With over 6 years in the industry of CPG websites, I have helped countless companies start entering the world of the digital age. For CPG, there are many new factors that come into play once you start entering online spaces. E-Commerce is an essential part of the new age in CPG marketing and many businesses are several steps behind. For brands that just have a website and no e-commerce functionality, I can help them scale their current framework to start understanding the possibilities across the internet.
Many of my clients request complicated and in-depth reports on their website once we start working together. To make that process easier, I will be breaking down what is included when I audit a CPG website for user experience and search engine optimization.
1. Analyze User Experience
The first step to any website audit is to start using the website and feeling it out.
This step takes a lot of time to practice and understand, but we all use websites! It comes down to understand what about the website is a bit frustrating for how you’d like to be using it. These are some of the primary website features that annoy people:
- Slow load times
- Too much popup functionality
- Scrolling is choppy
Google has been working year after year to understand more about user experience and how we organically define it. They try and use those metrics in ranking websites, so the user experience will matter for the long run of your website. Keep it simple, make sure it loads fast, and capture your brand’s energy.
There are some tools you can use for this step including Google Lighthouse. This tool will give you direct insight into page speed, as well as what is slowing down the page like javascript popups or heavy images. Lighthouse will also give you some information about on-page readability, including how colors overlap and text that is too close.
2. View Current Organic Ranks
For CPG brands, organic rankings will tell you a lot about how effective their marketing efforts have been so far. Backlinks and on-page content are essential parts of building a strong organic strategy, and a lot can be said by how organic traction has scaled within the past year.
I recommend tools like SEMRush that can give you a historical analysis of organic keywords and you can see how it’s evolved over time. Many CPG websites I have worked with have seen significant crashed in organic keywords at various points in time, and most of them had no idea!
Analyzing organic ranks can give you a deep insight into new opportunities for changes to optimize the website further.
3. Look For Technical Opportunities
As a technical web developer, I am always on the lookout for opportunities that exist for optimizing a website with code. There are many ways to implement code that can boost SEO, but a lot of people are not aware and do not use it frequently. Here are some of the best ways to optimize your CPG website with code implementation:
- Meta & Title descriptions
- Structured data
- Heading tags
These three tools are some of the most powerful in my toolkit and are constantly under-appreciated by SEOs and web developers alike.
Hire Us to Consult your CPG Brand
With years of experience doing digital marketing for cpg brands, we have helped businesses of all sizes grow their marketing presence across digial channels like Facebook and Google. Whether you are just starting, or are a large organization, we can help your internal teams create strategy and take advantage of the newest tools for analytics and remarketing.
