Dickey’s Barbecue is the world’s largest barbecue franchise in the world. With franchised restaurants all over the United States and headquarters in Dallas, Dickey’s stands as one of the most recognizable names in barbecue.
WordPress Management & Web Development
With interest in expanding their brand online, they worked with a company to develop a custom WordPress website using WooCommerce as the e-commerce backend. The website they initially gave us was very barebones and lacked many of the key features that successful e-commerce websites maintain. Here are some of the features we added to the home page of the website:
Lightweight Javascript Pop-up
Popups are becoming very popular for directing users to important pages. E-commerce sites all over the web use pop-ups to push sales, get conversions, and grow their email list. Many competitors use pop-up plugins that are slow and weigh down their computer.
We built a custom javascript functionality specifically for the Dickey’s website, to both move people to sale pages and increase their email marketing efforts. Made with only about 20 lines of code, we build some of the most lightweight javascript pop-ups around.
WooCommerce Quantity Selector
With experienced developers in WooCommerce, I work with them to come up with custom on-page functionalities I think would benefit the user experience. One of these updates was adding a quantity selector to each product across the website.
We saw that this increased the number of products that were being made per order since it was easier to interact with higher quantities of products.
Recipe Category Optimizations
We understand how important recipe categories are to ranking your recipe snippets across the organic search. For Dickey’s, we added a simple navigation dropdown to their main recipe page that helped users more easily find the recipes they were looking for based on the type of meal and types of protein.
This update helped increase user flow to category pages by 30%.
Creating A Base for Organic SEO
When new products hit the online market, and there is a marketing budget behind them, it is essential to create a base for organic traffic before you start spending money on ads. This will ensure that once you stop running ads, you will still be seeing traffic to your website.
I have worked with many brands that did not set up SEO correctly and saw a severe drop in traffic once their ads were paused. For Dickeys, we had a three-pronged strategy that included the following elements:
- Recipe Schema
- On-page Product Optimizations
- Content writing
Recipe Schema Will Win 2022
As we enter 2022, we have seen how important recipe schema is for brands that are trying to get their content displayed across the web. When we started working with Dickey’s, they had several recipes loaded to the website but they were not ranking for anything.
After about 3 months of recipe optimizations, we started seeing an average of 1.5K monthly impressions compared to the couple hundred we were getting before.
We noticed some recipes performing better than others and we worked to focus on those recipes through creating backlinks and PR relationships.
With Recipe Schema, we generated over 100K impressions in 6 months.
On-Page Product SEO for E-Commerce
When it comes to selling products on your website, you need to make sure they are optimized for SEO and for paid search. Using tools like Google Merchant Center will give you direct insight into how your products and ads are performing across Google search.
Using product schema will inform Google on your exact prices and brands that you are selling. This will help them serve your results better to people who will actually purchase.
How We Advertise New CPG Brands
Along with web development, Google Ads were one of the primary ways we helped Dickey’s reach their brand across new channels.
When starting off, it can be especially hard to know which platforms to use, and how much to spend across all of them. I will talk about some of the best ways we worked with Dickey’s to promote their brand across paid search.
Google Product Ads for CPG
Google has many great options for CPG brands looking to entire the direct to the consumer market. Google product ads are a cost-effective way to begin generating sales through your website. With this client, we wanted to make sure we were ranking #1 for several keywords that we determined to be essential to our process, and this helped us optimize the website as well as organic search.
Facebook & Instagram Ads
With new advertising opportunities daily, we work to figure out the best ones to boost ROI. With this client, Facebook and Instagram gave us direct access to people that had an affinity for products like the ones we were selling, and it helped us create a strong presence across social media as well.
The Results After 6 Months of Work
After 6 months of working with Dickey’s, we generated hundreds of clicks to the website, as well as consistent sales. Since we started from 0, it took a little bit of time for us to get off the ground using Google search, but once Google started recognizing the brand and the schema we were implementing, we saw some major boosts in traffic.
The best part is that after 4 months of work, we decided to hit pause on the ads to see how our organic traction would hold up. Here are some screenshots showing how after we stopped our paid ads, our organic search kept growing.
From the picture on the left, you can see how our most recent 3 months has beat our previous 3 months by a lot. Sure, a lot of those stats are just impressions and not clicks, but over time we will see a growth in clicks. It always starts with making room in your niche and growing your impressions.
