Mastering specialist Food & Drink SEO: We help you get discovered and sell more online

How SEO sells speciality food and drink online

Selling speciality food and drink to your foodie audience online might sound easy, but it’s far from it. Even if your product is the best on the market, standing out and getting discovered by the right audience can be a real challenge. Without a strong website presence in search, your food or drink brand risks getting lost in the noise, while similar to eCommerce, relies more heavily on premium positioning and emotional appeal than most other product categories. Whether you're using Shopify, WooCommerce, or another Wordpress, the right strategy can help your food or drink brand truly stand out.

Here’s where to start:

1. Premium images matter

Premium food is an emotional purchase, and high-quality product and lifestyle images can make your website instantly more appealing.

Inspirational imagery plays a big role in SEO, too. Images are often pulled into search results, especially in Google Images and rich snippets. To help Google read and display your photos and to improve accessibility, include descriptive alt text. Premium shots also make your content more shareable on social media, and these signals now benefit your search rankings and SEO.

It’s also important to compress your images so they don’t slow down your site - especially on mobile, where most food browsing and shopping happens. Large files can impact page speed negatively, affecting your search ranking.

2. Social Food and Drink searches

Search and social are more closely aligned than ever before. Google now takes more signals from social engagement, meaning that when people like, share, and interact with your content, it positively affects your organic search results. With platforms like TikTok and Instagram now serving as search engines, following search-best practices will help you rank in Google and social searches.

3. Authority and Expertise

By demonstrating your process and expertise in product development, ingredients, and more, you show google and potential customers that you are a trusted, premium brand.

This helps you build domain authority, drive backlinks, and improve your search position. Create detailed content hubs that showcase your expertise and build a connected content structure around a pillar page to strengthen your SEO strategy.

4. Understand Your Audience and Go Niche

We’re big advocates of truly understanding your audience by using available data signals. Speak directly to your customers, utilise GA4, social and CRM data to build audience profiles and understand the search intent behind their queries.

When building out your strategy to reach the target audience, keep focused on your niche - don’t try to be everything to everyone. Instead, own your space and build your SEO strategy around niche keywords.

Our advice is to target both commercial search terms and upper-funnel discovery content. Think of terms like “Welsh blue cheese” for buyers ready to shop, but also include broader discovery searches like “how do you make cheese” to attract curious foodies already interested in your niche, and the process. Reach people at every stage of their journey, and push towards purchase.

Summary

Speciality food and drink is a fast-growing sector, creating plenty of opportunities to rank for niche and long-tail keywords as search traffic continues to rise.