How often do you start online shopping on Google? Have you ever done a Google search for your own tea company without using your company name?
If you can find your website easily with a product search like “organic golden monkey loose leaf tea,” then congratulations – there’s some good search engine optimization (SEO) at play! But, if you’re scrolling past pages of your competitors and Amazon listings with no luck, then potential customers on search engines won’t even know you exist.
Organic search – or non-paid search engine traffic – is a pivotal part of any digital marketing toolkit. For small tea businesses, especially, opening-up this marketing channel is a sustainable, low-cost way to compete against larger competitors and attract new customers.
What Is SEO and How Does It Work?
Before diving head-first into optimizing your site, it’s best to understand what you’re optimizing for and how search engines digest and spit out the results that you’re trying to appear in.
We can break down search into three simple steps: 1) crawling, 2) indexing and 3) ranking.
Crawling is when search engines visit pages and store the information that they find.
Indexing is how the information is stored into a “library” that organizes details like a page’s topic, keywords and links.
And finally, the indexed pages are ranked when algorithms take a page’s meaning, relevance, quality, usability and context into consideration to return best results. So, when you search “World Tea News” in a search engine like Google, the results are what the algorithm has determined to be the best result for your query.
The process of optimizing a page so that a search engine ranks it for desired keywords (or queries) is SEO in a nutshell. It’s no accident that you see the results you do!
Why Is SEO Important, Especially for Smaller Tea Companies?
There are a number of reasons why SEO is so valuable for smaller players.
For starters, there’s the fact that over 90 percent of pages on the web get no organic traffic from Google and only a little more than half of U.S. businesses in 2020 benefited from Google – which captures over 90 percent of searches. That leaves tremendous opportunity to market where your close competitors may not be.
For tea companies that depend on online shops to sustain and grow their business, the implications of visibility on Google are even stronger. Half of trackable website traffic on average is estimated to come from organic search, meaning you could exponentially expand your customer base by tapping into SEO if organic search makes up only a fraction of your current traffic.
In terms of cost, SEO is a hidden weapon for companies with small teams and sometimes even no marketing budget. That’s because it’s usually considered to be one of the marketing channels alongside non-paid social media and email marketing with the highest return on investment. When vying for attention next to much larger companies with deeper pockets, organic search engine results even out the playing field so that spend on ads become irrelevant.
So, Who Truly Needs SEO?
Of course, not every business in the tea space benefits from SEO in the same way. For example, a tea shop with no online shop that depends on local foot traffic is all set with just a Google My Business profile to appear on Google Maps. There’s no need to rank in search results for every type of tea served there.
Those that can see the biggest reward from time spent optimizing their site for search engines undoubtedly include tea companies with online shops. In this case, your website is your storefront and just like in the physical world, if people can’t see your brick-and-mortar store, you’re losing out on traffic.
Another great use case for SEO is when launching a new website, whether on a new domain or as a redesign. This is an excellent time to make sure search engines are able to fully appreciate all the kyusu teapots, hojicha powder and matcha whisks displayed on your site.
Where to Start? Do You Hire Expert Help or Try the DIY Route?
Fortunately, as options for website builders like popular ecommerce options Shopify, Wix or Squarespace have evolved to become more user-friendly for the non-tech savvy, so have the baked-in SEO-options. This makes it easier to skip the coding and still have tea products, for example, appear in Google’s Shopping search results.
However, just because it’s now easier to optimize for search engines on a site’s backend, doesn’t mean it’s replaced the actual SEO work.
A big question that many small business owners grapple with is whether they should pick up the basics and dabble in SEO themselves. Or, if it’s worth the vetting process and investment to hire an outside expert. Both options have their value, and the right answer depends on several factors.
Hire SEO
The average monthly cost of SEO services ranges from $1,000 to $5,000 monthly. Depending on the growth stage of a tea company, that may be a steep price tag. However, if all you need is help in the initial set-up and one-time optimization of your site, the two-to-three-month project is well worth the return you’ll get for years to come.
SEO experts are also best suited for needs that require technical aptitude, involved audits and tackling older sites that may need a lot of cleanup.
DIY SEO
On the other hand, if your scope of needs is much smaller, it could be worth the time and effort to pick up some basics to implement SEO tweaks yourself. For example, a dedicated online tea shop may just need to get a few dozen, almost identical product pages with different teas to gain visibility on Google. Because those pages involve a repeatable process to optimize, basic SEO knowledge could go a long way.
It Boils Down to Trust and Time
Whoever you entrust your SEO efforts to, it’s important to remember that it can take months to start seeing real results. SEO is notoriously slow working compared to email marketing or social media, for example. Search engines like Google will take time to pick up on website changes and digest how they are relevant to what people are searching.
Even if you don’t plan on investing in SEO in the near future, there are a few things that any online business should do. First, set up a Google Search Console account for your site. This is completely free and provides analytics of the search queries in Google that your website appears for over time, such as “creme earl grey tea” or “plastic free tea bags”. Second, dive into any one of the numerous educational resources from Google to learn more about what makes great SEO. Their recent “How Search Works” campaign is a wonderful place to start!
Raquel Thoesen combines a knack for creativity and appreciation for tea in her blog Steeped Dreams to make tea approachable to the modern, casual tea drinker. Her professional career is in SEO and digital marketing, through which she’s helped countless small to mid-sized companies grow their online presence over the years. To learn more about Steeped Dreams, visit SteepedDreams.com.
Plan to Attend or Participate in the
World Tea Conference + Expo, March 21-23, 2022
To learn about other key developments, trends, issues, hot topics and products within the global tea community, plan to attend the World Tea Conference + Expo, March 21-23, 2022. The event will be celebrating its 20th anniversary, in addition to being co-located with Bar & Restaurant Expo. Visit WorldTeaExpo.com.
To book your sponsorship or exhibit space at the World Tea Conference + Expo, contact:
Veronica Gonnello
(for companies A to G)
e: [email protected]
p: 212-895-8244
Tim Schultz
(for companies H to Q)
e: [email protected]
p: (917) 258-8589
Fadi Alsayegh
(for companies R to Z)
e: [email protected]
p: 917-258-5174
Also, be sure to stay connected with the World Tea Conference + Expo on social media, for details and insights about the event. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn.