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:
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 agency followed a 4-step process to determine how to improve the home page of Edelweiss Bakery’s website:
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:
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.
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:
What the agency liked:
What the agency thought could be improved for Edelweiss’ site:
What the agency liked:
In reviewing the bakery’s website, the agency identified a few user experience challenges that offered opportunities for improvement:
Increasing conversion rates to their site and within their site is an important objective of the Edelweiss Bakery. To achieve this, the agency knew that one of the most effective strategies would be to rework the structure, content, and flow of their home page.
To help the bakery stakeholders understand what improvement ideas they had in mind, the agency created a mockup of their home page, focusing on 6 main sections:
To create a mockup, the agency used Figma’s free tool.
The agency knew that placing information about the company and its unique assets at the top of the home page was important for capturing users’ attention. In addition, they included a short video showing bread baking, product highlights, and the bakery’s cafe. Short videos can be an effective way to keep visitors on the page, introduce users to your brand.
Edelweiss already had a compelling “Why So Delicious” section on their home page that the agency included as-is in their mockup. This content not only illuminated the competitive advantages that made the bakery’s food so delicious, it also helps them build trust with their visitors and reinforce their decision to make a purchase.
Because one of the bakery’s business objectives is to grow the number of customers coming to their brick-and-mortar cafe, the agency included content sections in their mockup to spotlight this service, including:
Although the bakery had an online shopping section on their home page, the agency felt that it took up too much prime real estate. Their recommendation, which they illustrated in their mockup, was to reduce the size of the shopping section and rearrange it in the form of a gallery. This would allow site visitors to browse different product options more easily in a condensed view.
The contact us call to action at the bottom of Edelweiss’ site didn’t offer a clear value proposition to a site visitor. To improve this high-value call-to-action, the agency presented several to the bakery’s stakeholders in their mockup.
Ultimately, the bakery decided to proceed with offering a coupon for free coffee when visiting the cafe if a visitor filled out the short form.
To help the bakery attract traffic to their site based on real user inquiries, while simultaneously increasing the probability of ranking for a featured snippet in the SERP, the agency recommended including a simple frequently asked questions (FAQ) section at the bottom of Edelweiss’ home page.
The idea is that this is new FAQs questions-and-answers section would be made up of real questions that users have already asked and those that they thought customers might ask in the future.
To make this FAQs section as impactful as possible, the agency researched what questions people were asking online related to the products and services that Edelweiss Bakery offered.
For example, they searched for the keywords the home page was ranking for in Google, reviewed the “People Also Ask” results, looking for the questions that would align with the bakery.
Searches like “german bakery” didn’t yield results and the agency looked at the question a little more broadly, paying attention to the client’s business basis — a homemade artisan bread baked using a custom recipe. They put the “artisan bread” query in Google and immediately saw that the People Also Ask block had relevant questions they could snag. For brands replicating this strategy, note that you should place the questions and answers in the FAQ block that allow you to best highlight the brand’s USP.
The agency also checked Semrush’s “Questions” feature in the Keyword Overview tool to find more commonly asked questions related to the keyword at hand. To do this, they went to the Keyword Overview Tool, enter the main and additional keywords, clicked on the Questions block.
After discussing all their findings with the bakery team, the agency refined the list of four questions:
After a bit of back and forth between the agency and the bakery, the content mockup for Edelweiss’ home page was finalized (you can view the final version here).
The agency also wrote the technical specifications and functionality description for the implementation of this mockup for the bakery’s website developers.
With the redesign of Edelweiss Bakery’s hoe page underway, the agency will start focusing their optimization efforts on the site’s Main Page title tags and meta descriptions in particular — to help improve their click-through rates in the SERPs.
We’ll see you next time!
This is a programming note that I will be completely offline for the last days…
WordPress announced the rollout of Studio by WordPress, a new local development tool that makes…
Google updated their guidance with five changes on how to debug ranking drops. The new…
Google has officially completed its March 2024 Core Update, ending over a month of ranking…
Here is a recap of what happened in the search forums today, through the eyes…
The Google March 2024 core update finished a week ago and Google did not tell…
This website uses cookies.
Leave a Comment