How the Right SEO Ingredients Boosted Traffic for Cottage Delight

Cottage Delight is a British food producer known for its wide range of handmade, high-quality speciality foods. The company was founded in the 1970s in the Staffordshire Moorlands, England.

They started by selling homemade butter fudge and have since expanded their product line to include jams, chutneys, pickles, sauces, marmalades, biscuits, cakes and more.

Taking Ownership of Their SEO

Cottage Delight is renowned for using traditional recipes and high-quality ingredients to create their products.

Their offerings often make use of locally sourced produce, and they have gained a reputation for producing delicious and unique flavour combinations. Much of their business comes from B2B sales with the trade and they have a growing network of over 800 stockists including farm shops and garden centres. Their website was created as a new online channel for sales, focusing on new B2C customers.

They had worked with SEO agencies in the past but felt like they were not getting value for money. As the website was still relatively new, the team was small and much of the leg work had to be undertaken by them, creating additional workload beyond their day to day.

They wanted an agency to take ownership of their SEO activity and alleviate the pressure on the team. As the website and ecommerce offering was still relatively new, Cottage Delight felt that they needed more support at this point to ensure its success and create solid organic foundations for the future.

In addition to traditional SEO work, the internal team also wanted to enlist a web development team to help maintain and support any future work and improvements to the site. The focus would be on UX to help improve the conversion rate on the website as previous development of the site had left some areas with a lot to be desired.

Following the Recipe

Harrison Carloss adopted a holistic approach to Cottage Delight’s SEO strategy, covering all areas of the site:

• Regular, high quality content creation addressing relevant queries from the world of cooking and baking to build a useful knowledge base for their existing customers and drive new users to the site
• Improving and enhancing product listings
• UX improvements across the site including redesigning the blog pages to be more engaging
• Monthly technical updates to address arising issues common on ecommerce sites

Crucial Traffic Driver

Product pages are a crucial traffic driver for Cottage Delight therefore we worked to assess and optimise product pages as required.

As part of a UX project to improve the layout of product pages, we included space for concise product descriptions to help the flow of the page which were optimised across the site.

New products were optimised when going live with targeted meta data and on-page copy.

To cover any missed pages, we set up dynamic meta data through Yoast as a fallback for product, recipe and blog pages to ensure no page was missing any information.

A Baker’s Bible

At the beginning of the year, the team did extensive keyword research for the site, taking particular focus on long-tail keywords as this would form the basis of Cottage Delight’s blog activity.

Working with the internal team, we mapped out relevant content for each month, ensuring to highlight any seasonal occasions and pull focus on new product ranges.

Seasonal pieces were written with the intention of being updated each year, therefore retaining and building on any existing performance. This also made it easier for the team to generate seasonal content easily in the future.

We looked to create a diverse knowledge hub with content that targeted user’s queries yet remained relevant to Cottage Delight’s product base. These blogs looked to drive traffic from those interested in cooking, baking or were just generally curious about food!

Significant Improvements in Just 6 Months

• Harrison Carloss was appointed Cottage Delight’s agency at the beginning of 2023 and in only 6 months we started to see significant improvements in the quality of organic traffic and overall engagement with the site.
• After 12 months, the site had seen a 29.96% increase in organic traffic overall.
• The focus on content yielded significant results and ensured an 845.95% increase in /blog/ sessions compared to the previous year. In numbers, that’s a whopping 24,715 sessions coming directly through the blog over the year.
• We worked to increase and diversify their existing organic keywords which helped to boost their no. of organic keywords by 108%, from 2620 keywords in 2022 to 5465 in 2023.

About Harrison Carloss

Harrison Carloss is a strategic creative agency with 50 years of know-how behind them.