How will Barn2Door impact SEO for my Farm?
Today, Americans no longer use phone books or Yellowpages to look up information about your Farm. Instead, everyone expects to find your Farm online, including the ability to shop directly from you. However, having a Farm website is no longer enough to stay competitive in today’s market. For your Farm to stick out, you need to optimize your online presence to be more visible and available to Customers. How do you do this? By focusing on SEO for your Farm website.
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the amount of traffic to your website through organic search results. Potential Customers may search for “local farmers near me” or “grass-fed beef near Indianapolis, Indiana.” How you organize your website’s content will be used by the search engines your customers use to find you. Ideally, you want your Farm’s website to appear at the top of the results page.
There are thousands of tips and tricks for SEO, and it is constantly changing and evolving. At Barn2Door, we have an entire Team focused on building best practices for demand, including keywords by geography and product category - both important to optimize SEO. Whether you’re starting from scratch and don’t have a website yet, have an existing site, or want to improve your current SEO, Barn2Door can help your Farm implement SEO best practices to drive customers to your Farm.
I Don’t Have a Website
Here’s the hard truth. If your Farm is not online, your Farm does not exist to many potential customers. Why? Buyers tend to search for businesses online and expect to find your Farm website.
The good news is that Barn2Door will build your website and optimize it for SEO. Our Team will ensure that common keywords are included in the headings and body of your Farm website to increase your rank. The main objective is to include a wide range of key phrases indexed by search engines and are popular based on keyword search rankings. It’s important to note that while our Team optimizes SEO for your Farm, it’s not a guarantee your Farm will immediately appear at the top of search results as SEO takes time to achieve results.
Read: Will Good SEO Drive Customer Growth?
What’s the difference between search words, keywords, and key phrases?
Search terms are the set of words your customer enters into a search engine (like Google) when looking for Farm products. An example would be “organic poultry farms near me.”
A keyword or key phrase is the set of words used throughout your Farm website that are associated with the search terms. Search engines index the specific search terms to bring your Farm website to the top of the search results page, targeting your intended Customers. Where your website appears on the results page depends on if your website is optimized for SEO.
It’s important to note that Farms should use their personal language and tone to explain what they do, how they do it, and what makes their products unique. Plugging in as many keywords as possible will negatively impact your website’s SEO. This is called “keyword stuffing,” and search engines like Google can detect the difference between “human” language and stuffing your website pages with keywords. Our Team understands the balance between how to optimize your website and how to properly use keywords and phrases to make your site visible to Customers.
Good SEO has the potential to drive new Customers to your Farm. However, you need a website to begin driving traffic. Allowing Barn2Door to build out your site and maximize it for SEO will attract the right Customers and open your Farm to a whole new pool of Buyers.
Read: Insights from the Top 100 Farm Websites
I have an existing website (and don’t want to lose my existing SEO)
At Barn2Door, we understand how important it is to maintain the valuable assets and the brand credibility you have built with your current website. It’s our job to improve your online presence, save you time, and equip your Farm with all the tools to help it thrive. If your Farm has an existing website, the content you share and how it’s displayed affects how visible you are to your customers online.
When you sign up with Barn2Door, our Team will implement SEO best practices to ensure that your website is optimized. By adding SEO descriptions that describe the content of each page, linking your website to your social accounts, and making your website mobile-friendly, our Team can increase your Farm's odds of being near the top of the search results page.
If you know your Farm is linked to articles or resources across the web, then your website has already built SEO value. Our Team will “preserve” the unique URLs associated with your SEO when provided these links. If your Farm is aware of articles and backlinks to drive traffic to your current website, then Barn2Door can "preserve" the unique URLs that are attributed to your SEO.
We understand all the work you put into your website to build SEO and Brand loyalty. Our Team takes great care in ensuring your site assets are transferred properly, having assisted many Farm websites in this transition before.
Read: What Happens When You Transfer Your Website
I want to improve my SEO
Making it to the top of the search results page is the ultimate goal, but it takes consistent effort to establish, maintain, and develop your website’s rank. Our team at Barn2Door will help establish SEO basics, but it takes more than just keywords and phrases to improve SEO rank. At the core, your SEO rankings are based on the search index rankings of keywords, total traffic volume, mobile responsiveness, and are heavily influenced by the number of other websites that link back to your site.
So, how do you improve your SEO long-term? We recommend that Farmers push content and website pages to other local partners and influencers, encouraging them to hyperlink to your website. This is called ‘backlinking’ and is vital to improving rank. The more traffic and crosslinking to your website, the greater your SEO will improve over time. You should also update your keywords and phrases regularly as your Farm evolves or your Brand changes. SEO is a long-term commitment, and updating keywords on your website to match your Brand will help improve your rank.
From a technical standpoint, page speed and backlinks give visitors a quality user experience. Prioritizing your customers’ needs will keep visitors on your site longer and drive them to shop from your Farm store.
SEO is a marathon, not a sprint. It needs to be tended to every once in a while if you want to see it grow. Barn2Door can help your Farm implement SEO best practices to become more visible and valuable to your customers online. Through consistent customer engagement activities across all channels (social, web, and email) coupled with your online Farm store, you can drive traffic and increase your Farm’s popularity and searchability. Serving your Customer’s needs through quality user experience and building it in a way that’s attractive to search engines will create brand loyalty and drive Farm revenue.
Barn2Door provides an all-in-one solution to grow and manage your Farm business. If you’re curious to learn why successful Farms run on Barn2Door,watch this 5-minute video.