take a menu, full menu PD. Oh, I have to click there and then I have to click here. Nothing fa I don't know what that means. I don't know why that's there. Maybe they built this website themselves. I don't know. Um, okay. So, it's going to be very similar advice to what I had talked about for Demillos. They just need a little bit more content. I wonder how large their website is. Let's just take a look. One sign of competition that I often use is how large the website is. And theirs is tiny. Seven results. They have nothing on the website. Yeah, they have nothing. How big is Dillow's? I'm just curious. I'm just curious now. 83. So, again, the size of their website's not the problem. They just need more content that talks about the lobster roll. Uh, they need to update their freaking homepage title tag. Same thing for Becky's Diner here.
Okay. Okay. So, so that's three lobster shacks in Portland, Maine. One of them sitting on prominence and coasting. One of them stuck at number four because they're missing such basic basic things. And one buried at position 15 because whoever they paid to build their website didn't know what they were doing. If you like this one where I broke down lobster rolls in Maine, go check out the gumbo episode I did in New Orleans during Marty GR. Same format, different city, different food, same story playing out in the local pack. See you next time.