How to do SEO for an agricultural website

You might not be able to afford my consulting fees, so here are some free tips on how to perform search engine optimisation for farming and agricultural websites.

In this guide, I’ll explain what SEO is and how it can help your agribusiness.

What is SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimisation is a form of marketing. The main goal of any SEO campaign is to increase the number of visitors to your website and increase the quality of your website traffic. There are other things SEO can do, but for most businesses these are the primary objectives.

Higher rankings = More business

Studies have shown that the results on the 1^st page of Google receive 95% of visitor clicks. Roughly, the top 3 results on the 1^st page of Google often receive around 80% of those 1^st-page clicks.

As you can see, those sites which rank higher in Google, Bing and the other search engines capture the bulk of clicks, visitors, and website traffic. Whilst the remaining sites – those which languish below the top 3 positions – share the measly remains.

Farming and agriculture websites are no different. Agribusiness websites are still subject to the same rules, meaning sites at the top of the search results get the most visits.

So, your site needs to rank highly for the right keywords which’ll bring you the right customers. Because this’ll bring you more business.

What are Keywords?

Keywords are single, or multiple word phrases, that people type into a search engine to find your business. Here are some examples:

Example 1: A website selling Beltex Pedigree Sheep

In the above example, three relevant keywords might be:

Beltex sheep for sale
Beltex websites
Best sheep to sell at market

This is just a small example of the keywords a Beltex Sheep website might want to rank for. There will be many more.

If your sheep site ranked highly for these terms, Google/Bing would likely send you relevant customers who might want to buy a sheep, ram or lamb.

Our Beltex sheep website would not want to rank for:

Zwartbles sheep for sale
Zwartbles websites
Chicken Farm

Those 3 keywords are irrelevant to our Beltex Sheep website. The customers who visited our website after typing those keywords into Google would not find what they’re looking for. So, they’d probably leave, and few (if any) would want to buy any Beltex sheep from the business owner.

So, the keywords you want your website to rank for need to relate to your business and its goals.

And in the above example, our farming websites’ goal is to sell sheep. So, if we were producing content for a Beltex sheep site, we’d plan our site so it targets Beltex themed keywords, whilst ignoring irrelevant keywords like Zwartble, Cows, and Chicken Farms.

This would ensure that the search engines sends relevant sheep buyers to our Beltex website.

Plan your website

Before you build your website, you’ll want to plan it out.

Some Webmasters might tell you not to bother with this step, but those people have probably never worked on a large website with thousands of pages.

If you are planning an agricultural e-commerce website, you must plan it thoroughly. It’s easy for e-commerce websites to spiral out of control as their inventory grows.

For example, lets say we’re building an e-commerce website which sells agricultural machinery online. Your first step is to decide how to organise your website. The easiest way to get ideas is to find similar or rival websites to the one you are planning and analyse them.

A quick look at some farm machinery sites reveals the following common categories:

Tractors
Hay and Forage Equipment
Tillage Equipment
Harvester
Farm Attachments
Truck & Trailers

Another common thing most farm machinery e-commerce websites do is they have a second set of categories which allow buyers to search by brand. So when planning our website you might want to include a main menu with the following machinery brands:

John Deer
JCB
Massey Ferguson
CASE IH
New Holland
And so on…

Therefore, when planning our website, we need to pick an e-commerce solution which would allow us to categorise our inventory by machinery type and by brand.

When looking at how other sites organise things, also consider:

The order of their front page? Do they seem to prioritise certain things over others?
What’s good or bad about the site? Could their design be improved?
Does the website look trustworthy? What do I dislike or find untrustworthy about their design?
Is the website nice or horrible to use? Can you find stuff easily? Is the website slow or fast?
What do other farmers like or hate about the site and its services?

During the planning process, take notes on the above points and list each site’s strengths and weaknesses.

Agricultural forums are great for finding out what other farmers are saying about thing in their industry.

Type a few site names into a forums search facility and you might find conversations about your research sites. These discussions may reveal what users like or dislike about these sites.

The above approach will work with smaller websites too, it’s not just limited to large e-commerce sites.

Armed with this information, you might be to build a website which improves on your competition’s designs. Avoiding their flaws and building upon their strengths.

Having a list of good sites is a great idea if you’re looking for someone to build you a website. Because you’ll be able to give the designer a clearer idea of what you are trying to achieve.

So if you want to hire me. Feel free to send me a list of sites you love or hate. It’ll give me a clearer idea of your goals.

Domain Name

Once you’ve planned and mapped out your website you then need to think about domain names.

A domain name is the name of your website. It’s the thing people will type into their browser to find your site.

Here are some example domain names:

Amazon.com
Google.com
Apple.com
Kippax-Farms.co.uk
JamesKippax.com (this website)

In all the above examples, each domain uses the ‘.com’ domain extension.

Anyway, when picking a domain name don’t fret too much about the domain name or its extension.

Years ago, many SEO guides and consultants would tell you that having your main keyword in your name is important. For instance, using our farm machinery e-commerce site example again; the following site names would be considered good by our old SEO standards:

FarmMachinery.com
BestFarmingMachinery.com
BuyAgriculturalMachinery.com

Back in the day, domains like these did help their owners to rank in their chosen industries. And many people would pay big prices for these style of domains (called exact match domain or EMDs for short). But that ship sailed long ago – the advantage of an EMD domain is marginal at best.

An industry relevant – and descriptive – domain name is a good thing to have. But don’t get too caught up if you can’t find an exact domain.

And don’t hand over large sums of money for an EMD domain. There’s a lot more to achieving higher rankings than simply having a domain name related to the thing you are selling.

Using our farm machinery site again, domains like KippaxFarmMachinery.co.uk or BobsAgriculturalMachinery.com would be perfectly valid.

One piece of advice: people are still abusing EDM domains. If you run a successful website, at some point you will be contacted by shady types who’ll offer to sell you EDM domains in your industry. These scoundrels often claim their domains will help you rank well, capture more business in your niche, and owning them will prevent others from using the EMDs against you (stealing your traffic and customers). Such claims are bogus. This tactic might have worked in the mid to late 2000s, but not now. So don’t waste your money if someone makes you an offer like this.

Moving on…

Personally, when choosing a domain name it’s best to consider it from a branding perspective.

For example, if I was planning a website for selling livestock, my customers are likely to be local to my country of origin (I live in the UK). So I’d be liable to pick one of the UK type domain names such as .co.uk, .uk or another variant. That way, when people visit my website, they’ll know that my business and services reside in the UK.

Another tip is to avoid ambiguous domain names. For example, were I creating a poultry fan club website, I’d probably avoid calling my website chickenlovers.com. It might attract the wrong audience.

Also, avoid long domain names. Your ideal domain name should be short and memorable. Long domain names are harder for customers to remember and type.

Years ago, most SEO guides recommended that you should use a main TLD domain extension (.com, .org, .net, et cetera). But in recent years many new domain extensions have become available. And some of these may be a better choice for those working in agriculture. Here are some examples:

.farm
.builders
.construction
.shop
.store
.eco.

There are many others.

These new domain extensions give you a greater chance of find that perfect domain name – and one which hasn’t already been registered.

Buying a domain for your Farming Business

Once you’ve brainstormed a few domain names you will need to register it with a domain registrar. Below is a list of registers I frequently use:

Google domains (very transparent pricing)
Name Cheap (allows you to register a vast amount of domain extensions)
Gandhi (another good domain host)
Route 53 (Amazon’s AWS domain registrar service, can be expensive, lots of hidden costs, but offers advantages if you are hosting your website, business, or app on AWS services)

The only domain registrar I will recommend that you avoid like a sheep with Anthrax is GoDaddy. You may have heard of them because they spend a lot on marketing and TV advertising. But that’s the only thing they do well. If you’re in doubt about this company or are curious to see what they get up to, just Google GoDaddy problems or GoDaddy Domain Problems.

Once you’ve registered your domain name you should protect it. When you sign up with a domain registrar use a strong password – a long random string with special characters in it (about 21 characters long or more).

And secure your account with two-factor authentications. Any good domain registrar should allow you to use two-factor to secure your account – the registrars above all allow it.

Two-factor will significantly harden the security on your account. The last thing you need is your website to become popular, your registrar account taken over, and your web traffic pointed to a site full of malware or viruses.

You can keep your domain and hosting separate. In fact, it’s good practice to do so. Therefore, feel free to register your domain before you’ve even built your website or selected a web host.

Lastly, pick a fast and reliable web hosting company for your farming website. Cheap hosting can cause your site to be slow, and in the worst cases your site might go offline during busy periods.

If this happens frequently, not only will you lose customers and sales, but it will negatively affect your website rankings and SEO.

Produce good content

One of the best SEO tips for farming and agricultural websites is this: produce a content-rich website.

Meaning you should try to produce original and good written content and avoid plagiarising it from other websites.

Written content will help your farming business because:

Every new page has the potential to send you more visitors.
It increases the chances of your website earning links. Every page you produce is yet another reason for someone to your website.
You can use your blog pages to point to the most important pages on your website. This tells the search engines what parts of your site to prioritise.
Good content helps you to sell. Lots of content provides a more convincing argument for people to do business with you.
It can make you an authority in your area of expertise.

Blogging and writing good content is hard and time-consuming. If it were easy every business would be doing it. But over the long term, it’s an SEO strategy which can really pay off.

Because not only will it bring you more customers, but it can often reveal unexpected marketing opportunities which your competition might not know about– if you know where to look for them.

And if you don’t want to write, or lack the time, why not hire me to produce some conent for you.

How to do basic on-page search engine optimisation for a farming website

The best way to do keyword research for farms and agricultural businesses is to think of things from your customers perspective.

Ask yourself this question: what would my ideal customer be typing into Google to find my business?

With some brainstorming and research, you can usually come up with a list of several words which describe the services or items you are selling.

Include these words in the pages you want performing well in Google. Don’t force these words into your pages, try to use them in a natural context. If you write in depth articles about your industry it’s much easier to insert keywords in a natural manner – and avoid things like keywords stuffing (which the search engines hate).

If you’re struggling for ideas you can use free keyword tools like Google’s AdWords keyword tool, or Bing’s keyword suggestion tool. There are also free keyword suggestion sites like UberSuggest and AnswerThePublic.

Lastly, Google has even written its own set of guidelines to help Webmasters optimise their websites. It’s basic but it does show you the important things which you should observe when building your site. If you do everything in this guide you’ll be staying within Google’s guidelines and your site will be reasonably optimised. But most importantly if you play by Google’s rules you won’t risk incurring a penalty.

Keep in the light – stay away from the dark side

Some shady SEO practices break Google guidelines. These are referred to as Black hat SEO.

There are many black hat techniques to help improve your website SEO, traffic, and visibility. But doing this is like juggling with knives. A wrong move and your site can get penalised, meaning your traffic will crash and may never recover.

If you’re going to the trouble building a website, producing content, and promoting it, why ruin everything with dodgy fix?

If your business is a long-term project, avoid black hat shortcuts, and stick to what Google and Bing recommend.

White hat SEO isn’t the fastest way to build a profitable website. But it can pay over the long term. A website which adheres to the rules can help you make money for years and even decades. So, if you’re in this for the long haul, stay in the white light.

Link Building in Agricultural Industries

If you’ve been reading about SEO for any length of time, you’ll have read that your site needs links. And you’ll likely have read that link building is hard – this is true to an extent.

But there are easy links you can gain for your agricultural website.

Some of the worst SEO advice is that you should only acquire links which help your site to climb up the search results–whilst ignoring all other types of link.

Personally, I recommend that rather than looking at links as just tools to help you rank, try to get links which will send you customers. Often these are the links Google and Bing like anyway.

Here are some quick and easy links for your farming website to get: Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (if you can make videos). And don’t forget about business directories like Yelp, Yellow Pages, and Foursquare.

The agricultural industry is full of smaller link opportunities too. Some farming magazines have business directories.

You might be able to earn a link because you produce a certain breed or species of animal or plant (think breed clubs or growers’ organisations).

And most agricultural sectors often have dedicated industry forums too. It’s a good idea to join these places, converse with the people in them, and promote your business (just don’t spam it and annoy the site owners and users).

One of the easiest links to produce are internal site links. If you produce lots of content, each page can be pointed internally (within your website) to your most valuable pages. This tells the search engines about the most critical parts of your website. And this can improve the ranking of those pages without you ever having to do any outreach or offsite link building.

Conclusion

Is there more than what I’ve mentioned when it comes to SEO for farming and agricultural websites?

Of course there is.

What I’ve outlined on this page are basic SEO practices. But if you implement most of my SEO recommendations in this guide, you’ll increase the likelihood of your busines having a successful website.

And if all this sounds like a lot of hard work why not let me help you? I’ve been doing SEO for over 10 years. I’ve helped sites large and small. And I also know agriculture and farming well, because I grew up on a farm, and still run a successful farming business.

So, if you’d lack the time to implement my farming SEO tips, or it bores you to tears, then get in touch. I’m sure I can help you.