Webinar: Local SEO & Google Business Webinar for Meat Businesses

In today's digital age, having a strong online presence is crucial for businesses looking to attract customers and expand their reach.

In a recent webinar hosted by Sydney and Katie from ChopLocal, key strategies for optimizing local SEO and Google Business profiles were discussed to help businesses market their products effectively.

Watch the recording below or scroll down for a summary and full transcript.

Understanding Local SEO:

Local SEO plays a vital role in helping businesses connect with customers in their specific geographic area. By understanding what potential customers are searching for, businesses can tailor their online content to meet those needs. It's essential to focus on consumer-oriented keywords and terms that resonate with the target audience, such as "bulk pork" or "lean meat," rather than industry-specific jargon or breed names.

Significance of Keyword Research:

Keyword research is a fundamental aspect of optimizing your website for search engines. By identifying the terms and phrases that customers are using to search for products or services like yours, you can better align your website content to match those queries. Sydney emphasized the importance of using advantageous keywords for farms and butcher shops to improve their online visibility and attract more traffic to their websites.

Optimizing Google Business Profiles:

A well-optimized Google Business profile can significantly impact your search rankings and overall online visibility. Sydney highlighted the importance of having an updated and engaging profile, including adding photos, events, and customer reviews. Businesses can edit their profiles easily, ensuring that accurate information is displayed to potential customers.

Enhancing Website Performance with Image Optimization:

Image optimization is another critical aspect of improving your website's performance and user experience. By optimizing image size, file format, and naming conventions, you can enhance site speed and make your content more accessible to both users and search engines. Sydney recommended using tools like Canva to adjust image sizes and formats for better optimization.

Link-Building Strategies for Improved Credibility:

Building backlinks from reputable sources is essential for establishing credibility with search engines like Google. By networking with local media, restaurants, and small businesses, you can create reciprocal linking opportunities that benefit both parties. Additionally, seeking link backs from local event sponsorships and directories can further boost your website's authority and visibility.

Maximizing Google Business for Local Success:

Creating and optimizing a Google Business profile is key for local businesses looking to attract customers in their area. Sydney provided valuable insights into setting up a profile, including adding essential business information like address, contact details, and website links. By encouraging customer reviews and adding engaging photos, businesses can increase their chances of ranking higher in local search results.

Conclusion:

In conclusion, implementing effective local SEO strategies and optimizing your Google Business profile are essential steps in enhancing your online visibility and attracting more customers. By focusing on consumer-oriented keywords, image optimization, link-building, and maximizing your Google Business presence, you can improve your search engine rankings and connect with potential customers in your local area. By following the tips from the webinar, businesses can elevate their online marketing efforts and stand out in the competitive digital landscape.

Full Transcript:

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:00:00]:
Thank you guys for hopping on tonight. We are really excited to be launching kind of part two of our meat marketing webinar series. If you've been following along, we did, I think, five this spring and then we're offering another five this fall. So we're really excited to have you join us and hopefully you'll be able to get a lot of value out of the topics that we're going to be covering this fall. So to introduce myself, my name is Sydney Hadacek and I am a producer support specialist with Chop Local. I do a lot of work with organizing these webinars and offering them. So if you ever have any questions about where to find recordings or how to register or any of those things, feel free to reach out. And tonight, my teammate Katie Olthoff will be presenting about local SEO.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:00:52]:
So we're excited to share about this topic. It's something that's really exciting for us and we think it's a great way to help advance your business. So Katie, if you'll go to the next slide. So if you haven't seen, this is kind of a quick rundown of the webinars, we'll be offering it this fall. We kind of have them scheduled once a month regularly, but we do have another webinar on Thursday for meat and poultry processors. So if that applies to you, we'd love to see you there on Thursday as well. If this is your first time joining us. For a webinar, we always like to share a little bit about chop Local and what we do here.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:01:39]:
So chop Local is an online marketplace specifically for meat. So we work with vendors around the country to help create an online store for them to be able to sell their meat online. If you're interested in having a store with us and selling your meat or shipping your meat, we're always happy to talk with you about what it's like to be a vendor on chop local, so feel free to reach out if that is of interest to you. But with that, we'll go ahead and get started. We do have the Q A feature enabled. If you have any questions, just feel free to submit those throughout the evening and we'll be sure to answer them at the end. And we'll have a few interactive questions as well throughout the presentation. So feel free to participate with those so that we can kind of get an idea of who is in our audience tonight.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:02:31]:
So with that, I'll pass it over to Katie.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:02:34]:
Ok, awesome. Thank you. Sydney, do you want to go ahead and give them the first poll question while I introduce myself so we can gather some of those answers. Like Sydney said Katie from Chop Local, the co founder of Chop Local. We launched in late 2020 with the idea of creating this online farmers market specifically for meat. Then as we started working with farmers and butcher shops across the country, we realized that there were a lot of other things that they needed help with related to marketing their meat. And it wasn't just ecommerce, but it was things like websites and social media and ecommerce. I just said ecommerce websites and social media and SEO and things like that.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:03:18]:
And so we've expanded our offerings to be able to help in a variety of ways. And part of the reason that we get to do that is because we received a USDA grant to provide these trainings free of charge. So we do these webinars free of charge and then we also do quite a bit of one on one support as well. So the first question here was, do you have a website? So far, everybody that's answered it has said, yes, they have a website. Ok, Sydney, do we have question number two?

Katie - ChopLocal [00:03:50]:
Let me launch that one.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:03:53]:
Here we go. Question number two is, have you set up a Google Business profile? And you may not even know what that is, but that's going to help me really know how much time to spend on that topic when we get there. Okay, so we're about 70 30. 70% have set up a Google Business profile, 30% have not. So that's really good to know. Okay, Sydney, you can go to the next question if you use Google Analytics. First of all, do you use Google Analytics? What percent of your traffic comes from search specifically? Probably Google search.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:04:39]:
There is an I'm not sure option if you don't use Google Analytics.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:04:51]:
We're not answering because you don't currently use Google Analytics.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:04:57]:
Oh, everybody's participated.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:05:01]:
Oh, there we go. My Internet connection just went unstable for a second, so let me hopefully, knock on wood, Sydney, we won't have issues. Okay. Do you want to share those results? It looks like we only had a couple of people said ten to 15%, a couple of people said 25% to 30% and everybody else said not sure. So I can tell you in 2022, about over 40% of chop Local's traffic came via search. So it's been very important to chop local to help people find local meat by using search engine optimization. And there are some things that you can do as well to make your website more search friendly, make yourself easier to find online for people. So here's what we're going to go over tonight, we're going to talk about keyword research.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:05:57]:
We're going to talk about what you can do on your website from a technical standpoint, as well as the content, the words and images and things like that. And then we're going to talk a little bit about your Google Business profile. Keyword research. I love keyword research. I can go down a rabbit hole for a really long time about this. In fact, Sydney really likes to bake. So when I was preparing for this, I started to make up a fake bakery for her and I went down keyword research, rabbit hole on bakery items, and I was like, stop. I spent way too much time getting really excited about which bakery items are most searched for online.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:06:34]:
Turns out cupcakes are much more highly searched for than cakes are. I wouldn't have necessarily guessed that, but that's kind of interesting. So when we talk about keyword research, you need to think about what do you want to be known for? And are customers actually searching for that? An example here. I worked with an organization recently that did a lot of work around conservation and things like that. And they use the term pollinator habitat all over their website. Pollinator habitat. Pollinator habitat. Pollinator Habitat.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:07:10]:
When I started to do keyword research for them, I found out that pollinator habitat gets about 300 searches monthly. But butterfly garden, which is very closely related to pollinator habitat, gets 17,000 searches monthly. And so one of my recommendations for them was that they need to be focusing more on butterfly garden as a keyword or they need to be incorporating it alongside of pollinator habitat. One thing that I want to point out as we talk about keywords is that sometimes your marketing claims are really important in getting someone to purchase your meat, but that doesn't necessarily mean that someone is searching for that term. So, for example, well, here's my cake example that I was giving you with Sydney's bakery. So I used Google Keyword planner, which is my favorite tool. There are other free tools online that you can use to do some keyword research to find out what people are searching for, but I prefer Google Keyword planner. I typed in some guesses, bakery, sourdough, local cake baker, and these are the responses that I got.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:08:26]:
We found out that cupcakes get more monthly searches than cake does. And then from there, in this order, most searched as custom cakes, then birthday cakes, then wedding cakes. So here's what I want to talk about specifically to farms and butcher shops. These are common mistakes that I see in keywords is a lot of times on our farms, we will name them like the cattle farms. So Olthoff Cattle Co. That's what we call our cattle operation here on the farm. If I was selling beef direct to consumer, it would be highly advantageous to use that word beef in there instead. So maybe it's Olthoff beef instead of Olthoff Cattle Co.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:09:10]:
Okay, that's something to think about. Hogs versus pigs versus pork. This could be a regional difference. But what are people looking for if they are looking to buy directly from a farmer? You can use those keyword research tools. But if you don't feel like you're getting a good feel for that, go to some of those local Facebook groups that talk about that are meant to connect farmers and consumers and see what people are typing in for questions. Are they saying, I want half a hog? Or are they saying, I want to buy bulk pork? What does that look like? Another one I've seen with farms or butcher shops that are offering a variety of meat is they'll use the word proteins. Yes, that is accurate, but it is not necessarily what people are searching on Google. Another example is breeds versus attributes of your meat.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:10:03]:
So I can tell you I did not grow up on a farm. So I have worked in agriculture for over ten years now. But all of the different breeds, especially of cattle, most of them don't mean a lot to consumers. Instead, you want to focus on the attributes of your beef or your pork. Is it very lean? And there are consumers who want a very lean product. Is it highly marbled? There are consumers who want a highly marbled product. There are exceptions, of course. Angus beef is highly recognizable.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:10:41]:
Pork mangalitza is becoming more recognizable. There are some other breeds that might be more recognizable. But I once saw a farmer talk about on their website, they talked about the fact that they were using Maine Anjou cattle, and so they were showing up in search for local beef in Maine. Totally not relevant whatsoever. So just be careful with those breeds. They might not be relevant, but they may even lead people astray. And then a super common mistake I see is that people have one website and it is targeted at farmers and targeted at consumers. Most common here is somebody's got high quality cattle genetics.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:11:26]:
They are selling their bowls and replacement heifers, and they've got pictures and stuff on their website. And then they've also got a button that says shop beef. If you're serious about selling your beef, get a separate website for that because that is really confusing to your customers. Another thing, like I started to say earlier, is your marketing claims. They may be really important to get people to purchase, but they may not be important from a search standpoint. So an example of that that I see is of the term regenerative. We're starting to see the term regenerative used more in agriculture, and I think using the term regenerative meat could encourage people to press that button and make that purchase. But literally nobody is searching for regenerative meat online right now.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:12:18]:
So it's not necessarily what I would lead with or use all over your entire website. Okay, I mentioned a couple of these already, but regional differences. So we are based out of Iowa. And so the terms that we use for half a beef, quarter beef locker, beef freezer, beef, those vary in different regions across the United States. If you are a butcher, know I'm saying butcher shop, but we use locker in Iowa probably a lot more often. Some areas of the country use that's. And I don't even know if I'm pronouncing it right because we don't use that term in Iowa whatsoever. So think about what is regional.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:13:03]:
And if you use Google keyword tool, you can actually type in a keyword and then specify the location. So I could get down to the county that I'm in and see what people are searching for here or your state or your region or whatever that may be. Then I thought this was really interesting. I was going with this regional idea and looking up that idea of hogs, pigs, pork, and it is different regionally, but I found that there is an incredible search volume for pigs liver. Not pork liver. Not pig liver. Pigs liver gets a lot of searches right now. I don't know if that is a trending topic or what it is, but you can also get down to which cuts are getting the most search volume.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:13:55]:
And so do you want a separate page specifically about that cut? And then you can think about specific versus general terms. So big game processing certainly generally encompasses deer processing. But deer processing gets a lot more search online if that's something that you offer. So even if you are also offering elk processing or moose or whatever it may be, deer processing, I would definitely make sure that you have optimized for that keyword as well. And now we're going to go into talking about how exactly you optimize for these keywords. Once you've identified for most websites, I would say probably five to ten keywords or short phrases that you want to really optimize for. Okay, now we're going to get into the technical part. Once you've decided some of your keywords and one thing I didn't mention is that geography could be one of your keywords.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:14:54]:
We're going to talk about search engine optimization. We say SEO, that's what it stands for, is search engine optimization. And because Google is the biggest search engine in the world, we're going to be focusing on Google. And that's what most SEO search engine optimizers will be focusing is on Google. However, as a side note, there are different platforms that have their own type of search engine. So there is SEO for YouTube. If you want to have a YouTube channel and try to get customers that way, there are certain techniques that you can use on YouTube. There's SEO for Pinterest.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:15:32]:
In my prior life, I was a mommy blogger. I blogged about our farm and our home and recipes, and we have a hundred year old farmhouse here. So we were renovating it. And so I did a lot of Pinterest SEO in order to drive people to my website from Pinterest. And so these things really apply across platforms for the most part. But we are going to focus primarily on Google tonight. And the whole goal is that you show up because you are a local business. We want you to show up where it says places here, and we want you to show up in the text listings as well.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:16:12]:
So here's how Google works behind the scenes. If you're unfamiliar, there is a crawler and it's basically, it's what we would call a bot. And it is a robot reader that reads your website and then determines where it ranks compared to other websites to show up in the Google search results. And that is based on an algorithm which is really a set of formulas and instructions that, again, is all automated and that algorithm changes and it's always evolving. But there are some principles that never change and that's what we're going to focus on tonight as well. So Google, and also your potential customers, want to know who you are, what you do or what you sell, where you're located, and that you are reputable. Now, the first three sound pretty obvious, right? But that fourth one that you are reputable, is becoming more and more important, especially as we talk about artificial intelligence. There are a lot of people using artificial intelligence to spin up websites or blog posts, and they act like they know something really intimately, that they have firsthand knowledge of a topic, when they might have used AI to write this blog post.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:17:30]:
And so we want to show that you are reputable and you are credible, and we'll talk a little bit about that as we go through here. So Google does crawl your entire website unless you have a setting turned off on your website builder, which does happen from time to time, sometimes on accident. But Google reads your entire website, but there are things that you can do to tell it exactly what's most important. These are the signposts telling Google what it should pay attention to. And that's your URL. That's your actual website address. So choplocal.com okay, then the titles on your website and your official meta descriptions. We should have asked Sydney at the beginning where people's websites are hosted, what builder they're using for their websites.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:18:20]:
But we'll give some examples for Wix and squarespace because we've worked with some websites there and can kind of tell you where most of this can be found. Okay, so your URL, the first thing to think about is your home page when you are picking and kind of goes along with the name of your business. But like I said, which one is more likely to be found if I'm trying to sell my beef? Altof cattle Co. Or Olthoff beef might be advantageous. Like I said, to use the word beef right there in my name and in my homepage URL. So for Sydney's pretend bakery here, we're going to go with sydneyshomebakery.com because it has that keyword bakery right in there. Then we can talk about the other pages on your website. So I said cupcakes gets a lot of search volume.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:19:16]:
That means Sydney should have a page on her website. That is sydneyshomebakery.com slash cupcakes. And it should have information about the cupcakes that she offers. Maybe some past custom cupcakes that she's done, some photos as well as pricing, delivery information, that type of thing. Same when we get to cakes. And then one thing that I want to point out here is almost every website has an about page, and you have an opportunity here to make that about page more impactful. By putting sydneyshomebakery.com about the baker, we've just added another keyword in there, which is baker. So easy to do that instead of just leaving it sydneyshomebakery.com slash about.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:20:05]:
We also can put some of those geographic targets in. We're like I said, here in central Iowa. So maybe Ames area bakery or central Iowa delivery, things like that. And those pages, it's a little bit of work to set them up and to put some unique content on them you can't copy and paste from one page to another. Google doesn't like that. But she might rank differently for those pages on Google and draw people in from Ames or draw people in, know the surrounding area. Then on your website, you want to have the metadata properly filled out. Okay, first thing, h one tags.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:20:52]:
H one stands for heading one. It is the most important heading on your page. You only want one per page. If you put more than one per page, Google is going to get confused. Ideally it's 20 to 70 characters long. And again, you want to use those keywords. So like I said, a lot of websites we have an about page. We want to make sure it's about the baker, about our family farm, about our Angus beef, whatever it is, use some of those keywords in there.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:21:24]:
Okay. I did a screenshot here from a wix site, and when you go to add text in wix, you can click on add heading one and that will tag it with that h one tag. Okay. So just because it's at the top of your page and it's the biggest font and it's bold text, Google doesn't automatically know that that's your heading unless you have it tagged with h one. Most platforms nowadays, when I was blogging back in the day, when I was blogging, we had to go into the HTML and actually type in the h one tag. But these platforms now make it so much easier to make sure that it's in there. Okay. Your meta description is the description that often shows up in search results.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:22:17]:
So I should have done a screenshot of this, but if you look down here, you can't see my cursor, can you, Sydney? Or can you? Yeah. Okay, good. Okay. I'll try not to be spastic about it like that then. So down here where it says dutch oven bakery, the dutch oven bakery, Ames and Boone, Iowa Dutch bakery, which by the way, dutch oven bakery is amazing if you haven't been. But the dutch oven bakery, the blue part there is their h one heading and the text underneath there is their meta description. Okay? So that is often showing up there. Now, Google will sometimes create a meta description for you or create a title for you, but it's not always exactly what you want it to be.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:23:04]:
And so if you really want it optimized and you want to highlight certain things, it's best to put it in yourself. You want 120 to 158 characters. If it's longer than that, it might get cut off. So make sure that you have important information at the front and make sure you're using your keywords in there, but make it an enticing description as well. I don't want you to just list a bunch of keywords in your meta description. That's not helpful either. Okay, so that was probably almost the most technical that we're going to get. This is what I really love is the text, also called the copy on your website.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:23:47]:
So the crawler is going to look at those signposts, but they're also going to read the rest of the text on your website. So you want to make it immediately clear what you sell or offer. Generally, what is good for SEO is good for your real people that are viewing your website as well. You want to add plenty of text. There are a lot of different recommendations. Probably the most common that I've seen is that you need 1000 words on your page. And if you're thinking, I have no idea how I'm going to write 1000 words about cupcakes right now, I feel you. I'm a short writer and so I struggle with this sometimes too.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:24:23]:
One tip is to add an FAQ section with questions that customers often ask you. So if you have a butcher shop, you know what questions you get at the counter all of the time. Make an FAQ section with those questions and then the answers to those questions. And along with that, balance what you're writing for Google with what you're writing for people. Even though we're talking about 1000 words for Google, if you put 1000 words in one giant paragraph or even in ten paragraphs, that's a lot of text for your viewers to look at. And so utilize subheadings, utilize that FAQ type of an idea, spread it out across the page so that the real person looking at your site doesn't become completely overwhelmed when they look at it. This is something, honestly that I love to do. And I was just on a call the other day with a gentleman in Missouri and that was the first thing, as we were doing, we did a little mini website audit while I was on a call with him.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:25:31]:
And that was the first thing that jumped out to me was there was a huge block of text, really valuable information. But I encouraged him to think about breaking it up into paragraphs, maybe making some lists with bullet points, using subheadings, which are also valuable to Google because that's going to make it a lot easier for the viewers on your site. And then one thing that I recommend is try to include some content related to what's going on around you locally and that might appeal to people who value local foods if we're talking about local meat here. Okay, I've got some examples of that and these content ideas, you could put these on a page on your website, but you could also use these in social media posts, again, to provide value to your followers. And you're going to make some buddies with some local businesses if you do this. So if we want to show up and search for local foods in central Iowa, we could do a best local foods in central Iowa. And Sydney is going to mention she just went to the dairyette. It's this little ice cream shop this week with her know.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:26:41]:
And we could highlight the dairy yet and we could highlight some other places to get local foods. Again, five local farms near Des Moines. If you sell beef, list a flower farm, a dairy farm, a produce farm, maybe a pumpkin farm, maybe somebody that sells pork, something like that. Again, where to buy local foods in central Iowa? If you're a butcher shop, list some farmers markets, list restaurants that use local foods and of course include your butcher shop in there as well. So these are some ideas. You can read through these and maybe think of some more, but think about those people that value local and what else they might be looking for here. One word of caution, because we're talking about selling food. A lot of people like to put a recipe blog on their website.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:27:34]:
There's nothing wrong with that. But it's probably not going to get you buyers via search. Someone might come to your website because they looked up a local farm or something and then the recipes might entice them to try a cut that they hadn't thought of or something like that. But people who are searching for a roast beef recipe probably already have roast beef that they're trying to decide what to do with. Okay? So it's not necessarily that they have buying intent if they are searching for a recipe. Okay, now we're going to circle back to this idea of credibility and whether or not you are a reputable website. The biggest thing that Google looks for here are backlinks. And what that means is that there is another website out there that has linked to you.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:28:29]:
It is like a mini endorsement of your site and it boosts your credibility in Google's eyes. It can be really difficult to get backlinks. And that's honestly one of the reasons that being part of chalk local is valuable is because we have a lot of backlinks because of some media being in news articles, working with some ag media, as well as some different awards that we've won. Even this grant that I mentioned earlier, we sent out a press release about receiving the grant and we were listed in a lot of different publications and we got those backlinks. Okay. So for you, best way to get backlinks is to sign up for different directories and we'll go through a list of what I mean there in a second. Other ideas would be news articles. So if your local newspaper does a story, ask them to include your website in it and link to it online.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:29:28]:
Hopefully local media knows that that is important to you, but sometimes it doesn't hurt to mention it to them. If there are restaurants that purchase your products or other small businesses like I said, that you've networked with, that might aren't direct competition, but attract the same type of buyer, maybe they will link to you on their website, especially if you do that reciprocally for them. That was a big word to tackle. Okay. And then local event sponsorships, if you're active in your local community and you are doing sponsorships for local events, sometimes they will put those online and link for those as well. I know different associations will do that. A lot of times if you do a trade show or if you do a vendor fair or something like that, now the more variety in your backlinks you have, the more valuable it's going to be. But like I said, directories are an easy way for you to get some backlinks.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:30:29]:
A key here is to make sure that your name, address, phone, your nap is what the seos call it. Make sure that those all match across all these directories, because if they don't match, Google's going to start going, wait a second, is this the same business? Is it not? Are they shady? How come they're not giving out consistent information? So a few directories that you can try would be foodmarketmaker.com, local harvest. Those are both free state farm bureaus. A lot of them have local food directories right now. Your state beef council might have one. And then there are just on a state by state basis, USDA has one I forgot to list on here for local foods. But then there are others like this one that I have an image of is out of New York. So on a state by state basis, there are some different options as well.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:31:24]:
Now, some of these directories, honestly, you may not get people actually seeing your listing and clicking to your website or buying because of this directory. You might, but you are definitely going to get value out of having that backlink. And so I think it's worth it to take the time to take part in these directories for that purpose, if for nothing else. Okay, this is the second piece that is maybe a little bit technical here. Your website images. Image size greatly affects site speed, and Google wants a great experience for the people who click on its links. And so they prioritize fast websites. So we highly recommend that your image files are smaller than 500 kb.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:32:17]:
Even better is smaller than 200 kb. In order to make that happen. Jpegs are typically a smaller file size than pings are. There are times when you need to use a ping because you need a transparent background, but otherwise jpegs are going to be your friend. And I do have here this first screenshot is from canva. So I'm guessing some of you use canva. If not, we have a webinar coming up about that later because I love canva. When you download from canva, a lot of times it will want to download as a ping automatically.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:32:56]:
And so you'll want to change it to a JPEG. And then you might also adjust the size and the quality. The size that they have here is actually the physical dimensions of the image as it's downloaded or as it would show up on your website, not necessarily the file size. So when I say 200 kb, I'm talking about the file size. The other thing I wanted to mention here is that you could have two images that are 805 by 1750 pixels and exactly the same physical size. But the file size is not going to be the same because the file size really depends more on how much detail is in the photo, the amount of contrast between the colors, if there's text, and things like that. So unfortunately, it's a little bit of a guessing game when you're downloading to know if you're going to be under that 200 kb. But most.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:33:51]:
I'm a Windows user, Sydney is a Mac user. I know both of our computers have an easy photo editing service where you can resize that image and compress it. Okay, the next thing, name the images with keywords. So we take them straight out of our phone nowadays. Right, but it is worth your time to rename that image before you upload it to your website, because that is another thing that Google can read. It reads the data that is associated with that photo. And so if you have keywords in there, that's a great way to get those keywords in one more time and then also alt text. So I have up here an example again, this is from Wix.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:34:37]:
You can see that the image is not named with anything valuable to Google. And also it's 2.6 megabytes, which means it's 2600 kb. So this is one that we definitely need to optimize I also saw in Wix, but it's not part of this screenshot. There was a place, it literally said, I might have been squarespace. Now I can't remember. But on one of them it literally said, tell Google what this image shows. And it had a field where you could type in your alt text. Alt text is alternative text.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:35:13]:
And it means back in the day when, well, some of us in rural areas still have this issue. If a website won't load and it just has that little picture icon and some words, the words are what's going to show up there now for website accessibility, for people who have vision problems and they use like a website reader to read it out loud to them, it will tell them what that alt text is. So it will say something like, image of sheep on pasture on Nebraska Farm, something like that. Whatever you put in there. So that's important for accessibility. It's also important to Google, and Google looks favorably upon you putting it in there for the purpose of accessibility as well, because, again, they want users to have a good experience when they click on these websites. Okay, we are ready for part three here. I think Google Business profiles.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:36:13]:
It is incredibly important. I know most everybody. I think it was 70% of the respondents at the beginning said that they had a Google business profile. That is fantastic. It's incredibly important for local businesses. I have an example recently, my son is seeing a specialist medical specialist with their own office, and this gal does not have a Google Business profile. And so when I go to put the address into Google Maps, I am an Android user as well. So when I use Google Maps to get there, I have to actually click on her website, copy and paste the address and put it into Google Maps because it doesn't show up in that local pack that I showed you earlier.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:36:56]:
And there's not a Google business profile where I can just click on the address or click on the map button. So here's another example, though, from my local area. So I typed in dentist. This is the dentist that is closest to me. Jewel family dentistry. This is their Google business profile in the past. Google recently changed the name within the past year or so. They used to call it Google my business.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:37:27]:
So if you hear that phrase or you see that somewhere, GMB, Google my business, it's the same. Um, you do not need to have a website to have a Google Business profile. And your Google Business profile almost acts as if as a mini website on. Okay, if you do have a website and you have kind of a presence online with maybe social media or you're in some of those directories and such, Google may just create a business profile for you, but again, it's not going to be completely optimized. And if that is the case, if you search and you're showing up and you're like, oh, I'm good to go, look for this little button right here that says, own this business and click on that because then you can claim that profile and you can optimize it. So to create this, if you haven't, it's google.com slash Business. I believe that you do need to have a Google account or a Gmail account to do this. One thing that I would highly recommend is add photos, especially photos of your people and your farm or your shop if you're a butcher.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:38:36]:
Okay, this is a great way to show people what's going on behind the scenes or in your store or on your farm without them actually visiting. And one thing that we found from our marketing at chop Local is that if you include faces in your photos, so faces of your farmers, of your family, of the guys cutting the meat in the back room, faces are really powerful for people to feel like they can trust your business and want to do business with you. And so we highly recommend that. And then we also recommend that you ask your customers for reviews. I know that that can be awkward sometimes, but do it on social media. Do it in the store even. Hey, would you mind leaving us a Google review, something like that. It's worth the awkwardness to get those reviews because people really do look at them and appreciate them.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:39:35]:
And I didn't want to throw anybody under the bus, but I was looking up another local business sector earlier and what I saw was that there was a local business really close to me in our little town that's a few miles away. And it was actually lower on the search results than some of the businesses that were further in distance away because those businesses had a stronger Google Business profile. So you can outrank those results that you would expect to see show up sorted by distance. You can outrank them if you have a really strong business profile, you have reviews, and then you can also add those things like photos that are going to make people more likely to, once they see your business profile, they want to do business with you if they see those photos and that type of thing.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:40:29]:
We had a quick question. Come in, Katie, and I'll ask this here. What happens in your Google Business profile if your business moves to a new address? I know maybe multiple people have that question.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:40:42]:
So if you want to talk about go in there. You can go in there and edit your Google Business profile and edit that address in there if you need to. Does that answer your question? Yes. Awesome. Another thing that I will point out is that I know some farms are hesitant to share their address online. And I understand that we have a small herd of mini herefords out here, but we also have a commercial turkey farm. So I've heard hate from people online about our farm, and I get that. And activists are a real concern.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:41:22]:
But for the most part, if you are selling food locally and you've got those pretty pictures of your farm and your people, you're not really a target for activists. I wouldn't worry about it too much, honestly. It's typically the farms like mine, the commercial farms, that are more of the target for activists. So I think it's worth putting your actual location on there if you are trying to attract local customers. Okay, so if you haven't done this, I'm going to go through this real quick since most people had already done it, but if you haven't done it, these are what some of the screens look like here. So start building your business. I went to google.com business, and it has you sign in and then you can manage your Google Business profiles. And I clicked on add a profile.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:42:18]:
This is where it got me typed in my business name. Now, one thing, business category. Think about this. Here are some of the categories that I outlined that you might fit into based on who I'm expecting on here. Meat processor, meat product store, farm shop, or organic food store. Now I'm really torn, and I honestly don't have data to know whether farm shop typically refers to your selling farm goods to farmers or you have a shop on your farm selling farm produced items that make sense. Sydney, you're the only face I can see, so not at me. Okay, so are you a bongars or an orchland? Or are you the local shop selling the local food directly from know? So if we're all meat on here, I really lean towards meat product store or meat processor and using the word meat in there, they have organic food store, they have restaurants with literally dozens of different types of cuisine that you might offer.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:43:32]:
They don't have anything with the word local food or anything like that, but you can put a business category in there. And this is really one of those for sure I would recommend, and I lean towards the ones that have the word meat in them personally. Then I go to the next slide. Do you want to add a physical location that people can visit if you are targeting local customers, yes, I would say so. It's going to ask you to put in your address. Do you provide deliveries and office visits if you're selling online and you are doing some deliveries, that type of thing, you can put yes. And then you're going to add the areas that you serve. If you are doing farmers markets in different towns, I would definitely add the farmers market.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:44:21]:
If you have delivery areas, put that in there. If it's more of a general like I want to serve these areas, you can see that I put in the biggest town that's near me, but then I also put in the entire county that I live in so that I'm not going to limit it. I don't want people 4 miles away from me in the small town to think that I'm only serving Ames, Iowa. And then you can put your contact information in here. The phone number is required. But like I said, you do not have to have a website that is optional. And as I was doing this, preparing for this presentation, they actually told me I was verified and I was shocked because I have done this before. And they will send you a postcard.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:45:10]:
Google literally sends postcards. I know it's hard to believe, but they will send you a postcard to verify your physical address. And so I don't know why they decided to verify me without that this time, especially since I don't sell beef from my farm and that was completely a made up name. But they may send you a postcard. Okay, from there you can add those photos. You can put in your open hours, which you can put that you're open twenty four seven. I honestly am not sure the best way to handle that if you're putting your farm address because you don't want people showing up at your farm at any time to purchase. But if you have an ecommerce site that is open twenty four seven, you can say that you're open twenty four seven.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:45:56]:
You can put in your optimized description using more keywords. So if you decide to go with the meat related business category, you might use that farm shop in your keywords instead or vice versa. And I believe also I didn't click far enough through this process, but I believe you can add additional business categories as well. So maybe that meat products shop or whatever it was is your main category. But then you add farm shop as subsequent categories too. Okay. So that's the gist of it. I do want to share with you guys that we are offering some SEO services here.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:46:42]:
So if this seems like it's overwhelming to you and you don't know how to implement these things on your site. We have a couple of options. We can do an SEO audit, which means we would take a look at your site and give you five major recommendations specific to your site and the things that we see there. And then you would implement those things so we might tell you your image sizes are way off the chart. You need to resize those images. Also, because I spent five years editing the Iowa cattleman's magazine before this job, I'm going to give you some copywriting suggestions. Because I was also a teacher, so it's in my nature. I can't help but edit the writing that I see.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:47:23]:
So I'm going to go ahead and share that with you as a bonus. Okay. The next package is the complete SEO package, which we'll take those top five recommendations and we will go ahead and do it for you. And then we will also give you five to ten additional recommendations for you to implement if you want to go ahead with that. But we'll take care of the big ones that we think will make the biggest impact on your site and your SEO. And then if you don't have a Google business profile and you want help setting that up initially, we can go ahead and do that. We'll optimize that business description based on the keyword research that we've done and working with dozens of farms and butcher shops across the country as well. So just want you to know that those are available.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:48:07]:
And if you're interested in that, you can get a hold of me here at my first name, last [email protected] or visit our website sell. Choplocal.com is where we have all of our free resources, recordings from last year's webinars. We'll have this recording as well as recordings for our future webinars coming up. This is really your one stop shop to get a lot of different resources on marketing your local meat. So what other questions do we have?

Katie - ChopLocal [00:48:42]:
I'll wait for those questions to come in, but in the meantime, I'm going to go ahead and put a quick survey in the chat. If you have time, we would love for you to fill this out and give us some feedback so we can continue to tailor these webinars to you all. But go ahead. The Q A feature is live so you can enter your questions as you have them. You did such a good job, Katie. You just answered everybody's questions.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:49:17]:
I anticipated and answered them all, or I lost everybody somewhere along the way and it was too much.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:49:26]:
Here we go. So here we go. I noticed on the example the business had events, I. E. Farmers markets, dates. How do you get that on the profile?

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:49:40]:
Good question. I would go to google.com businessmanage your profiles and there should be a place in there that you could put those events on there. I also am super curious about that one, honestly, because the farmers markets in Jewel, Iowa are next door to jewel family dentistry. But Jewel family dentistry is clearly not selling anything at the farmers market. So I'm curious whether Juul family dentistry actually put that on their Google profile or if Google somehow associated the two things together because of their proximity. Good. Interesting thought. I don't know how often should you update your business account or your social media? Some people treat their Google Business profile as another social media channel.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:50:43]:
I typically do not, but I will say, and I should have mentioned this in websites too, Google likes to see new things because they know then that you are an active business. And so I would try to update it regularly. I would not super stress about getting it updated as often as I would update my Facebook or my Instagram or anything like that. But I would try to add new content, probably quarterly, seasonally. And it doesn't hurt to just double check everything and make sure that the information is still up to date and that kind of thing. Okay, you said that we have to have a phone number listed, but did we have to have an address? We are mainly e commerce and do not have any products available locally. If you are mainly e commerce and are not selling locally, don't worry about a Google Business profile. We do have one for chop local, but honestly, it shows up in the little town of Wayland, Iowa, because that's where our headquarters are and we serve everybody all over the country.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:51:47]:
So it's really not doing us a lot of good, except that it puts our phone number out there so people can call us. So, Margaret, I would not worry about Google Business profile for you. I would worry more about what's on your website and really do that keyword research for e commerce to see where you can get some pickup. One thing that I found really interesting is that some of the products that we have trouble selling face to face or at local farmers markets in central Iowa, like maybe liver or kidney or heart, things like that, they sell better online if you optimize for SEO because people can't find them in their local grocery stores and so they're forced to look online. And so having a page about liver, kidney, heart, whatever it might be, could be a really good way for your e commerce business to get some traction and some search traffic there. Those are good questions. Any other questions?

Katie - ChopLocal [00:52:58]:
Almost eight or nine if you're on the east coast, so maybe we'll give it a few more seconds. Otherwise, thanks so much for joining us tonight. Hopefully you enjoyed this and we hope to see you again in the upcoming months.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:53:12]:
Sydney, I almost forgot we created the free checklist.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:53:15]:
Oh, gosh. Why don't you go ahead and share about that for those who are still on?

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:53:20]:
Okay, so we made you all a free checklist based on this presentation and to thank you for being on it, we will include it in. You're going to get an email right after this that says thank you for joining. Tomorrow you will get an email with a link to the presentation to rewatch it and we will include the checklist in there at that time as well. Okay, perfect.

Katie - ChopLocal [00:53:44]:
I'm so glad you remembered that.

Sydney - ChopLocal [00:53:46]:
I know, right? Okay, awesome. Thank you everybody for hopping on. Thank you, Nicole, for the kind words she said. Thank you so much. Great presentation, everybody. Have a good night and get in touch with us if you need anything.