SEO for Foodies

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Each year there seems to be more and more  food and drink festivals, and as an out and out foodie I’m really loving it!

So how do Independent food and drink businesses go about marketing themselves in this era of supermarket offers and special deals? How do you make your products stand out from the rest? Here are a few questions and suggestions that you will hopefully find useful / thought provoking:

  • Have a clear strategy and plan – this involves understanding your target market, your competition and how you get your products in front of your audience.
  • How good are your marketing materials – packaging, point of sale, posters, flyers, website etc..
  • Are you capturing your customers’ and your potential customers’ email addresses? If so are you sending them a regular monthly e-newsletter?
  • Are you using Social Media to full effect? – This will primarily be Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
  • How good is your website? Is it set up to sell, and are you easily found in Google search results?
  • Do you write a regular blog?
  • If you travel to festivals and markets – can your customers easily see when and where to find you?
  • Do you give your website visitors reason to keep coming back to your website – free downloadable recipes, how to videos etc..
  • Do you stage events to promote your products?Just a few ideas and questions to get you thinking about your marketing. You may already be doing some or even all of these things, if you are then great. The question is how often and are you able to quantify how effective they are?
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SEO Things You Should Be Doing in the First Year of Your Website’s Life

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By now, most site owners realise the importance and value of SEO in the development and growth of their site. A properly optimised site is going to rank better in the search engines, see more targeted traffic being directed over, have a higher conversion rate and much more. However, SEO is incredibly long term and nothing can rush time. It takes time for a site to build a good trust factor with the search engines and until that happens, most of your off-site SEO efforts are going to produce minimal results.

If you recently launched your site and are already looking into SEO, here are a few things you should focus your time and energy on.

Start a Blog
Start blogging right away. Start with at least one blog post a week and see if you can work up to one a day within the first year of your blog’s life. That may seem like a huge ordeal now, but you’d be surprised at how easy it gets to write a 350-500 word blog post with practice. You’ll learn how to better formulate your thoughts, present a single idea and flush it out entirely with time. If you aren’t confident in your writing ability or are struggling to come up with topics, turn to your employees and co-workers for help. The worst thing you could do is launch a blog and then not routinely update it with fresh content.

It takes a long time to hone your writing skills, find and develop your niche, build your reputation and attract loyal readers to your blog, so don’t expect to see major results fast. However, just like your site, as your blog ages it earns more trust from the search engines. Individual blog posts can start to rank for targeted keywords, increasing your online brand presence.

Build Your Social Network
If you are just getting onboard the social media marketing train, you’re in for a surprise! Social media marketing takes a lot more time than most companies realise, and it needs a solid strategy to run on. Don’t walk into social media blind and hope you’ll figure it out before something goes wrong. Take the first year of your site’s life to really develop your social profiles and connect with your target audience. What kind of content are they looking for from you? When is the best time to engage them? Which sites do they spend most of their time on? If you want your social media marketing efforts to be effective, you need to understand the behavior of your target audience so you can better reach them.

Focus on On-Site Optimization
The first year of your site’s life should really be spent focusing on the site itself. Don’t worry too much about developing a full blown link building strategy just yet; it’s more important to make sure your site is in the best shape it can be! Work on creating great webpage content, developing an internal linking structure that helps keep your visitor engaged, tweaking your landing pages to improve their conversion rate and so forth. Your website is going to be the hub of the rest of your Internet marketing. It doesn’t matter how great everything is off-site if your website doesn’t measure up. At the end of the day, it is your website that is going to convince visitors to act. Does it matter how many show up or how they got there if you website fails to convert?

Plan an Editorial Calendar
Content pretty much fuels all of your SEO and social media marketing. Without great content, you don’t give your target audience a real reason to check out your site, profile or blog. In addition to all the content you have to create for your sites, you also need to start looking into 3rd party sites where you can publish guest content. Take the first year of your site’s life to build relationships with industry bloggers and other site owners that allow guest articles to be published on their site. Identify which popular industry blogs cater to your target audience and start laying the groundwork to get one of your articles published there. If you can create an editorial calendar for you to follow, you’ll be able to get a jumpstart on your content marketing.

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5 Ways to Kickstart Your Digital Marketing Strategy this 2017

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Christmas and the New Year celebrations are but a distant memory so now it’s time to get down to business. We all know that in digital marketing, the game changes constantly. What worked for you last year may not work at all in 2017. So keep right up to date with our top tips on how to update your digital marketing strategy for the year ahead:

Start with the basics – Set some GOALS.
Not having goals for the year could spell disaster for your digital marketing strategy. If your campaign doesn’t have clear-set goals for the year, you may find it difficult to write your content, plan your emails and set your social media strategy. Goals can be as simple as “getting more people in my geographical location interested in my product” or “go global.” With defined goals, your content will become more cohesive and appealing for all audiences.

Pick the right communication channels.
In addition to your goals, you should determine which channels or platforms work best for your company. If a popular company is doing so well in a particular marketing channel, it does not mean that it will work for you too. Don’t just try to recreate another company’s actions as their target audiences and goals may be different. Do some social listening, know which platforms your audience participates in, and build your campaign around them.

Learn to talk back – digitally, that is.
One common mistake that companies often make is to simply post a lot of content and then forget about it. Try to use social media the way it was intended – for communication and personalisation. Respond to tweets, comment on your audiences’ posts, and find other ways to communicate with your followers. If you do this right, your company will become a part of their lives and your brand will be seen by their circle of friends.

2017 is the year when marketing gets more personal so it is best to start talking back digitally to your audience.

Go Live.
In one of our previous blog posts we mentioned that Facebook Live is a game changer for social media marketing. This still holds true this year, along with other platforms such as Instagram Stories, Snapchat and Periscope. In fact, digital marketing this year is about closing the communication gap to as close to zero as possible. The digital marketing landscape is drowning with content and with so many options on what to watch and digest, going “live” helps capture the audience. Knowing that if they don’t watch you right away, the moment will be gone can bring an immediacy to your message. The idea that something that may “disappear” in a short while could help them to focus and watch your live stream now.

The Google mobile-first policy for website ranking.
The Internet was abuzz when Google announced their mobile-first indexing policy. If you are starting your digital marketing strategy without considering the mobile-first indexing, then you are setting up your company for failure. The majority of internet users consume content on their mobile phones these days, so in 2017 make sure that you are targeting your mobile audience.

If you would like an informal chat with us about how we could help you with your 2017 digital marketing then please call us on 015242 37774 or email hello@alexandermarketing.co.uk

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