Coffee in Australia is a special drink; the vast majority of the population drinks it in the morning.
Some coffee shops are open from 5 am to catch the first customers. Lots of people stop by on their way to work to cheer up and enjoy a strong drink. Prices in coffee shops are about the same that greatly complicates the search for new customers.
In this case, the business definitely needs to promote and be present online, especially since the Client has substantial advantages and customers need to see it.
However, to take such an advantage, your website needs to be able to be found through organic search. We helped the client with this increasing traffic 16 times.
Read about our SEO optimization for drive-thru coffee shop brand.
Perks: In this article, we have gathered useful recommendations together that will help pay attention to important aspects of SEO promotion.
1. Client
Our Client is the MuzzBuzz brand.
The history of the company started back in 2004. The franchise of this brand adorns 50+ store units around the world for more than 15 years on the market. Coffeehouses can be found in countries such as Belarus, Turkey, New Zealand, Great Britain, Singapore, South Korea, and others.
The drive-thru coffee shop format is an incredibly popular idea in the West. You drive up in a car, place an order and get fresh coffee in 90 seconds. You don't need to get out of the car, and this is a super convenient feature for those who are always in a hurry.
The brand offers drive-thru coffee + snacks such as muffins, croissants, donuts.
There are about 7,000 individual purchases per day (these are already loyal customers of the MuzzBuzz coffee shop chain).
2. What was required of us
We were given the task of "bringing" loyal customers to the landing page australia.muzzbuzz.com.
To do this, you need to increase the visibility of your primary domain in search. That is, to conduct a full-fledged search engine optimization (below we will take a closer look at this aspect).
Besides selling fast food, MuzzBuzz invites those who wish to join the company and will gladly share their secrets and branding. To do this, you can buy a franchise. Domain franchising.muzzbuzz.com.
As in any other business, our Client cooperates with investors. It is necessary to entice investors for business development continuously. In our case, these are coffee shop buyers. Namely, those who are interested in investing in the coffee business. Our task is to bring them to the franchise landing page.
The Client also wanted to increase traffic to the onlineshop.muzzbuzz.com domain. By the way, this is how cool it looks:
Fig. 1 — You can buy a gift card for your friends or relatives right on the page
Visitors to this page are potential merchant buyers.
The figure shows the style. It can be seen that work was underway on the brand. Moreover, there was a website redesign.
And then the Client wanted to increase the branded traffic of the website. Such requests contain the name of the company, such as muzz buzz drive through coffee).
3. Why optimization is needed
SEO (search engine optimization) — a set of measures to improve the position of the website in the search engines results (PC), aimed at improving and/or supplementing the internal structure and creating and/or developing an external link profile.
Optimization is needed when you need to increase traffic to the website from organic search. Agree, most often we search the net, knowing in advance what we want to find. It's no secret that the maximum traffic falls on the first page of search results. This means that it is necessary to enter the TOP for specific search queries. In the TOP-1, of course.
See below why:
Fig. 2 — search results for drive thru coffee australia
Do you see ads? Below are Google Maps (you can appear there if you set up a Google My Business).
Actually, the organic results themselves, that is, what we were initially looking for (not advertising), are below (it is no longer visible in the screenshot since the program captured only the visible part of the page). It turns out that you need to scroll down and choose where to go. All those who scroll the page will turn their eyes to the links. You need website optimization to have a client's link there.
A pretty interface itself won't bring visibility. The Internet is large and word of mouth marketing will not help here. But comprehensive website improvement - will help.
4. Link Profile Analysis
Indicators such as the number of external links leading to the website are taken into account when ranking sites. If the website is not useful, then it would not be linked. The opposite is also true: even if a website is linked to, but it does not carry any value, then it simply cannot go to the TOP. It won't be possible to achieve the result without an integrated approach.
There was an unstable dynamics of the growth of the link mass at the beginning of cooperation with the Client.
Fig. 3 — Dynamics of changes in the number of domains linking to the Client's website
Fig. 4 — Dynamics of changes in the number of pages linking to the Client's site
Link building should be a natural process. Sharp surges signal external interference.
Actually, this is what happens. However, for search engines everything should be as “natural” as possible.
Link weight plays a big role in promotion. The higher it is, the more weight is transferred to the promoted site. Search engines have their own algorithms, the content of which is not disclosed to calculate this indicator. That is, no one knows for sure the full list of factors that are included there.
However, there are points that you should definitely consider in building your link mass:
- thematicity. You need to place external links on resources directly on your subject or related. You should not go on vacation in Turkey with vacuum cleaners;
- quantity. The more links from external resources there are, the better for the acceptor;
- anchor of the link, that is, the text of the link. So the search engine will be able to find the resource even if its text does not contain words from the query;
- quality. The linking page must be authoritative. If the donor has low positions, then placing a link there will ultimately lower the position of your website.
It was these principles that guided us in working with our Сlient's case. Next, you will find out what other aspects need to go through in detail in the process of site search engine optimization.
4.1 Geolocation matters
The region we worked with was Australia (.au). Most of the referring domains come from this region and from .com.
When working with external optimization, we focused on the au and com domain zones in order to achieve the maximum naturalness of increasing the number of links. After all, it would be very strange that a large number of references appeared in the US domain zone, if they were never there.
Fig. 5 — Referring domain statistics (in %)
4.2 Competition
A thorough analysis of competitors helps to find patterns that will set the vector of work.
You can maximize the visibility of the site for crawlers by finding benefits and using them in conjunction with technical improvements.
We worked through the list of competitors provided by the customer using Ahrefs. During the audit, it turned out to identify the most powerful market players:
The number of backlinks they have is an order of magnitude greater (up to hundreds of thousands), which showed that active SEO work is underway there. The dynamics of mass growth is changeable and only an experienced specialist will tell you whether optimization work has been carried out.
For our case, we can say with confidence that the work of competitors was carried out.
That's often the case - there are many links, but the site has little traffic. Most likely, the ongoing optimization is not effective enough. You should trust your brainchild only to professional optimizers to avoid such "missteps" in your work.
The main result of competitor analysis is the compilation of a list of domains for outreach.
Outreach is the placement of links on other sites, blogs, forums in order to promote the main site by means of an agreement, communication with the owners of the portals, where it is necessary to place a reference. This is a white method (crucial point) of promotion that helps:
- increase site traffic;
- increase referral traffic (clicks on links);
- increase trust on the part of search engines (hence, reaching higher positions in the search results);
- increase brand awareness.
Важливий момент: оптимізація не дає миттєвих результатів, зате дає довгострокові. Білі методи вбережуть від санкцій (якщо пошуковик раптом зрозуміє, що сайт спеціально заточується під його вимоги).
5. Technical audit
For us, it's important to communicate with the Client, because in addition to solving the main issues, we are fully interested in outcomes.
A technical audit is a complete check of a website for the presence or absence of technical errors in order to adjust the resource to the official and unofficial requirements of search engines.
Google already has 200+ ranking factors, all of which have an impact on a website's position. It is recommended to perform a technical audit at the stage of portal development, but there are no ideal websites. Therefore, periodic checks are the only way to maintain the lead or even win it.
As a result, the Client receives a document with recommendations and priorities, which are important to fully implement. Then the result will be as it is planned for.
A comprehensive audit was carried out for our Client in order to indicate the shortcomings for their further review.
Consider those that maximize the visibility of the website:
- Redirect 301. It informs the SE that the page has been moved to a new address and the user needs to be redirected to a new page.
- Setting up the robots.txt file. It contains information for robots and tells which pages can be crawled and which cannot. For example, the order and registration form does not carry a semantic meaning for a crawler.
- Sitemap and imagemap. It allows you to specify the entire structure of the website, which will facilitate navigation for both bots and visitors.
- Micromarking of contacts. In 2012, Google announced the introduction of the knowledge graph to improve the relevance of the SERP. So, the entered information about the address and profiles of social networks will help to take additional places in the search results and increase the visibility of the site.
- Breadcrumbs marking. It informs about the structure of the website, allows the user to understand where he is, and go to the main page in 1-2 clicks.
- Optimization of h1, h2 tags. They structure the text and can be used one (h1 heading) or more times on the page (h2 heading).
- Duplicate pages. They negatively affect the ranking, redirects are required for the solution, and duplicates must be closed from indexing.
- Image optimization. Absence of filled Alt meta tags (alternative text if the image is not shown and Title (name of the image). They must be meaningful and short.
- Set up a 404 page. It will help correct negative impressions if a person did not get to the desired page (entered the wrong url or there is no such page). Offer him to go to another section of the searched site - most likely, the visitor will click there.
- Development of metadata templates. SE forms snippets from them, on the basis of which it displays tips for the user, and this, as a result, increases traffic.
- Optimization of download speed. Optimization of download speed. A fast loading site has more visitors. They can be turned into clients. Therefore, it is necessary to revise image formats and make them scalable, remove unnecessary JavaScript code, and put it at the end of the executable part of the code. This will significantly reduce the loading time of the main content.
All recommendations are binding. The Client can implement them himself, on his own, or entrust it to the agency. In any case, it is necessary to make all these changes and monitor the dynamics of growth.
Our client received a complete file with recommendations (tips and examples), which contains all the errors that need to be corrected immediately.
6. Semantics
This word defines the meaning of linguistic units. The basis for website promotion on the Internet is the competent compilation of the semantic core (SC). This is a general list of all words and phrases, which fully reflect the structure and the content of the website.
The search for one or another information begins with a query. The user looks for a suitable answer in the search results and goes to the site that, as he thinks, is most relevant to his request. This means that the site most likely contains the answer to the search query. The satisfaction of the user's information needs is the main ranking criterion for all websites.
Since our Client already had a website, we had to collect semantics from scratch for all three domains. These are all those queries by which interested persons can find the website. Consequently, all content must be search-optimized.
An extensive database will help increase your audience reach in search, but you can't overdo it. Each business has a certain specialization, and therefore it is worth focusing on it.
But should be found in Rockingham:
Fig. 7 — On the right we see data taken from the Google Knowledge Panel (+ additional visibility)
The collected semantics were also divided into categories:
- brand queries;
- essential service (drive-thru coffee);
- vacancies;
- semantic core for pages onlineshop.muzzbuzz.com, franchising.muzzbuzz.com.
Also, the requests were categorized by the links to which the collected keys should lead. The frequency for the last month is indicated for each phrase. SC should be used to optimize content (below we have given other recommendations for optimizing site content).
7. Crowd Marketing
You need to create the right opinion of people about the promoted service or product to increase popularity and build awareness. This is called crowd marketing.
Put simply, this is communication between the brand and the audience, which is carried out based on the placement of inconspicuous reviews. We can direct them to visit the website and buy our Client's product by increasing user confidence.
Statistics indicate that 92% of users would hesitate to buy a product if there are no reviews for it. At the same time, the presence of only positive reviews will make users doubt their veracity. After all, it so happens that you read reviews about a product and you realize that something is wrong here.
The task of crowd marketing is to sow positive impressions, increase audience loyalty and interest.
For our Client, we have compiled a list of websites (they MUST be different) to post reviews in such a way that it looks natural. In this case, we also took advantage of non-anchor links. That is, the link is not tied to a keyword (words: here, read the link). From the context surrounding the non-anchor links, it becomes clear where the link will lead. SE considers such backlinks to be natural because they are usually used by people when communicating with each other in comments, on forums, etc.
8. Content optimization
One of the main tasks in the search engine optimization process is to create (write) content that meets the requirements of search engines and the needs of consumers. Any article or text posted on the website must answer visitors' questions. Information should be as relevant to the topic as possible.
There should not be articles on how to choose a microwave if you have an IT company that promotes websites. Such an article can only relate to a project to promote a website that sells microwave ovens. And no more.
It is quite difficult to write a text aimed at the satisfaction of both parties, not to mention the fact that the information must always be relevant (meet modern needs and show the latest facts).
Following to these recommendations, it will be possible to write good material for posting on your website:
- pay attention to structure and simplicity, do not burden the text with heavy structures;
- it makes no sense to write long material if you can write shorter, but delve much deeper into the topic;
- try to make the feed unique and use different words so that there is no overspam;
- use different styles, then articles will look sharp and varied;
- use spelling and grammar checker tools (Language Tool, Glavred, Advego, Spelling): reading text with errors is simply unpleasant;
- divide content into logical blocks with headings h1-h5, and it makes the text easier to follow;
- use keywords evenly and add them to the text of headings (in a diluted and unchanged occurrence), use synonyms.
Writing a thematic text is not a difficult task, but it is not worth entrusting such a thing to just anyone. Only the owner of the company and a couple of his employees know best about their product and industry. However, they hardly have time to write articles. Therefore, you need to look for professionals who can vouch for their work and write really interesting and readable material.
By contacting the agency, the business owner can protect himself, because the agency provides a full range of promotion services (including copywriting services).
Each optimization case involves the individual development of technical specifications for writing texts that will be posted on the Client's website.
For our Client, we have developed terms of reference for writing articles for such main sections as:
- work at MuzzBuzz;
- shop online;
- a guide on how to start cooperating with the brand on a franchise;
- how to use the app;
- text for the Eat and Drink page;
- text for the home page.
We tried to always keep in touch with our Client by agreed on our actions with him and providing reports.
9. Deliverable
Unfortunately, the Client did not work through all the recommendations that we provided and did not implement the semantic core properly.
As specialists who have invested time and effort in the development of this project, we were sad to see this (after all, much more incredible outcomes could have been achieved).
Initially, the website was closed from indexing, but due to our technical audit, the Client's website became visible and more structured.
The implemented sitemap and redirects in combination with other measures made it possible to break through fierce competition to the first search page.
Visibility increased significantly after adding the site to the Google Knowledge Base (see Fig. 7 in Step 6 again).
The website traffic has increased significantly:
Fig. 8 — The number of visits has increased 16 times!
Using Google Analytics, we tracked the dynamics of changes in visits over the period of work and compared it with the previous period:
Fig. 9 — Comparison of the number of users for April-May 2020 (orange bar) and May-June 2020 (blue bar)
The number of visitors from organic search was over 70% by the end of the first month of work (May 25 - June 25). These figures could be higher, but only the Client decided what he agreed to implement. After all, we do not force anyone.
We can help you move forward, we can do everything for you. Nevertheless, the last word is only for the Client!
Efficiency and quality are with us.
