With years of experience helping consumer packaged goods launch into grocery stores and digital marketing spaces, I have watched the CPG marketing landscape change as the internet has grown. Traditional marketing is no longer the best strategy for CPG products, and large CPG brands are understanding more and more how essential the digital space is to the future of their brand.
In this article, I have broken down some of the most important strategies I use when I start working with a consumer good brand that is new to their industry niche. With natural and whole foods becoming more popular in grocery store markets; it’s important that you understand exactly where you fit into the industry.
1. Follow Your Competition
All consumer goods brands I have worked with have a general understanding of their major competitors and who they are up against in their niche. Knowing who your competitors are and keeping tabs on their progress is essential for beating them out as they begin making moves to take over your spaces in the market. To do this work, you will need a deep understanding of your niche.
Find & Establish Your Niche
As you work to create your own space in your industry, you must know who is your target audience and what they will need to start paying attention to you. You will be in one of two realms of thought:
- Your target audience currently pays for a competitor and you will be working to direct their traffic to your brand
- Your target audience is not currently serviced by a brand and you will be the first to target those individuals with your brand
Depending on which side of the fence you are on, you should build your niche accordingly.
If you relate to the first group of brands who are working to take traffic from competitors, you should analyze your competitors to understand how you could provide more value to the target audience than they are. This will put strategies into place that will work to grow your brand above where your competitors currently are.
If you relate to the second group of brands who are trying to build their own niche, look at competitors who are effectively generating new audiences. This can be through SEO, social media, or website strategy. You will use what you learn from those competitors to build tactics that are parallel to theirs and achieve a similar level of growth.
How To Look for Competitor Strategies
When analyzing your competitors across, it’s good to use the same process to break down how they are being successful and what may not be working at the same time. How do I analyze a competitor for SEO? When I analyze a competitor, I use this general checklist:
- Website
- Overall look & feel
- Speed & user experience
- Ways to add customer value (blog content, food content)
- Social Media
- The follower to following ratios
- Individual post likes & engagement
- How the brand interacts w/ users
- SEO
- Organic Keyword breakdown
- Analysis of ads that are running
- Strategy analysis (how do they generate new keywords)
After going through this checklist, I have a good understanding of how my competitors are using the digital space to connect with current users and potential new users. When it comes to areas like unique content creation, it can take some time and research to really understand what is happening behind the scenes. As you write down what they are doing for each of these platforms, you can start twisting their current work into new ideas for your own brand!
Understand Keyword Pockets
As I lightly touched on in the last section, consumer good SEO is an essential part of understanding how your competitor’s website and social perform. One of the only ways to see how well a website is performing is the look at the organic keywords it’s currently ranking for. Using tools like Moz.com or SEMRush can give you a competitive insight into where you should be aiming.
I use the term “keyword pockets” to describe specific niches inside of industry keywords. You will have keywords that relate directly to your niche such as, “craft”, “organic”, or “keto”. These keywords will work to help you find high-intent users that understand the value inside of your products. This is how you will create a keyword pocket for your brand. With extensive experience in search engine optimization for consumer product goods brands, I can help you build the perfect keyword pocket for your brand.
2. Create Unique Recipe Content
Many CPG brands that are just starting out don’t realize how essential recipe content is for growing your website organically. Looking at work we have done for Dickey’s Barbecue, we helped build the At Home website from the ground up using organic SEO strategies. Our first and primary strategy was using high-quality recipe content and optimizing it for rich snippets. How can I use recipes to generate traffic to my website?
How Recipe SEO for CPG Works
Google uses Recipe Rich Snippets to display recipe results directly to high intent users. This means that recipe snippets have a generally better click-through rate, and also provide users custom information like cook time, ingredients required as well as reviews. This creates a better user experience for people who are looking for specific recipes.
Google will automatically do it’s best to understand your recipes pages and the information that is displayed there, but there are ways to give them that information directly so they can display it across Google search. In the paragraph below, we will talk about recipe schema.
How Do You Optimize Recipes for Organic SEO?
Once you have recipes on your website, you will need to start implementing code that can rank your recipes better. This case study about implementing recipe schema directly to recipe pages on WordPress explains how custom schema can greatly increase your website’s organic reach. Recipe schema is incredibly powerful, but it may require some custom development depending on which CMS platform you use.
Looking at the work I did with Dickey’s, we increased their organic reach by almost 30% just using recipe schema. By giving Google detailed information about our recipes, we are able to pull high intent users directly to our website who have an affinity for our brand and products.
Watch Competitor Progress
As you work to build your own catalog of recipes and website content, your competitors will be doing the same. It is essential to always be watching your direct competitors for how they are creating content in the same spaces as you. Perhaps they are coming with new ideas that you could work to implement yourself! Or maybe they are taking your ideas and doing a better job. Either way, keep a close eye on your competitors and how they are moving in the same areas on content creation.
3. Find Direction From Your Keywords
I have touched on several ways to grow your presence through organic search as a CPG brand, but this is one of the most essential pieces that will bring it all together. Monitoring your keyword pockets and the progress you made will show you how the work you put into organic, is paying off.
Many CPG brands I work with do not see the true value inside of organic SEO, and they end up leaving it to the side for their competitors to eat up their space. I try to explain the value of organic in a way where it is defined as a legacy, and true legacies have upkeep. How do you monitor the keywords of your website?
Our team always prefers to use multiple tools when it comes to keyword analysis or keyword monitoring. Using multiple tools for monitoring keywords will give you an accurate look at where your website is, and how effective your optimization work has been so far.
A great example of this not happening is with a website called Bunn.com. Bunn is one of the largest distributors for coffee machines and supplies in the country, and they have recently built a new website. That’s awesome! New websites are always a great feeling, but they can distract you from what is happening behind the scenes. A friend of mine asked me to take a look at Bunn’s website status organically, and here’s what I found:
In March of 2019, Bunn started the work on migrating to their new website. You can see in the screenshot that around that time they were ranking for about 14,000 keywords organically. Those keywords were spread between both consumer-focused market and a business-focused market.
Looking deeper into 2019 for the Bunn.com website, they decided to split their consumer face and business face into two separate subdomains. This is totally fine for SEO! But it’s important that you are constantly monitoring your keywords as your website goes through a transition like this. Take a look at this screenshot from September.
You can see in September they were ranking for approximately 7,000 keywords. This is about a 50% decline in organic keywords as their website migration took place. By constantly monitoring your website’s organic keywords, you can watch for trends where your traction is declining and your competitors are taking the space.
Take Your Keywords, and Build
As CPG brands expand their content and off-site presence, it becomes critical to actively monitor keyword performance and adjust strategy based on what is gaining traction. Tracking keyword movement across recipes, product use cases, and branded search terms allows brands to identify which content themes are resonating with users and which topics are increasing in search demand. As trends emerge across social platforms, creator content, and online communities, these signals often translate into new search behavior. By paying close attention to rising queries and long-tail variations, CPG brands can expand into new keyword pockets early—creating content before competition increases. This proactive approach helps brands compound organic visibility over time, ensuring their content strategy evolves alongside consumer interest rather than reacting after demand has already peaked.
5. Build a Social Following That Supports SEO
As you create high-quality content for your website—such as recipes, product use cases, or educational blog posts—it’s important to extend that effort to your social media channels. While social signals themselves are not direct ranking factors, strong social platforms play a critical role in content distribution, brand discovery, and driving qualified traffic back to your site. Many new CPG brands struggle to use social media strategically, often treating it as a separate effort rather than an extension of their SEO and content strategy.
One effective approach for CPG brands is collaborating with food creators and niche influencers to produce recipes, lifestyle imagery, and short-form video content. These partnerships give brands access to high-quality, authentic content that can be reused across social media, email campaigns, and even on-site content, without the cost of producing everything internally. When done correctly, influencer content can also generate backlinks, brand mentions, and referral traffic that support long-term SEO growth.
Promotions such as giveaways and limited-time discounts can further amplify reach by encouraging engagement and sharing. These campaigns are especially effective when tied to specific content or product launches, helping brands grow their audience while driving traffic to high-intent landing pages.
As social and website traffic increases, remarketing becomes a key component of sustainable growth. By using tools like the Meta Pixel or Pinterest Tag, CPG brands can build custom audiences based on prior site visitors and content engagement. This allows you to focus ad spend on users who already recognize your brand, rather than wasting budget on cold traffic. Many early-stage CPG brands overspend on broad ads without a clear funnel; aligning social growth, content, and remarketing helps ensure every channel works together more efficiently.
6. Engaging Your Users Off-Site
For new CPG brands, brand discovery rarely happens in a single place. While your website and social channels may serve as the foundation of your digital presence, meaningful engagement often happens off-site—through third-party platforms, creator communities, and shared content experiences. The more often consumers encounter your brand in trusted environments outside of your owned channels, the easier it becomes for them to understand your product’s value.
One effective way to encourage off-site engagement is through giveaways and collaborative campaigns that live beyond your primary social feeds. Partnering with complementary brands, newsletters, or creator platforms allows you to place your product in front of audiences that already align with your target customer. These campaigns work best when they are tied to something useful or entertaining, such as a recipe, a guide, or a creative use case, rather than a simple “follow to win” promotion.
Additional content, such as recipes, preparation tips, or lifestyle integrations, also plays a key role in off-site engagement. When this content is shared by influencers, embedded in blog posts, featured in email newsletters, or linked from third-party sites, it reinforces brand credibility while driving referral traffic back to your website. Over time, these touchpoints help establish topical relevance and brand authority—both of which support long-term organic search growth.
Influencer collaborations further extend this effect by allowing consumers to experience your brand through voices they already trust. When creators integrate your product naturally into their existing content ecosystem—whether through videos, recipes, or editorial features—it reduces friction and builds familiarity. The more frequently users encounter your brand in these external contexts, the more likely they are to recognize, search for, and ultimately purchase your product.
By focusing on engagement beyond your own platforms, CPG brands can create a stronger, more durable digital footprint—one that compounds over time and supports both SEO performance and customer acquisition.
7. CPG Loyalty Programs and SEO
Loyalty programs can also serve as a powerful, often overlooked SEO asset for CPG brands. When built into the website with intentional design and content strategy, loyalty and subscription programs create opportunities to target high-intent keywords related to repeat purchasing, rewards, and memberships. Dedicated landing pages for loyalty programs, subscriptions, and member benefits allow brands to rank for terms such as brand-plus-loyalty, rewards programs, and recurring delivery options, while also reinforcing trust and value for returning users.
Educational content explaining how the program works, exclusive member perks, and long-term savings can further expand keyword coverage and support organic acquisition. By optimizing these pages for search and integrating them naturally into site navigation, CPG brands can turn loyalty initiatives into discoverable, evergreen content that drives both retention and sustainable organic growth.
Examples of important keywords could look like “hot sauce subscription,” “protein powder monthly delivery,” “natural soap refill subscription”.
Let Us Build Your CPG Plan
Moving into 2026, it’s important to have a cohesive strategy for your digital presence. We work with CPG brands all over the world to develop effective search engine strategies for growing their brand into the future.
We can analyze and monitor your digital strategies to give you effective and easy to implement options for growing your brand.