Honey Badger Apiaries SEO Plan

Search engine optimization (SEO) is a set of strategies used to increase a website's visibility in search engine results according to Chris Barr in his book The Yahoo! Style Guide. I was somewhat familiar with SEO as I've seen the term while working on my own personal projects, but I had not learned much about how to evaluate or edit my projects to improve SEO. For this project, I've create an SEO plan for my business website (Honey Badger Apiaries).

Website Goals

Our website serves two main purposes - as an e-commerce and educational site. We want to make money and inform the public about bees and beekeeping. Our primary audience will be consumers who are local to the Macon, Georgia area who are looking to buy raw, local honey. With these goals and improving our SEO strategy in mind, I reviewed our website.

SEO Review

Wix is our webhosting platform which includes an SEO and Marketing review with suggestions. I knew that our website needed improvement in several key areas. First, our website lacks accessibility as we currently use no alt-text for our images. Second, our content needs improvement as it's not targeted, organized, or easily readable. Finally, our news page needs work as it's just a page with endless scrolling content.

Despite this issues, our website currently pulls up as the third result if the search term "Macon honey" is used in Google, but that does not seem to translate to users actually clicking on our website. The image below is a snapshot of our current website traffic. We have appeared in Google search results about 675 times in the last 90 days (impressions), but only 23 users have actually clicked on the result. This is a large disconnect that I hope we can close with SEO changes.

SEO Plan

To tackle our visibility issue, my plan is to review all the images on our website starting with our shop page. Alt-text will be added to help improve SEO and accessibility. I also plan to add metadata descriptors to hopefully draw more attention. This can easily be done through Wix, but I'm also getting best practices on writing metadata from Google's guide to meta-descriptions.

Next, I plan to review and revise the content of our website to include more keywords and to increase scannability. The markers of scannability include organization, concise language, and clear formatting. Adding headers and breaking up large pieces of text will improve the scannability of our website and hopefully keep users more engaged with our content.

Finally, I will add a blog to our website. It's been on my list for improving our website for a long time, but I simply haven't been able to put the effort toward it. Now, that we've been open for some time, have pictures, and stories to tell, I think that changing our "news" page to a blog format will improve SEO as I can use tags to connect commonly themed posts.

While there are many other ways to improve our website's SEO, I think my plan addresses the most glaring issues on our website. This plan will be a good starting point as we are constantly seeking to improve and grow our business.