What The Food Industry Needs To Know About SEO
Having a strong online presence is needed for businesses to succeed now more than ever.
What are the most important aspects of this for the growing food industry today?, with consumers searching for terms such as ‘’Restaurants near me?’’. Localised searches show the importance of having your business locations search engine optimised another important part of optimising your site is also ensuring it is mobile friendly.
According to Statista, 63% of google searches are now done on mobile devices, (Robertson, 2020) So not having your business optimised with fast loading times and content, that adapts to mobile users can cause a business to loose revenue. Also having incorrect business listings, can create poor customer interactions, and generate bad reviews.
So to gain a competitive edge and grow your customer base, it is important to consider the effects on your business of having bad SEO and a weak online presence.
An example of a business who developed strong SEO is Fashion retailer Milady’s, who adapted a strategy focused on mobile optimisation and its SEO focused on location based searches over terms and keywords.
They found that their local searches lead to an increase of 50% more mobile visitors visiting stores in one day, and found that 18% of local searches lead to a sale within one day.
These figures show for themselves the benefits of location optimisation and mobile friendly sites.
Milady’s chose to focus their strategy on a less traditional method by using ‘’Google My Business’’, and with it they went from the most invisible fashion brand on Google, to the most visible, all within 3 months. (MMA Smarties, 2017)
Milady’s example is from 2016, however it is still relevant to the Food industry as it remains vital to focus on local search and mobile optimisation. Another consideration of SEO for businesses, is the “Bert algorithm” update in October 2019, which was created to help Google understand search queries , it allows Google to better understand natural spoken languages that are more commonly used by consumers today.
Why is this important for your business?, When optimising your site with keywords consider how will your customers be searching, and how will the Google algorithms influence their search results. This will help you when writing content and creating keywords.
(Robertson, 2020)
There are many other parts to search engine optimisation but here is a starting point very relevant for the food industry to focus on first.
#keywords #SEO #localsearch #mobilefriendly #resturants #localbusiness
MMA Smarties (2017) ‘Miladys Mobile Search’, Warc By Ascential.
Robertson, C. (2020) ‘how to stay at the forefront of SEO trends’, Warc Best Practice. Available at: www.warc.com.
Chaffey, D., Hemphill, T. and Edmundson-Bird, D., 2019. Digital business and e-commerce management. 7th ed. Harlow: Pearson.
Enge, E., Spencer, S. and Stricchiola, J., 2015. The Art of SEO. 3rd ed. O'REILLY.
Referring to the new Bert algorithm developed by Google to better understand natural search queries, Answer The Public is useful online tool for a business to create keywords based on natural searches. A dashboard of the most popular search queries is displayed based on the main keyword inputted such as ‘chocolate’. The results are categorised by the interrogative pronoun it contained such as ‘how’, ‘why’ and ‘are’. The tool is essentially writing long-tail keyword phrases that cover many different types of informational search. For example, dietary needs could be identified in the search ‘are chocolate buttons gluten free’ or ‘what chocolate is vegetarian’. These longtail keywords can be integrated into a business’s website both on-page and off-page, in the form of a page header, body text, URL, page description or meta tag. I feel this tool is invaluable for businesses to optimise content and websites for SEO because it reveals the needs of customers in a specific niche which businesses can use to tailor the solution their product or service provides towards. The data it can collect is time-relevant and it offers an opportunity to add value to content by being useful and relevant to the target audience which is key to content marketing.
ReplyDeleteAuthor: Elizabeth Duffy
To expand on your thoughts about improvising as Google's algorithm changes, much of the same thinking should be applied when considering organic searches. As stated in Robertson, 2020, "According to research by Brightedge, organic search traffic to website compared with other channels has risen from 51% to 53% in the last five years". The same paper also discusses the three pillars of organic search: technical, on-page and off-page.
ReplyDeleteThe technical aspect is concerned with what most would informally refer to as the back-end of the website. Involved in this is the ensuring that search engines and crawlers can access the website with ease to assess it and rank it appropriately.
On-page concerns mostly revolve around optimising the user experience, both from the viewpoint of its visual nature and the efficiency and ease at which the user can operate.
When discussing off-page factors, one would be referring to the views, readers and inbound links from other websites to theirs. The more of each of these things a website acquires, the stronger their reputation and website quality will be in the eyes of a search engine.