Are you the owner of a bakery or dessert shop seeking effective strategies to boost your online presence, promote your bakery business, attract more customers, and increase sales? Have you experimented with paid advertising on Google? Have you tried Facebook ads for small businesses, copied the popular social media marketing techniques for bakers on Instagram, explored email marketing tailored for dessert businesses, and tested various e-commerce platforms without achieving desired results? If you have a website, SEO can be the most cost efficient option to promote and grow your bakery or dessert business online and acquire new customers when done correctly. Let’s compare it to other customer acquisition channels to understand the benefits.
First we need to look at the food delivery platforms like DoorDash, UberEats, GrubHub, and Postmates. They get your desserts in front of thousands of users that are ready to order. But if your customers come from food delivery platforms the fees take up to 30% of each order, eating in to your profit margins. In addition to this you do not have customer's data and cannot retain the customers and turn them in to the regulars. So, you need to look for less expensive and sustainable way to attract new customers.
Social media is another channel that might be somewhat beneficial, but has its own challenges. Let’s take a closer look. What do people do on social media? Is their primary goal to purchase a dessert when they dive into their Instagram or Facebook feed? Most likely not. People get on social media to engage with the content published by their friends, family, celebrities, to stay connected. Massive number of bakeries, ice cream shops, home bakers and other dessert shops are present on social media and fighting for the audience attention by spending good amount of time and money to constantly produce and post content. They might have huge army of followers and good number of likes, but this doesn’t lead to the new customers and growing sales because audience on social media is global and is not ready to buy.
Paid advertisements across major platforms such as Google, Facebook, and Instagram are highly competitive, often driving up costs and making it challenging for smaller businesses to stand out. The management of these ads is time-consuming, requiring continuous monitoring, bid adjustments, targeting, and content optimization. This constant need for attention can demand significant resources or specialized expertise. Additionally, the financial investment in paid ads can be substantial, and despite this spending, they often yield short-term gains rather than fostering a sustainable customer base. Once the advertising stops, traffic and sales frequently diminish rapidly, highlighting the need for more enduring marketing strategies.
SEO solves all the challenges the above channels are posing and, if done right, can bring a sizable number of new customers to your dessert business. Unless you offer nationwide or international shipping your products are sold locally. Google search brings the new local customers ready to buy and looking for the products you sell right to your website. But you need to be SEO ready. What does it mean?
Let’s start from the basics by answering the simple set of questions.
Do you have a website?
Is it fast? Do you know your site performance stats?
Do the search engine know your site exists?
Can people find you?
Why are these questions important? Because answers to them are foundational and affect your Google ranking that drives your site appearance in search results. People are not likely to go beyond first handful of results, so your goal is to get to the top of the first page. You need the SEO optimized website to attract the new customers to your bakery. If your website is slow, people are unlikely to stay, leading to a significant loss of visitors even if you manage to drive traffic to your site. Let’s dive into the tactics you can use to promote your bakery website.
First you need to analyze and optimize your website performance with free tools from Google. Ensure your website is mobile-friendly, as many customers may search for bakeries on their smartphones. Test your website's loading speed and optimize it for fast loading times (0-3 seconds) on both mobile and desktop devices.
The next step is to understand what people are searching for. To identify relevant keywords related to your bakery use tools like Google Keyword Planner, Semrush, or Ubersuggest.
Collect the most common relevant keywords and phases to start the website SEO optimization journey. You need to analyze the keywords that people are searching for that include the location and your business type. For example “French bakery in San Francisco”. Then think of the best and most popular products you offer and think of the potential searches similar to “best black forest cake in San Francisco”
Once you figured out the keywords you need to add them to H1 tag and meta title and meta description on your website. H1 tag is the heading tag that indicates the main topic on a web page and helps search engines to learn about your page content. Meta title and meta description are shown as the headline and a short summary of a webpage in you Google search result.
Next step is to use high-quality images on you website and set the Alt text for each image that Google uses to recognize the images. This helps to show your products on the Google image search that can potentially bring new customers to your bakery. So, with the example of the image of black forest cake for the bakery located in San Francisco set the Alt text similar to “best black forest cake in San Francisco”.
Set up a separate page for each product you offer with images and reviews from your customers and ability to order online. Google will rank your dedicated page higher in the search result for this particular product and make it easy for the customer to find your product and order on the spot.
One of the factors in the Google ranking is a time spent on your site. Make sure you provide user reviews to read, add the story about the the owner(s) journey, add some articles/blog posts, so visitors can engage with your site content.
You need to know your audience and make sure that your articles and blog posts are not driving the people with no intent to order your products. For example someone might be looking for the eclair recipe for their french class assignment. You should optimize your content for the people that have intent to order form your site or visit your bakery or desert shop. Write about the mention of your eclairs by some magazine, or the resent addition to your menu after the trip to Paris, or behind-the-scenes glimpses into your bakery life to engage visitors.
You need to understand your audience and ensure that your articles and blog posts are targeted towards those who are likely to order your products. For example, someone might be searching for an éclair recipe for their French class assignment and have no desire to order the éclairs. Therefore, optimize your content for people who have the intention to order from your site or visit your bakery or dessert shop. Write about mentions of your éclairs in magazines, recent additions to your menu following a trip to Paris, or behind-the-scenes glimpses into your bakery life to engage visitors.
Make sure that the most important info about your business shown on other websites and directories like Yelp match the business name, address, phone number and website exactly.
Claim your Google My Business listing and optimize it with accurate business information, including address, phone number, and business hours. Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews on Google My Business
Prompt your customers to also share their experiences on other review platforms to broaden your online presence and attract more potential customers. This approach can enhance your visibility and credibility across various online channels, helping to build trust and attract new visitors to your bakery or dessert shop.
In order to keep experimenting and optimizing you need to track your data with some data analytics tools. You can use Google Analytics or some other tools to track traffic, keywords, and user behavior to make SEO improvements and adjust your SEO strategy accordingly based on the data. It is important to regularly update your website with fresh content to maintain and improve your ranking.
By implementing these SEO strategies, your bakery can improve its online visibility, attract more customers, and increase sales. However, managing, analyzing, and continuously experimenting with SEO are time-consuming tasks that might significantly affect the workload of small bakery or dessert shop owners. Delegating these tasks to consultants may not always get you the desired results. You can explore less expensive and sustainable ways to attract new customers and enhance your online presence by listing your bakery, creamery, or dessert shop on directories like Thumbtack (Thumbtack | Care for Your Home | Find Local Pros & Reviews ) and Shop My Porch (Welcome to Shop My Porch ). These platforms can help you promote your bakery business, attract more customers, and increase sales. These directories are not dedicated to the dessert business vertical specifically, but we are actively working on closing this gap and developing a dedicated platform for all types of dessert businesses. Join our waitlist, and we’ll reach out with onboarding instructions when the time comes and we’re ready to welcome you to our platform.
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Photo by Monika Grabkowska on Unsplash