Challenge

The Anvil Inn restaurant came to us in need of getting their brand new site launched in a matter of days. They also wanted to drive traffic to their new site through search engines, but had only limited resources to dedicate to search engine optimization. Since they had no web presence before coming to us, they were not indexed by any of the major search engines and were not ranking in the top 100 even for searches of their own name - 'anvil inn.'

Solution

As part of the rapid development of the Anvil Inn website, Small Box implemented our basic nine-step search engine optimization process. Keyword research and an analysis of the competitvie landscape on the major search engines was a critical part of this process. High volume searches like 'indianapolis restaurants' were discovered to have a very low ROI because of the intense competition. It was simply impractical for the Anvil Inn to try to dedicate their limited resources to compete for them. The preliminary SEO analysis, however, revealed several promising, niche keywords like 'fine dining,' 'martini bar,' and 'fine cuisine.' These niche keywords had a very promising ROI because the search volume was strong and the competition was weak.

Results

Small Box's basic nine-step search engine optimization process proved to be a good fit for the Anvil Inn. We were able to get the Anvil Inn listed on page one of Google for several localized searches using the niche keywords identified in the initial analysis. Moreover, we were able to do within their budget and under the same tight deadlines of the web development. The preliminary SEO research and analysis was critical in finding the best SEO solution for the Anvil Inn.

Search engine optimization was implemented and the site was launched in October, 2007, but our SEO efforts continued to bear fruit well afterwards. The table below shows the Anvil Inn's Google search engine rankings on March 31, 2008.

 

Keyword	Ranking
indianapolis fine dining	9
fine dining indianapolis	8
fine dining near indianapolis	6
carmel fine dining	10
fine dining carmel	10
fine dining near carmel	5
fishers fine dining	2
fine dining fishers	2
fine dining near fishers	1
martini bar near carmel	2
martini bar near fishers	1

 

Portfolio: Anvil Inn
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