How to Make A Great Food and Drink Website?

If your business is in the food and drinks industry, a restaurant or a niche artisan food supplier, it is a valid question. Just having a food website or drink landing page of information is simply not enough, especially nowadays with Covid and reduced hours. You need to be standing out from your local competitors, creating great "foody" experiences online so people keep coming back and recommend and share to others, therefore converting your traffic into pound notes is no small feat and a feat that needs to keep happening day in and day out.

So, here is our very "tasty" checklist showing the most important features of a typical food or drink website, from the more obvious ones to the less so. We have focused on food and drink websites specifically, however, this guide can be applicable and relevant to other industries.

Is Your Food and Drink Website Mobile Friendly?

Customers often look at food & drink websites to look for a shop location, or where best to buy a certain product when watching a TV advert or at the office on a lunch break etc. Therefore, having a mobile responsive web design is essential; when did you last look at your website on your smartphone to see how it looks? Step into the shoes of your customers when you do this, ask yourself how highly you would rate your website in terms of the visual look, the simplicity of its use and ease of steps to purchase.

Use the Best Imagery You Can for Your Website

Using great quality images of your food and drink products online is an effective and important feature for your business website - and a bit obvious! However we still see examples of sites that do not get this point right. Not only do great images help you display best your products and tempt your visitors to purchase, it is also useful for visitors who are not familiar with your brand to start to build a picture of your products. After all, the best way to tell your customers how delicious your food is by showing them - we buy with the eye!

Poor quality images or videos will give off the impression that your product is also of poor quality. It can influence your brand coming across as unprofessional, cheap, and research suggests that people can go as far as to think the company doesn’t really care if the site doesn’t look great and showcase the products in an appealing way.

A study by Adobe shows that if images will not load, 46% of people will switch devices, 39% will stop engaging with your brand.

Content Marketing for Food and Drink Websites

Your content should speak directly to your target market, the moment people land on your website. A great way to test this on your site is to adopt the character of one of your key customer personas, decide on an outcome you hope to achieve or a specific pain point or question you have. Visit your site and see: how easy is it to find your answer? Is the content long and complex? What is the tone, does the content on the site speak directly to your problem or question?

According to an Adobe study, some of the reason’s consumers decide to switch devices or stop engaging with content altogether include:

Content is too long; 30% switch devices, 38% stop engaging, and the content is unattractive in its layout or imagery; 35% switch devices, 38% stop engaging.

How to Use Instagram For Your Food and Drink Business?

The use of social platforms is an obvious one. Instagram is a great one for the food and drink industry as its visual element makes it great for the platform. It is always best to ask yourself the question: Is this where my target audience spends their time online? Over 208 million Instagram posts have been hash tagged “food” since 2010.

How to Use Video on Your Food and Drink Website?

A video is easier to digest than it is to read a text and is far more engaging. Your customers generally appreciate the effort a company has made to create a video and the statistics tell the story.

According to Wyzowl:

79% of consumers would rather watch a video to learn about a product, than reading text on a page

84% of consumers have been convinced to make a purchase after watching a brand’s video

91% of consumers have watched an explainer video to learn about a product or service

What Is A Call to Action?

CTAs are buttons placed across your website to guide and encourage your visitors to perform the desired action. For example: ‘Find Us, ‘Download This Recipe’, ‘Contact Us’, ‘Read more’, ‘Continue’ or ‘Buy now’.

What makes a good CTA? First off it needs to stand out on the page, it is best to experiment with size, the image, even colour to find out what brings the most conversions. You can A/B test this. A lot of thought needs to go into strategically placing them and not overdoing it. They are a key element of converting visitors towards your website goals, so take the time to think it through.

Why Engage with Your Customer With Online Chat?

Adding live chat to your website is a useful feature for visitors wanting to ask queries and get answers fast. By providing this option to your online visitors you can provide great customer service the moment they reach you, many people like efficiency and speed, live chat enables you to provide this. You can set live chat for only peak times of the day, so you do not have to be responding 24/7 and can also enable it for just PC if it slows your site down.

Even better, having a live chat will help you to better understand customer pains or how effective your website is being. If multiple visitors are asking the same/similar questions it gives you an indication to make it clearer for future visitors and improve aspects of the website.

What Is SEO For Food Brands

Great SEO is an essential feature to ensure your food & drink website gets the attention it deserves in the search engines and we do mean Google. SEO is an online marketing discipline to ensure that your website and its content appears in search engine results for keywords (SERPs) related to your business, increasing quantity and quality of traffic to your site.

SEO is a serious part of your marketing, as it can make all the difference as to whether your website ranks well on Google or any other search engine for that matter. If your customers have a hard time finding you on a search engine, then you need to up your SEO game. Even if you are ranking for key terms, great, but what else could your target market be looking at which relates to your business? Are you ranking there too?

What Are Your Food Brands USP?

What sets you apart from your foody competitors? Whether it is a specific special ingredient, your amazing price, the way you source the product, your amusing packaging, you need it to be clear and obvious the moment someone visits your site. Something different is usually something memorable, so it could be the contributing factor of why your customers chose you and return time after time.

Engagement Is Everything - Tell A Story

Having a back-story is a very valuable feature for your website, particularly for the food industry. Consumers are becoming increasingly conscious of where their food & drink comes from, and your business’s practices and processes along the way will help them determine how ethical your brand is. People also like to hear the business’s why what makes the business and its team do what they do.

By providing consumers with transparency, it gives you the chance to build a trustworthy, honest relationship between your food and drink brand and the customer. It is showing that human element and a side to the business that people often appreciate and remember - so what are you waiting for - talk to me about pushing your food and drink brand and business to the next level.