With years of experience helping consumer goods brands growing their SEO, we help big brands to new CPG companies.
In 2019, we saw a lot of our clients build new websites and continue their efforts into 2020. Why should consumer goods websites upgrade website framework?
In this article, we will talk about some of the most important features that all CPG websites should consider as they build onto new platforms or work to audit their current CPG websites. With websites like Magento and WordPress being very popular for this industry,
1. Mobile Friendliness is King for CPG
Having a mobile-friendly website is one of the most essential functionalities you can ask for. Looking at newer frameworks like the WordPress 2020 theme, you will see that it’s built fully-mobile friendly.
Why does mobile-friendliness matter for CPG websites? As people find your products across search engines (Google, Walmart, Amazon) you want to provide them mobile-friendly experiences when they are learning about your brand and using your store locator.
Mobile is Growing, Desktop Declines
As we enter a generation of people where mobile phones are increasingly popular, it’s important that you understand the mobile side of your CPG website.
When it comes to consumer good industry, we have seen this be one of the toughest things to manage when they are working off of legacy frameworks.
Many brands built their websites a decade ago assuming they wouldn’t need to update it. But as mobile phones started becoming popular, they are realizing the mobile side of their website is not usable.
What are the Options for Non-mobile Friendly Websites?
These are the best options for CPG websites that are not mobile-friendly:
- Use landing pages tied to your domain across social media
- Plan to upgrade your website framework
- Develop a shop or temporary website that is mobile-friendly
If you are running Google ads or pushing traffic from social media, it’s essential that you can utilize a custom landing page to ensure those users are able to load and move around the page. Often times non-mobile friendly websites restrict users from interacting and even sometimes loading pages. Here is an example of a custom landing page we utilized for a client that gave mobile users an effective experience.
2. Fast Page Speed
With so many websites on legacy frameworks, page speed often gets left in the dust.
If you want your recipe content and products to rank well across Google, they should load in under 4 seconds. Many CPG brands ask me, why do my recipe pages load so slow? Here are the most popular reasons that your pages might be loading slow:
- Clumsy HTML structure
- Heavy JavaScript Load Times
- Under-optimized Images
Using tools like Google Lighthouse, you can scan your website and look for possible errors that are affecting your page speed.
3. Effective SEO Strategies
Obviously this is a pretty big step, but I have a lot of articles that explain how to create CPG SEO strategies. In this article, we are specifically talking about the website, and I believe there are several steps you can take to optimizing your website for search.
Content Strategy
For any consumer goods website, it’s essential that you develop a content strategy to generate keywords. Once you have generated a keyword list, you can work to create SEO-optimized recipe content that can generate new traffic for your website.
On-page Optimizations
With your keyword list, work to add these keywords across meta and title tags on your website. This can help you generate some effective numbers for those keywords.
Structured Data (schema.org)
If you are using recipe content, it’s very important to utilize structured data across recipes those pages. This can help you generate rich impressions and clicks across the organic search.
Keyword Monitoring
Finally, monitor your traction of those keywords as you implement changes on your website. What if you do something to your website that negatively affects SEO? You should try and revert those changes and see if you can gain those ranks back.
