In recent years, we have seen a dramatic shift in the way we go about our daily lives. We have tied most, if not all, of our routines to software and applications, and clearly there is no turning back. Digitalization has become the norm, from the way we communicate and to the way we shop.
For CPG food companies, this shift should be seen as an opportunity rather than a threat. Understand that since your customers are now online, so too should your business! And one great way to effectively reach your customers is through implementing SEO best practices for your CPG brand.
In this article, we’ll discuss the basics of SEO for CPG growth, starting from its three pillars that form the core of the strategies related to it, and why optimized content will always be king.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to the process of helping a website gain better visibility on search engines like Google by bumping these websites, ideally on the first page of search results. This is possible through a combination of high-quality, valuable content and technical work, summarized into the following “three pillars” of SEO:
Technical SEO is the work done on a website’s backend, which is crucial for crawlability. Work done for technical SEO typically involves:
Off-page SEO is also another work done behind the scenes, but is focused on building quality backlinks for the website. Great ways to do so will be through guest blogging and social media sharing (especially on X, formerly Twitter, and Facebook), which is within white hat SEO best practices or those that are done ethically and within Google guidelines.
Meanwhile, beware of black hat SEO practices, which are high risk but negative SEO tactics that are typically prone to being penalized by Google, which involve paying for links or spamming links.
On-page SEO is what’s readily visible and experienced on your website that can entice your audience to go and stay on your website and, ultimately, be converted into quality leads. On-page SEO involves:
At the core of all these pillars of SEO lies quality content, which can be a culmination of how well you understand your audience’s pain points and how well you could create content that provides better value to your audience than your competitors.
E-E-A-T or Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trust is currently the guiding principle behind how Google rates the quality of website content. This is in response to the past scenarios when it was easy to create fake information on websites, especially on what Google categorizes as YMYL: Your Money Your Life (finance, health, etc.) topics that must absolutely be truthful to avoid ruining a person’s life.
There are 4 main types of content or search intent that are also great benchmarks for mapping out the buyer's journey. That is, creating content specifically targeting your audience by addressing their search intent can help ensure you’re capturing potential customers regardless of where they are in their decision-making process.
Jane Phelps identified the 4 types of search intent as follows:
As mentioned, a deep understanding of your audience’s pain points can help you create content that they truly find valuable and could truly resonate with them. This is where keyword research comes in handy, which can help you identify fitting keywords based on your audience’s search intent.
When you analyze search queries related to your industry, patterns emerge that reveal gaps in the market. These gaps represent opportunities for your business to create content that addresses specific pain points. For example, if you notice high search volumes for questions about pricing structures in your industry, this indicates confusion or frustration that you can address through targeted content.
Think of keywords as “the voice of your customer”, so ensure that you show them that you listen and understand their needs by creating content relevant to their search intent. To do this, consider the following criteria for choosing keywords:
Don’t overdo it, though. Avoid the practice of “keyword stuffing”, which could work decades ago, but could no longer work now. Make sure to only choose one primary keyword per page that’s incorporated naturally in your content.
Creating optimized content doesn’t end with ensuring that relevant keywords are targeted or that content was written well and provides enough value to your audience.
Metadata refers to the information that best describes the content on your webpage. It includes:
Taken together, these three could help bring your webpage to its best ranking potential, especially when effectively aligned with each other.
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator, which is used to locate a resource on the internet. Simply put, it’s a webpage’s address on the internet. To further optimize your webpage, it’s important to also remember to optimize your URLs and titles, done by observing these best practices:
Different schools of thought have different takes on whether one could use AI to create content for their websites or not. Some may say that you can’t absolutely use AI to create content, while some are permissive about it.
Even Google’s stand on AI content is pretty ambiguous, with their guidelines mentioning that they care more about quality and helpfulness of content rather than how it was created. However, some discussions on Google penalizing AI generated content by giving them a low or lowest rating have been going rounds since the January 2025 update.
Still, what’s certain is that AI should be viewed as and used as a tool that only assists in content creation. That is, even if you use AI to create content, it’s still best not to be too dependent on it—creators should make sure to add in their own discussions that can provide value to their readers and AI shouldn’t do the heavy work for them.
Businesses should always learn to adapt to the changing trends to allow themselves to thrive in a competitive CPG environment. In a digital world, the best way to do so is to implement a strategic approach to SEO, which offers not just a marketing tactic, but a fundamental solution to core business challenges.
Although SEO typically takes 3 to 6 months to show results, those results compound over time, making it a cost-effective way to do your marketing over paid strategies that stop working the moment you stop paying.
At Vdriven, we’re committed to helping CPG food companies thrive and achieve sustainable growth. We strive to provide guidance for businesses wanting to follow data-driven and structured approaches to decision making and resource allocation.
Contact us today to learn more about how we can help your business reach unprecedented heights through our comprehensive business solutions.