[paulcole]

> One thing about the inbound traffic I am getting is that it's all for direct restaurant searches (e.g. "Johnny's Diner") rather than area searches (e.g. "Newtown restaurants"); the latter is where you see the site's true value, so everyone just bounces from the restaurant page.

What page are you expecting to rank for “Newton restaurants”? And if people are ending up on the Johnny’s Diner page, why doesn’t that page include the site’s true value?

[eclipse31]

For something like "newtown restaurants" I hwas hoping the search results page for that would rank, something like menucosm.com /restaurants/newtown-123 . On that page I have good canonical URL, pagination, rich text, SEO text, links to similar pages, all the standard stuff.

The reason I said the Johnny's Diner page doesn't show the value is because t;s the area search that's most useful. I have added links to the area search from the Johnny's Diner page, and that might be why I'm slowly seeing this upturn in traffic from 350 to 500 (the dates tie in with when I released the code)

[paulcole]

https://www.menucosm.com/restaurants/newtown-123

How the heck are you expecting this to rank for anything?

> On that page I have good canonical URL, pagination, rich text, SEO text, links to similar pages, all the standard stuff.

Here's what I see when I load that URL:

https://imgur.com/a/cEffh4U

I see absolutely nothing like what you describe on that page.

Meta description: Find great restaurants in Sallybrook on menucosm.com Meta title: Restaurants in Sallybrook

Really?

And if the area search is so valuable on the Johnny's Diner page why are you linking to it and not making it a primary focus of the page?

[eclipse31]

Hey, thanks for getting back to me and taking a look.

Newtown and Johnny's Diner were just sample names I came up with. If you go to the homepage, you'll see links to area searches and the 3 most recent;y added restaurants. I didn't want to put anything specific, I guess I probably should have!