It’s always a great pleasure to be able to help a small business with some free marketing advice. I had the pleasure of meeting Alessandra from Chef Uniforms who is an entrepreneurial mum whose website offers a quality but low budget range of chef uniforms. Her target market is Chefs in Australia but could include anyone in the hospitality industry who needs chef uniforms. Her products are not branded which means they are cheaper.
Rich Brown and I put together the top 10 things she could do to improve her SEO and grow her business. Let’s dive straight in…
Top 10 Tips #2: Chef Uniforms Down Under
10. Think-Feel-Do like your customer.
We have an assessment framework which we call the Think-Feel-Do framework. Essentially its a quick and easy way to look at a website and ask ourselves, what are we telling people to think about our business, how are we making them feel and what are we asking them to do?
- Think. I would suggest we use your tagline front and centre to make a statement to your potential customers. “For Chefs who expect Great Service and Quality Product”
- Feel. In most cases the feel comes from images, I believe we should have an image or images which show people wearing your products, perhaps in a kitchen or restaurant environment. They should all look fantastic and happy. This will make people feel that when they buy your products they will also look fantastic and feel happy.
- Do. In the top right-hand corner, you should have your primary call to action something like “Shop Now” with the cart symbol.
There are a few user experience changes I would recommend making. Your menu is repeated, you can get rid of one of them. The Sitemap, T&C’s etc… can go down the bottom of the page. They shouldn’t occupy your prime real estate at the top of the homepage.
I would also get some products on sale at the bottom of the fold or next scroll down. Let people feel like they have just walked into a shop and are browsing for chef uniforms.
9. Set up a Google My Business Account
This is so you can show up in the local pack as well. Ensure the name, address and phone number are identical to what you have listed on the website. It will mean you have the chance to be listed in the local pack search results and increase your exposure.
8. Remove the Tag Cloud
This is an old SEO tactic that essentially doesn’t work anymore. Given that it offers no SEO value and no user value I would simply remove it.
7. Move the entire site to https:
This utilises the SSL (secure certificate) and will make people and Google like your site more. In the past year or so Google has placed more emphasis on this factor and since you already have it set up for your cart it makes sense just to employ it across the entire site.
6. Unblock Resources in Google Search Console
We have experienced an almost immediate uptick in organic traffic from clients in the past when we have fixed this factor. It’s slightly technical but in short, the Googlebot can’t see elements of your website so doesn’t know what is on the pages. As a result, it doesn’t know what to rank you for. In order to fix this, you will need to revise your robots.txt and the settings in your CMS.
5. Keyword: Chef Uniforms
This is probably the main keyword for your website and at the time of writing, you ranked at position 28.8. This term has 1,600 searches per month in Australia according to Google Keyword Planner, so it is worth pursuing. I would strongly suggest optimising your home page with this term in mind, include a title and meta description that sells your product and include Chef Uniforms in the H1 of the home page.
4. Make the website responsive
You are currently getting penalised by Google for not having a responsive website. Mobile is more than 50% of all Googles traffic worldwide, you are missing out on a large percentage of your traffic on mobile devices. Making this change should be a good win for you!
3. HTML Improvements
You can find this tab in Google Search Console. You currently have 37 duplicate meta descriptions, 8 short meta descriptions and 13 duplicate title tags. This means that Google doesn’t know what each page is distinctly about and as a result doesn’t know which keywords to rank you for. Going through and optimising each of these pages will give Google clear signals about the intent of each page and improve your traffic.
2. Competitor Awareness
I typed “Chef Uniforms” into Google and then reviewed the top 4 results. Just for a moment, I would like to mentally put aside the technical SEO and ask the question “What are people experiencing about these sites that is better than yours and How can I be better than them?” We want to put people first then the technology second. This will mean that as people enjoy and respond positively to your site, Google will rank you higher knowing that you are the best answer for someone looking for “Chef Uniforms”
1. Put in place a backlinking strategy
Based on our research the primary reason Chefworks is ranking number one is their backlinking profile. They have 2,620 backlinks compared to your 65. It’s not all about quantity, its definitely about quality, however they have more quantity and quality than the rest of the competition.
The best way to start is to review their backlinks and look for ways you can get links on the same sites they have. Using a tool such as Majestic SEO or SEMRush you can get a list of their backlinks and then go through them one by one to find backlinking opportunities. It’s painstaking but it will yield results in the long run.
A couple of freebies…
I would suggest using Google Shopping for your PPC strategy, the clicks will be cheaper and the use of the visual is more appealing than text-based Search Ads. I would then remarket using the Google Display Network with an offer eg.e 25% off first purchase and get their email and send them a voucher then email them specials monthly.
Similarly, you could make a video on Facebook, promote it to every chef in Australia then remarket your offer to them on Facebook. This way you will get sales and a database for ongoing future sales.
I hope this has been helpful and informative, not only for Allessandra but also for anyone looking to make SEO improvements to their website.
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