SEO for Food: Specialty/Candy

The food industry, especially candy, is evolving with the massive growth of technology. Now, many consumers search for their favorite candy products on search engines and the internet. Therefore, to appear in the top search results, it is necessary to utilize strategies such as SEO. 

SEO for food specialty and candy is specifically designed based on the characteristics of the industry so that it can be effective for reaching target customers and increasing brand awareness of related businesses. 

This article will take you through how SEO for food specialties such as sweets can benefit businesses. Moreover, you will see an overview of the industry so that you can design the best SEO strategy according to the characteristics of the industry. 

Food Specialty and Candy Industry

The food specialty and candy sector prepares agricultural products for consumption but usually focuses on one type of food. These companies include condiment, chocolate, and pasta manufacturers.

According to Statista, the candy industry is expected to earn up to 1.19 trillion dollars by 2024 and grow by 5.78% annually. Additionally, its volume is estimated to reach 152.50 billion kilograms by 2028 and show volume growth of 3.2% in 2025.

These figures are not surprising as sweets such as candies are in high demand by many people worldwide, including Indonesia. This makes the candy industry a great opportunity to grow. 

Not only candies but other sweet products such as chocolate are also favored by Indonesians. This is in line with the fact that Indonesia is one of the top producers of cocoa beans.

Despite the huge opportunity and demand, the food specialty and candy industry is quite dependent on external factors such as consumer perception. Consumers will consider information about the candy product to be purchased before choosing to buy it or not.

In addition, consumers also pay attention to how good the quality of the candy products sold is, the price matches with the perceived benefits, as well as how the manufacturer promotes its products. 

Therefore, the food specialty and candy industry needs the right, relevant, and efficient marketing strategies to match customer characteristics. 

Additionally, the food specialty and candy industry must realize that they are in fierce competition with other large companies, such as PT Indofood Sukses Makmur Tbk, Mayora Indah, Garudafood Putra Putri Jaya Tbk, Siantar Top, and so on. 

In order to compete organically with these companies, you need to prepare more effective marketing strategies, such as SEO for specialty food and candy.

Challenges Facing the Food Specialty and Candy Industry

Even though it is one of the most popular food products, the food specialty and candy industry certainly has its challenges, where they must have their uniqueness and survive amidst the rapid transition of trends. 

The challenges faced by the specialty food and candy industry are as follows:

1. Business Uniqueness

Candy manufacturers come with various shapes and colors of products. This makes you have to be more unique than those manufacturers.

However, you need to make sure that you provide the best quality products, product descriptions, and nutritional information on the packaging labels.

In addition, you also need to be unique in your marketing content, such as advertisements, social media content, and so on to compete uniquely with other manufacturers.

2. Seasonal Trends

The food industry is very sensitive to seasonal trends following the needs and wants of customers. This forces you to keep innovating and maintaining your products. 

Your company needs to predict demand trends and periods where trends will peak or decline to survive amidst rapid trend shifts.

3. Competitive Keywords

Keywords related to candies, sweets, and chocolates can have stiff competition as many big companies target the same keywords. This makes you have to work harder to rank high in the search results.

4. Competition with Local Businesses

Aside from competing on products and keywords, your company will also compete with local businesses in the specialty food and candy industry, especially if you have a physical store. 

In this case, you need to optimize your website for local searches to compete with local businesses on search engines. 

How to Implement SEO for Food Specialty and Candy

There are various SEO tactics for food specialty and candy that you can apply to your business. Here is a breakdown of SEO strategies that you need to understand more deeply: 

1. Conduct Keyword Research

The first thing you can do is conduct keyword research to find out the words that users use when searching for candy, sweets, or chocolate products online. 

You can target relevant keywords such as "mint candy", "lollipop", and "nearest candy agency" according to your product and business value. 

2. Create SEO-Friendly Content

After doing keyword research, you can apply it to the content you produce to make it more SEO-friendly. Creating SEO-friendly content should pay attention to several aspects, such as being informative, interesting, valuable, and relevant to the target customers.

Additionally, you can also create content that explains that your company guarantees the quality and processing of food ingredients to gain customer trust.

3. Build a Good Brand Reputation

Next, you need to build a good brand reputation by monitoring how your brand is perceived by customers. In this way, you can maintain a positive image of your brand, both online and offline. 

In this regard, you can take several approaches, such as:

• Respond to reviews on Google Maps, Google My Business, or other review sites.
• Create testimonial content on your business website. 
• Respond professionally to negative reviews and offer solutions to customers.

4. Implement Technical SEO

Just as important as creating SEO-friendly content, you also need to optimize technical SEO on your website. Technical SEO helps websites to be crawled and indexed by Google's bots. 

In addition, implementing technical SEO on the website will make it easier for you to monitor the site's performance on search engines. Some technical SEO activities that you can do are as follows:

• Optimize website speed in loading pages, including product pages. 
• Ensure the website is responsive for mobile so that users can access the website from their devices. 
• Apply schema markup for products and reviews to display additional information in rich snippets.

5. Build Backlinks

Backlinks are one of the important aspects to increase the credibility of your website. Backlinks are links that come from other sites and point to your website. You can make efforts below to get high-quality backlinks, such as: 

• Work with food bloggers or influencers to get product reviews.
• Share product-related press releases with the media to direct links to your website. 

6. On-Page Optimization

Finally, you can do on-page optimization on the pages on the website to get high rankings in search results and get high organic traffic. 

In addition, some of the efforts you can make to optimize on-page are maximizing title tags, description tags, and page titles.

Start Using SEO for Your Business Now!

Using SEO marketing strategies for business will indeed benefit the company. However, with the jobs we presented above, you might need a team, time, and money if you do it yourself. 

That is why using SEO services will greatly ease your work so that you can focus on other business targets. In this case, you can entrust it to SEO Services by cmlabs. 

cmlabs has a multidisciplinary team that can fulfill all your SEO-related requests, from technical, and content production, to website development. cmlabs is here to elevate your business website to the top of search engine rankings and increase online visibility.

Consult your SEO needs with our team by scheduling a meeting now!