SEO for Food and Beverage - Guide to Grow Your Business

What Is SEO for the Food and Beverage Industry?

SEO, short for search engine optimization, is the process of increasing a web page’s organic traffic by focusing on beneficial SEO tactics. It’s important to remember when that website ranks highly in search results, more people will see it.

Keep in mind that it could be many potential audiences that may see the listing or mention on Google – this could be one of a number of audiences including:

• Consumers looking to directly buy your product
• Other businesses looking to add to their in-store or online products
• Press – local and national
• Trade publications
• Distributors
• Competitors (adding it here because it’s always good to keep an eye on them too)

It’s always good to be top of mind for all of the audiences listed above and to keep the competition (ones you know of and ones in the search listings).

Why Is Marketing Important for the Food and Beverage Industry?

As you know, it’s incredibly hard to get in front of the right audiences to be successful in this industry. Ranking for terms that are super relevant to your target audience’s searches can be invaluable in terms of potential impact on your business.

How Long Does It Take To Start Working?

There are several stages in the aftermath of making adjustments to your online presences (both on-site and off-site) that show the effects of the work that you do. The ultimate effect of the works takes place in about 3-6 months. However, we can see the impact of edits and updates to copy on the website in 7-10 days. We often see positive changes in this time frame.

As the changes age and Google, Bing and Yahoo digest them, they tend to continue to improve slowly. How quickly changes make an impact depends on factors like the age of your website, how many people are linking to it (and how influential the search engines feel they are) and how competitive the industry that you are in is.

How Will I Know If It’s Working?

You can start seeing the impact of the work that you are doing through a few data points. These are:

• Changes in traffic from search engines to your website (often referred to as organic traffic). This is shown via the Google Analytics dashboard. Google Analytics is free and is the industry standard for measuring and analyzing traffic to your website.
• Changes in where you are ranking for terms. This can be seen using a variety of third party programs such as seranking.com, moz.com or semrush.com
• Improvement in clicks and impressions for keyword phrases – Google provides another free tool called Google Search Console that will actually give you data on how your website is being viewed in their search engine listings. Once you set it up, your website data will start compiling. As we mentioned, SEO can take some time and this type of data can show you in the early stages of your campaign that you are moving in the right direction with your efforts (by seeing impressions and clicks for relevant keywords increase).
• You ultimately are getting more calls, leads and sales for your product. You want to make sure that you have all of the fundamental data collection tools in place to be able to tell where people found you from that contact you. This is something that is not often done by marketers for a variety of reasons (usually cost and time). However, it’s invaluable to have this type of data because of your analysis afterwards. Ultimately, you want to put your marketing dollars into the channel(s) that are driving the most meaningful response from your target audience.

John – My Head is spinning – Can You and Your Team Just Help Me with SEO?

Absolutely! We love working with food and beverage seo clients. Just fill out the form on the page or give us a call at 440-821-1425 and we can take a look at your site and campaign.

Steps to Consider When Crafting An SEO Strategy

There are certain steps marketing experts must consider when trying to reach the correct audience through SEO efforts.

• First off, it’s essential to create a site that appeals to your clientele. To gain any traction to your site, you need to include well-rounded content. It’s important for a business to stay up to date on current trends and pay close attention to what is overall helping your business to grow.

• Other aspects to consider include, have your content or images recently been updated on your site? Are you paying close attention to keywords and rankings? How are your competitors doing and what could you implement that they may be doing to make yourself more successful?

• After considering the above questions, it’s highly recommended to have a social media presence for your brand. This is completed by being consistent with your content. Be up to date and active with your content and know who your target audience is. Try to build a relationship with your audience and create the content they want to see. By doing this, businesses can interact with different visitors and help build brand awareness.

• It’s essential for food and beverage manufacturing SEO to pay close attention to the keywords trending within the industry. Strategize the use of keywords that increase the growth of your site and be sure to include those keywords within your website.

• Additionally, it’s important to pay attention to competitors. See what SEO keywords they are benefiting from and how your business can grow from that.

• Backlinks are essential in SEO rankings and help a business boost their site. Including different links within pages of your site allows for visitors to find information easily. This will increase interactivity and ultimately sales.

Case Study – M/I Homes

At our firm, we have worked with a variety of companies to increase their SEO rankings. One company we have worked with in the past was M/I Homes. Through the work we have conducted, we saw an increase of 10,000 visitors nationwide to their website via organic search.

Comparing September 1-27, 2018 to the same dates in 2017, we saw:

• Overall website traffic went up 48%
• Organic website traffic went up 12%
• New users on the website went up 58%

These results were accomplished through search engine optimization. The campaign itself focused on:

• Keyword research – Determining high-volume search terms for each of the cities M/I Homes had a presence in

• Content creation and optimization – Using the keywords from our research, we then wrote optimized content for all 16 locations and their subsections

• Google local profile creation and optimization – After finding the relevant profiles, we initiated verification and began profile management

• Google Search Console review – Evaluating and remedying any issues that we found via GSC