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So you have created a meal prep and food delivery service, you have poured your self into creating the best menu with the freshest ingredients with the most optimized delivery plan. You’ve added in all the ingredients to make a successful online business, but now you need orders and some SEO. This guide contains actionable SEO for a meal prep service or meal delivery service.

Zulu Shack Creative has worked with many meal prep and delivery businesses and we use these tips to help them reach more customers online. These tips are for beginners, owners or marketing managers who don’t have a lot of experience providing SEO for a meal delivery service or SEO in general.

Before We Continue

To be clear, these tips are for SEO which standards for search engine optimization. These tips will help you find hungry customers organically. This is not PPC or paid, or ads. This will help you rank naturally, or organically in Google search results and hopefully rank in front of the right clients.

ALSO

Remember that you should understand how your customers think and what they are searching for online. That is something we won’t cover here but you can read our blogs on customer focus to understand how to think and search like your target audience.

[1] GEO Target Everything

GEO target is a fancy SEO way of saying location specific. So, your keywords should be location specific, the content on your pages should be location specific, your page titles should be location specific, you should have locations on your contact us page. Locations everywhere! Location hashtags as well. Any opportunity!

Take every opportunity you can to get specific. Build out pages for each location you service and add those pages to your site contact us page.

Then, take a few hours, on a Sunday night if you must, if have an intern do it if you can, and register your business on every website that supports local listings. Use HubSpot’s list of 57 local business directories to get started.

[2] Gotta Get Social

SEO for a meal prep service is completely reliant on social media. The best social media for a meal prep service in order is Instagram, Pinterest and Facebook. You have to understand social media so brush up on your Instagram for business, Pinterest for businesses and Facebook for business.

Here are some quick tips for success on social media.

• Images

Get good at taking pictures! Learn about framing, about lighting and about editing. If you can’t do it, then hire a social media expert to do it for you. Meal prep services should take compelling images of the food you prepare.

• Engage – Do NOT Set & Forget

Engage with your audience and with the community. Reply to comments, and comment on other pages within your niche. You don’t have to engage with competitors, but you do have to engage with local business and pages that your audience is interested in as well.

Do not just set it and forget it. This is worse than doing nothing!

• Have Some Personality

You know what sucks? When someone does nothing but talk about themselves. You’ve probably got friends on Instagram, or Facebook or Twitter that just talk about themselves o post selfies with the same pose in every picture. They suck. If you only post about your business or products you are just like them. Obnoxious, self-involved and boring.

Post about diets, post about your experiences at the farmers market, post about your employees, about your customers. Get personal and have personality.

• Reuse What Works

Have you noticed that some of your posts get more attention, more engagement than others? Use that information! Pay attention to the analytics and insights!

Post time, post type, hashtags, the post itself. Remember what works and replicate it.

Optimize Your Google My Business Listing

Your Google My Business listing is so important. If you haven’t created one, or you haven’t claimed your Google My Business listing, do it right away!

In your dashboard you will see lots of great little features. Here’s what you should focus on:

• Information

Make sure all your information if correct and up to date. This includes address, phone numbers, business hours etc.

• Your Business Description

You can optimize your business description and add in lots of great keywords. Discuss the diets you cater towards, your business mission, and why you are the best meal prep and delivery business in the area!

• Posts

Google Posts is a relatively new feature. Each post will appear towards the bottom of your Google My Business listing and will be visible for one week. Use this space to post your latest blog, talk about an event or even add a special or coupon.

Update Your Blog Consistently

This is one of the more tedious aspects of SEO for a meal delivery service, but it will set you apart from competitors. Especially meal prep services that don’t see the value.

Create blogs about your recipes, about the diets you cater for, about the events you attend. You can turn your staff meetings into blog posts, you can turn your best customer interactions into blog posts. There is so much opportunity!

Blogs are the easiest, quickest and most assured way to organically rank for your industry keywords. If you don’t have the time, then contact an SEO company to do it for you. The few hundred you invest every month will pay off in large dividends in the months and years to come!

Make Sure Your Site is Fast & Mobile Friendly

Finally, ensure your site is mobile friendly and fast! These days, there really isn’t a choice in the matter. If your meal prep and delivery service website is slow, you will lose customers and ranking.

Use the Google Mobile Friendliness Test and Mobile Speed and Performance Test to know where you stand.

Any questions? Contact an SEO pro, a web developer or digital matketing expert at Zulu Shack for more information!

So you want to speed up your site hmm? Let us first start off by saying every website and every developer is different. As a result when you have your website made it is good to have a checklist of items to check off when it comes to speed. Zulu Shack Creative lists 3 ways to avoid slowwww web pages.

1. Compress Images

We find time and time again, this is the number one reason why a website lags. Although high quality images look great, it is imperative to find a good balance as a websites' response time is key. We live in a day and age where every fraction of a second counts and keeping the audiences attention often lies on a knife edge.

How to compress images?

We could dedicate a whole blog to this, and we probably will. There are a number ways, ranging from online services and software you can buy to compress your images. There are also some WordPress plugins that offer this service, sometimes free, sometimes for a pretty penny.

Our personal preference is Photoshop. Simply open your image in Photoshop, click File and then Save for Web. You will be presented with options for quality, don't worry about picking a low setting, the images still turn out great. Try get all of your images under 100kb, save out your image and re-upload it to your website.

2. Caching

Sounds like something to do with money, right? Not really... although time is money. Think of caching as a web browsers memory. In today's age our web browsers have come a long way making our online user experiences good, for the most part. Our browsers have the ability to remember front end code, scripts or images if told to do so. When this is true, these items are stored in the cache. When something is stored in the cache our browser can easily reference and load the second or nth time of asking. This reduces the download time from the server and allows for a quicker page load time.

How to add caching to a website

Remember we mentioned every website and developer is different. So depending on how your site is setup and what platform or framework it uses, the answer will be different each time. Content Management Systems like WordPress offer caching plugins you can leverage off, while custom solutions may require your developer to write a few lines of code to ensure caching is turned on.

3. Mini Me you complete me

Imagine trying to pick up or carry Dr Evil from Austin Powers somewhere, then doing the same thing with Mini Me. Although carrying Dr Evil would be hilarious, carrying Mini Me is way easier! Minification in a nutshell is compressing all your scripts, style sheets and front end code, basically removing all the line breaks and white space in your code. Believe it or not, that empty white space, takes up space!

Once again there are a number of plugins you can use if you are using WordPress, if you are using a custom solution ask your developer to make sure the code is clean and light weight.

Learn From Google Page Speed Insights

Getting tips on how to make sure your website performs well is all good, but how will you know what to fix?

Google makes this easy via their PageSpeed Insights developer tool.

It is as easy as entering in your website URL and hitting the "Analyze" button. Give Google a few minutes to look over your web page and write you a summary. In the summary it will give you a mobile score and desktop score. Green is good! Red and yellow... not so much, you have work to do.

Also inside your summary, Google will provide links on how you can fix the issues, Google also takes it a step further in ordering the issues by importance, the lower down the list you get the less it is affecting your speed score.

Zulu Shack Creative has improved countless website scores. And is more than happy to help you with speeding up your site or even guiding you along the way if you are more hands one. Feel free to contact us if you would like us to help with your website.

Put simply, Lorem ipsum is filler text or dummy text, which allows print and web company’s to show their clients what their product or page will look like with text on it.

Why use Lorem Ipsum?

1. By using dummy text a web page can be viewed in its entirety before the content is ready. By filling text on a web page it will give the page shape and the client a better view of what the finished product will look like.
2. Not many people understand Latin, they wont get lost in the text when you present them a proto-type or work that is in progress.
3. Time Saver. Clients do not always have content ready, by simply generating some ipsum, you can quickly fill pages of a website, to indicate to your client you are awaiting content.
4. All the cool kids are doing it. Lorem Ipsum is pretty much an industry standard when it comes to presentations in the development processes of a design

Where to generate some Lorem Ipsum?

The traditional Lorem Ipsum can be found here. That being said, Lorem has been around for ages and can become a bit boring... if you want to change it up or flip the script as they would say, we have short-listed some Lorem Ipsum generators on the funnier side.

Donald Trump Ipsum

Samuel L. Ipsum

Cupcake Ipsum

Bacon Ipsum

Let it be known! We are yelling from the top of the Himalayas our echos heard down the spine of Africa, crashing through the mighty Chinese wall and bouncing of the Hubble Telescope, "First Card Payments has launched their new website!"

Alright, we are not in the Himalayas or anything like that... but that's how excited we are to launch this gem of a website!

Alexander and Bruce were recommended to Zulu Shack Creative a short time ago to meet all their development and digital marketing needs. They have since mentioned they are extremely happy they did!

In a business where leads are crucial, Zulu Shack Creative collaborated with Alex and Bruce to craft a intuitive and responsive website. A solution geared towards capturing leads, while maintaining a great user experience for their users. Without getting too much into the secret sauce, we have tailored helpful information for  future clients while keeping the content SEO friendly and technically sound to rank on Google.

The fun doesn't stop there! We are excited to be moving forward with First Card Payments in the next steps to help build a solid and trusted brand. We have our road map packed and it is going to be an adventure for the ages! So watch this space, some great things to come!

If you are in need of High Merchant Accounts, please do contact First Card Payments, tell 'em we sent you, have some laughs, crack open some beers or whip up some coffee, just relax, visualize and attack... like a true Zulu warrior. May we also recommend you start off the introduction with "Sanibonani",
1. It sounds great and 2. It means greetings in Zulu, a great way to start a conversation.

Below is a cool before and after slider to give you an idea of how the makeover went. Alternatively go visit the new site!