The Just Eat SEO Strategy (explained)

First. A big welcome to the new home of the Growth Through Content Newsletter.

I felt that Linkedin would be the best place to house this content moving forward.

Each week I'll take a look at an SEO and or content success story. I'll share what's working well. And give some insights and learning points.

Let's dive into this week's article, where we look at the SEO success of Just Eat.

TL/DR

• Just Eat created simple yet scalable SEO process.
• They leverage their international assets and big brands for links.
• Their domain strength is huge and allows them to dominate local and national searches with quite average pages.
• Growing them beyond this point with SEO is going to be tough.
• They could grow into the 'Hello Fresh' model with ease. Order a delivery, or have the ingredients for a dish delivered and cook it yourself.
• The Just Eat model can be applied to other sectors.

How Just Eat Does E-E-A-T

The above H2 is a bit of a pun, sorry.

The simple truth, Just Eat doesn't need to worry about SEO.

Their organic traffic is a monster.

But how?

Using Ahrefs we can see that 28 pages of their website generate a whopping 66% of their traffic.

And on the other side of this scale, 60,000 pages generate over a million, monthly visitors.

Or in other words, 47% of their website generates just 12% of their traffic.

So, let's look at both sides.

First, the goliath 28 pages.

The Brand Domination of Just Eat.

I'm going to assume you have access to an SEO tool, and you can do your own digging into this. There are plenty more insights to be had, I'm sure.

But I'll share mine.

Just Eat has rather cleverly targeted the broad terms of 'near me' keywords and also the brands.

If you Google Mcdonald's, you'll no doubt find Just Eat's Mcdonald's local page showing up in your search results.

This is simple SEO.

It's fuelled by authority and scale.

But it's nice to see good, simple SEO working.

They have brand pages and food pages that flow into local pages. But we'll break that down shortly.

The other lovely thing here is that, at a brand level, the pages make sense.

They're simple, to the point and link to all their localised pages.

But that's not all that's going on here.

Just Eat has gone all in on the near-me keywords.

A Near Me Buffet

The near me keyword is pretty much an easy target for any local business.

And Just Eat targets 3 areas.

1. Food by type
2. Food by brand.
3. Food brand or type by location

In a nutshell, it's things like KFC near me, fried chicken near me, or fried chicken Stoke.

That type of thing.

But what are the pages like?

The answer is 'pretty basic'.

Sure, there's the usual information you'd expect.

The first section houses some basic information.

Next, we have 2 popular dishes.

Following that, a quick review section.

And then a list of restaurants again.

A few images of other food types are below, and then we have possibly the worst example of FAQs I've ever seen.

They 'dialled' that content in for sure.

So what does all this tell you?

There are 3 takeaways (sorry...slight pun)

1. That basic SEO works. There's nothing revolutionary here.
2. That you don't need to create a 10,000-word mega page for everything (you can't skyscraper your way to beating Just Eat)
3. That domain authority and offline marketing matter.

We've all seen the TV ads and heard the jingle.

Just Eat is a brand that's in your head.

What I do think deserves a mention is their backlink strategy.

Backlinks From the Big Brands

Just Eat are a great example of a monopoly.

They own multiple domains across Europe offering the same service.

And they nicely link to the other nations as well.

The other thing they've managed to do is gain links from all of the big brands.

Take this nice link from the Asda website.

There's a good reason for this.

Just Eat solves an issue for many food businesses. They deliver their food.

As such, linking to them from their websites makes sense.

Sure, some of these will be no follows, but at this scale, with so much marketing power behind it. It doesn't really matter.

But how can they grow?

Growth For Just Eat

There's no doubt about it.

Just Eat is a massive site and isn't going anywhere soon.

But could they grow using content?

They do post blog content, and some of this drives a tiny amount of traffic.

But in all honesty, it's a food delivery app. Written content isn't going to do much for them (although I do have one huge idea at the end of this post).

They have apps on people's phones. They dominate the SERPs for keywords that matter.

They're doing more than well.

Thanks to covid, society has become accustomed to whipping out their phones when they want to have a takeaway, and writing reams of informational content isn't going to grow their business.

But with the competition in this space increasing, there's a possibility of a price war going to happen.

FoodHub, an up-and-coming competitor, positions itself as far cheaper than Just Eat.

It's clear...there's a war going on in the food delivery space.

Having said that, there's not much difference between the positioning of these brands.

And that's possibly where content can help.

By letting people have more information, there is a chance that they make using their apps and websites more interesting and enjoyable.

This is playing the 'experience game'.

Go Behind the Scenes

One thing that I do like to know is what the restaurant looks like on the inside. This is a content area in that I think the food delivery space can do well in.

Sure, hygiene ratings matter.

But what about the chefs?

What do the kitchens look like?

What does the restaurant recommend?

This kind of personality is missing from the apps and their sites.

And providing this content might sway some more 'resistant buyers'.

My parents don't use any food delivery company, as I'm sure there are many that don't for reasons of worry around food poisoning.

This likely means there's possibly a huge customer base that could be convinced to use these apps if one puts a bit more effort into it.

The Story Behind The Dish

The next battleground for information might come down to knowing more about your food.

I actually want to try more food from the Indian restaurant. My issue is that I don't know enough and tend to stick with the same.

Content that explains what every dish actually is, its history, and so on might work well.

I'm not saying that this is going to generate huge traffic for them. But it might help make their sites more than just a push-button ordering system.

Making the ordering process more interesting could help with revenue.

Mini Portions: The Content Angle That Might Be Worth Millions

This last idea could actually add huge revenue.

So, here's the problem.

As I wrote earlier.

There are hundreds of dishes I'd love to try, but I never do.

Why? Because I don't want to risk ordering a meal that I don't like.

Here's how I'd link this to content.

Create the 'Wikipedia style' content on every dish. And introduce a 'discovery portion' that customers can order along with their normal order.

The price of a discovery dish would be half of a main meal, and the content created can help a customer decide if it's for them.

Humans love stories, and learning the story behind the dish (while being able to order a small portion) could add significant revenue to businesses.

It's encouraging consumption through content.

Just Eat to Just Cook

So you might not have heard of Dishpatch.

It's restaurant ingredients delivered to your home.

The basic gist is that you look at the meal you want, and then the ingredients and cooking instructions come that same day.

It's easy to see how Just Eat could grow into this model.

Another example is the Hello Fresh business model.

This would open up even more traffic opportunities through leveraging recipes.

In a nutshell, traffic growth could come, but ultimately I think that changes in the business model would open up more growth on an SEO front.

The Near-Me Model - Steal it

The near-me model is something that affiliate SEOs have been cashing in for years.

And it's relatively easy to see opportunities for a Just Eat in other industries.

Checkatrade has done this with trades.

But what about...

• Coffee delivery
• Mobile Hairdressing
• Personal training
• Fitness classes (without needing a gym membership)
• Birthday cakes
• Suit hire
• Alcohol delivery
• and many more.

The reason that Just Eat works so well is that it increases consumption and reduces friction.

An example of someone trying to do this is Beelivery.

Beelivery focuses on just food and drink.

Interestingly this could actually reduce food waste by allowing you to order the ingredients for a meal. "Should we have tacos tonight?"

My point is this.

The Just Eat market is highly competitive but opens up plenty of options to take their web strategy and send it to other sectors.

I'll leave the ideas up to you.

That's the fun part of reading a newsletter like this. It gets the brain working.

What Next?

If you've enjoyed this newsletter, please make sure you subscribe and share.

I'll be writing weekly.

Also, I'm just about to launch my substack newsletter, so follow me on Linkedin for details.

The substack newsletter will be both paid and premium content where I go deeper into marketing, business development and the value of SEO.

Thanks for reading.

Andy