When it comes to searching for locally produced food and farm products, most folks hit Google or another search engine. Now imagine the financial benefit for you, if your business ranked in the top spot.

The fact that my farm ranks in the top couple spots on almost every search term we’ve worked on has made a big impact on our sales. We regularly have people reach out and placing an order, telling us they found our business on Google.

Depending on your product or where you’re located, improving your website to move up the search engine ranks is fairly easy… because most farmers don’t put in the effort to keep their website up-to-date. But that’s great news for us!

So here are a few of my top tips to improve your search engine optimization:

Rename your photos before uploading them to your site:

Google (and other search engines) can’t tell what your photos are of so it’s important that we make it easy for them by renaming the photos that we upload to our site. ‘IMG_2104’ means nothing to Google but ‘CSA For Sale San Diego’ is a search term folks would likely be searching for.

Create copy that’s rich in keywords:

The idea here isn’t to stuff as many keywords as possible into our content because that’s an old-school tactic that Google has long since figured out. Better, is to create rich and valuable content that just so happens to discuss ideas and topics that naturally include the terms you want people to be searching for to find your business — Think a blog post all about the benefits of grass-fed beef or a guide to the different cuts of pork.

Avoid anything that slows down your website:

How fast or slow your website loads plays a big factor in how your site ranks so it’s important to always size your photos appropriately before uploading them. Did you hire a professional photographer for your website? That’s amazing! But be sure to reduce the size of those photos before uploading them because they’ll absolutely impact your site performance.

To check your website’s speed, check out Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool.

Use headings in your copy — Like this one:

Not only do headings allow long form content to be more easily read, which in turn improves your SEO because folks will actually take the time to read it and therefore stay on your site longer, but it also helps Google best determine what your content is about by highlighting important topics.

Regularly add and update content on your site:

Google wants to make sure the sites sitting in top positions in the ranks are up-to-date and not full of old and stale information so it’s important to keep your site updated. This is a big reason why having a blog as part of your marketing plan is so great for search engine optimization. You certainly don’t need to run yourself ragged posting all the time but even a post every couple months helps.

Now those are just a few of the many things you can do to improve your website’s SEO but the key here is that there are fairly quick and easy to execute which is key when you’re growing a business as a farmer.