So far in our SEO Reality Show journey, we’ve shared the steps our expert agency has taken to build a strong SEO foundation for Edelweiss Bakery’s website and, eventually, improve its performance.
These steps include:
- Conducting competitor analysis
- Identifying link building opportunities
- Mapping out a new site structure
- Coming up with a list of keywords that most accurately describe what the bakery does/offers
- Running a technical SEO audit to search for backend concerns
With this data thoroughly researched and compiled, the agency had the insights they needed to move on to the next stage: Updating and optimizing the bakery’s home page.
The Process
The agency followed a 4-step process to determine how to improve the home page of Edelweiss Bakery’s website:
Step 1: Analysis of the Competition’s Page Layouts
The first thing the agency did was to evaluate the home page content and design of Edelweiss’ most relevant competitors, paying careful attention to sections that they knew the bakery would also need to include on their site, as well as those that were unique to one or two sites ranking in the top 10 on SERPs.
The agency looked at between one and three keywords of the main page and searched for them in Google. In this case, the main keywords that best captured user intent for the bakery were:
- German bakery
- Bakery cafe
- European bakery
The agency searched for these keywords and then reviewed the pages that showed up. They stated that it was important to consider the following:
Due to the specifics of this business, the local SERP in each city will be different. It’s crucial to choose the search region where the site was being promoted. In this case, it was Fort Lauderdale, which is a major city in South Florida. The agency used Google’s CS location changer plugin to do this. If you’re replicating this with a local business that’s from a smaller city, you can expand to a larger area around it as there may not be enough strong sites in your niche to derive research from.
- They would only analyze the sites that aligned with the search intent. This included bakeries, cases, and pastry shops. Irrelevant listings were not analyzed.
- It’s best to analyze the search results in incognito mode, or at least by first resetting the browser cache to get unbiased results
After careful evaluation of various competitor’s websites, the agency refined their search to focus on two that aligned with the content, design, and user experience elements they were looking for:
