Trip Advisor Dominating the SERPS
If you type in a popular restaurant name followed by a local modifier such as ‘Number 16 Glasgow’ into Google you will find that Trip Advisor has numerous listings for that keyword.
At first this looked like they were using dodgy SEO practices but what they are doing is actually relatively simple and appears to be within Google’s guidelines.
Great Page Titles & Fresh Content
The reason that Trip Advisor is dominating the first page of Google for the mentioned keywords is because Trip Advisor displays 5 reviews on each page and each page is optimised for the top review’s title or sometimes the amount of reviews in total, the restaurant name and the area in which that restaurant in based.
This means that if a restaurant is popular, then Trip Advisor is constantly adding a fresh page of content with a unique page title and as Google mentioned in the past, they are putting a greater emphasis on ranking fresh, unique content.
How to beat them
Companies like 5pm, who take a cut of each booking that they generate for a restaurant will probably be suffering as a result of this. Their rankings appear to be getting pushed down as a result of Trip Advisor dominating for these phrases.
Change The Page Titles
For several restaurants it appears that 5pm actually get a lot more reviews than Trip Advisor, so what they need to do is optimise their own page titles for the restaurant name, location and possibly something that ads a bit of uniqueness to it such as a review title.
So this ‘Reviews of number 16’ needs to become something more like this ‘Number 16 Glasgow – insert top review title here – Discounts Available.’
This simple fix across all restaurant names could potentially result in an increase in visitors and revenue. It should also allow them to have multiple listings for each keyword.