Extracted from the original post on LinkedIn by Tom West, Account Director
Widespread food wholesale industry developments, such as 24 hour fulfilment and fully-integrated online ordering, have redefined norms.
Cutting through the competition is a challenge larger than ever before, which means standing out in the market is essential to success.
Your unique service offering and exclusive initiatives may be industry leading and exactly what consumers look for in a food wholesaler. But if your competitors take the lead in online search rankings, your chances of being able to deliver your message effectively, and to the right prospect, become worryingly slim. How do you make sure that you don’t get lost in the digital labyrinth? Well, you can start with SEO.
It’s never been more important to invest in organic SEO.
If you want to succeed in the digital landscape and effectively market online, a comprehensive SEO strategy should be in place supported by tech-savvy experts. SEO remains a transformative component of online presence and serves as the middle-man connecting you with potential customers.
SEO is great for business. Firstly, it’s a marketing strategy that works and is measurable with tools such as Google Analytics and Adwords. Joshua Guerra, CEO of marketing firm BIZCOR notes that as long as businesses focus on “optimal user experience while performing methodic SEO strategies, you will be rewarded with higher positioning and organic traffic.” It’s pretty cost-effective too, and in comparison to other popular online advertising strategies such as social media marketing, provides good ROI.
As consumer behaviour changes and mobile device traffic increases, search engines are inevitably securing more market share.
Forbes estimates that approximately 80-90% of consumers now check up on businesses online prior to making a purchase or contract decision – and this figure will only go up. Soon, everyone will be searching for services online.
Which is why SEO is so crucial. Without great SEO, your potential customers will have difficulty finding you. Even worse, they may instead be directed to a competitor who offers a similar service profile! This brings us round to an obvious, but important point. Your competitors will be doing SEO. And they’ll probably be doing it pretty well. Don’t lose out in a quickly changing wholesale market by ignoring such a valuable marketing tool.
The two most important components of SEO to get right are arguably, keywords and meta descriptions.
In short, keywords are the terms that you optimise to attract your audience and meta descriptions are, as neatly defined by MOZ, “HTML attributes that provide concise explanations of the contents of web pages”. So then, keywords get you in the listings, and meta descriptions help your searcher determine whether to click.
When choosing keywords for SEO, relevance is the most important factor. This is because the more specific you are, the better the chance you’ll attract qualified prospects to your webpage where you can showcase all you have to offer. SEO specialists conduct research and run tests, and determine what are known as “long-tail keywords”. Long tail keywords get less traffic than generic terms, but they typically deliver more relevant visitors and thus, better ROI. For example, if there’s something unique about your wholesaler, such as location or service offering, you’d be wise to feature this as part of your keyword profile.
SEO experts also take care to generate meta descriptions that increase click through rates, improve website traffic from organic search, increase website traffic from social media and provide the right content to the right people. All fantastic for your search rankings! Specialists write powerful meta descriptions by combining content writing skills, analytic know-how and industry expertise.
A great meta description will typically feature compelling content that informs and persuades in little more than a short sentence. It will include a select number of keywords relevant to the webpage it describes and usually be no longer 155 characters. This is because search engines such as Google don’t measure their listings by characters, but by pixels! Too many words, and a meta description will be cut off from view. Meta descriptions will also be free from duplications and non-alphanumeric characters – Google and the like also aren’t too keen on either of these.
This all doesn’t sound too easy, and is easily overwhelming for the novice.
And yes, you’d be right to think that SEO really is a modern, digital art-form. It’s yet another digital development for wholesalers to implement, and is at risk of getting lost in all the tech-heavy new system implementations, such as quicker fulfilment and online ordering. If you feel that you need a hand, Bareface can be here to guide you through and get you on the online map.
We understand that technology has revolutionised the way your buyers consume information. So, we put digital at the heart of everything we do. We know exactly how to deliver SEO that drives ROI and can supplement this with campaigns that effectively communicate messages in a fast-moving market. Not to mention, our wholesale targeting is second to none.
