SEO for small catering businesses,
Trenchers catering has had a bit of a learning curve recently, trying to tackle SEO or search engine optimization on, not just our own, but as the owner of a small business, it has fallen to myself alone, to make a website that is cost effective and has the best possible SEO.
I have recently changed my website from a fairly expensive site, to what is much more sustainable, cost effective website, and doing so has taken a WordPress site with great SEO, highly rated in all areas, to a cheaper Site123 build which I have produced from scratch, and had to work out what is the best SEO i can put on, and in the site, within a really stringent framework, what follows below is what I have managed to do that has really help Trenchers Catering Website.
The first thing I have found is ‘DOMAIN NAME’ purchases,
Now I had already got my Trenchers domain, trenchers-midlands.co.uk, but had been given a tip from a google rep, who told me that for a small cost, (about £10 a year each) I could buy relevant domains that where specific to by sector, and be able to point those domains at my website, helping my SEO, and in turn helping get up google search results. We are an office catering business so the domains I had purchased where office-catering-birmingham.co.uk , officecateringbirmingham.com, and a few more, but you get the picture.
By pointing these at our trenchers-midlands.co.uk web address, we get the search engine to see that we are office catering Birmingham, as well as Trenchers, giving us a really good boast up the rankings.
Backlinks has been a bug bear of mine as I cannot get any decent ones that can help me, however, I do know that the more of these that you have that are specific to your business the better, I believe getting your suppliers to give you backlinks as well as customers if you can will really help.
Keywords,
Keywords is a term used for the words that appear most on your website, this helps your rankings, but apparently not as much as they used to. So for me I have tried to have the words Catering, Office, Birmingham, Sandwiches, Platters appear as much across my website as possible, for instance, the main heading will say OFFICE CATERING BIRMINGHAM, and this is repeated a few times over the website with Catering appearing 46 times overall, you should have about 5 or six keywords that describe your business appear as many time as possible, but they need to be written is as good a sentence as possible as google can check grammar.
Speed,
Hopefully your website is better than mine with regards to speed, google recommends all websites load up within 5 seconds, however due to the platform I chose to create my website on, the speed of my site is 6 seconds, which will get penalised by google.
My issues are pictures and the weight of my site being to large, google has a great speed checker which can give you help to speed up your website. (I have now sorted the picture issue and increase speed of website in doing so)
Headers,
No not football, but the headers that your website has the main body of text in,
So all main title pages should have H1 Headers with the secondary headers being H2, and so on down to H5, it is essentially the size of the text.
Meta tags and descriptions are the bit of writing that google would use to check what is on a page and depending on if you have them and where, will depend on how easily google can read and place you on rankings.
My meta description for my home page is: Office Catering in Birmingham, free delivery to Birmingham postcodes, menus start from £2.80, 5* Hygiene rated, we offer sandwich platters and buffet lunches.#
With tags like: catering, Birmingham, Office, Food, Lunch, Buffets, sandwiches,
Every page on your website should have these above tags and descriptions.
Your site needs to be connected to social media, the more the better, so get a Facebook page, twitter account, google plus account and then get them linked.
Doing all the above will hopefully help your business get better at SEO, and in turn be more visible on google search results.
Great websites to check your score or get extra help: