CPG SEO: Strategies & Trends for 2023

Digital acquisition looks very different now than it did in 2018. At the time, I worked for a brand that pretty much hedged its bets on Facebook. It worked at the time (even though new customer acquisition was still high). But post iOS 14, acquisition looks very different.

Gone are the days of putting your eggs in one channel’s basket. Today, the landscape is more rooted in diversification. It's about the educated customer and how the brand can build trust through this education.

This is where SEO can play a crucial role for CPG brands. SEO, of course, is getting your brand to show up organically so that customers can find you and convert. But organic search is also crucial in building trust and authority with your customers and search engines.

So, if you’re a CPG brand and you’re ready to up your SEO game, here’s where we recommend you start.

SEO Strategies for CPG Brands

Collections pages

Never underestimate the power of the collections page! But seriously though, your collections pages are the most under-utilized pages on your site when it comes to SEO.

Your collections pages house serious internal linking power. Here are the areas and strategies we use to make the most of them:

  1. Categorize your product pages into as many collections pages as possible

Don’t only have “Shop All” and “Best Sellers”. Categorize these products so they can fit broader searches.

We think about collections pages like this: the type of product they are, the problem the product solves, and the type of customer who is searching.

So for example, if you’re a hair brand, this could looks like:

  • Shampoos, Dry Shampoos, Hair Oils (type of product they are)

  • Frizzy Hair, Oily Hair, Damaged hair (problem the products solve)

  • Curly hair, Straight hair, Coily hair (type of customer who is searching)

Look to your other industry competitors to see how they are segmenting for more ideas! Here's a great example from Living Proof.

 

Living Proof nav/collections pages breakdown

 

2. Write content on the top and bottom of the collections page

Go with me here because I know that people always looks at me funny when I tell them this. We’ve seen that adding content to the collections page lifts performance immensely. Why? Because it gives search engines more information to understand what this page is about.

We recommend adding ~50 words of content at the top of the page and ~300-500 words at the bottom of the page.

For the content at the top of the page, think about it like an introduction to your collection. What should they know about your leave-in conditioners or lips balms?

For content at the bottom of the page, we recommend answering questions that your customers routinely ask. How do I use this? How is it made? Is this organic? Is it cruelty-free? What does this do?

Product Pages

To your customer, your product page isn’t there just for them to click “Add to Cart”. They first want to get as many of their questions answered as possible. That’s why for us, the perfect PDP is one that educates your customer with helpful content both for people and for search engines.

Here’s what we typically recommend a product page have:

  • H1

  • H2

  • Product description

  • Before & After photos (if applicable)

  • How to Use section

  • Ingredients section

  • FAQs section

  • 4+ images (if you have any that also include infographic details of the product, that’s a bonus!)

We always point out this product page by Biossance as the perfect product page. It is perfect 🔥

Blog Content

So many of our brands are not only competing against organic competitors, but also against affiliate competitors. Just search for “dry shampoo” and you’ll see a few retailers, but you’ll also see articles from the likes of Allure, Byrdie, or The Strategist with headlines like, “The 15 Best Dry Shampoos to Use Between Washes”. Ding ding ding. Those are affiliate articles.

So how else should we compete in the search results if we’re dealing with this type of competition? This is where blog content comes into play.

I know what you’re thinking. Blog? What is this, 2005?!

I get it. It does sound like that. But over the past 5 years, Google has prioritized educational content more and more.

Before you start throwing out content, though, I do want to note a few things first:

  1. You do not need to be post 5 times a week for your blog pieces to perform

  2. Don’t throw random posts up - go in with a strategic plan that sticks closely to the products you offer

  3. Look at how your competitors are writing about your identified queries - are they writing about the topic in listicle form? Are they answering a bunch of questions? Are there a lot of bulleted lists? Keep all this in mind when building out your piece.

Our best advice when you’re starting with blog is this: Answer questions about your product or niche.

If you have access to a paid tool like Ahrefs or SEMRush, type in a super basic keyword for your products, i.e. “hair mask”, “hyaluronic acid”, “olive oil”. And then look for the section that shows you questions asked about the term. This is the perfect place to start. Write your articles based around the questions here.

For a free (and highly underrated) way to research and find the questions you should write about, go to Reddit or Quora with the same terms. Look through the kinds of questions people ask. These are great ways to find content ideas that your competitors probably aren’t looking at!

Writing like this is a great way to begin showing topical authority in your niche. We’ll cover more on that below.

PS - you can also use this content as a great jumping off point for content across Pinterest, Youtube, TikTok, etc. Just sayin 👀

SEO Trends We’re Seeing in 2023

  1. Popular Products Pack

You may have seen something that looks like this recently when you search for anything transactional-related:

 
 

These are Popular Product packs and we have seen an uptick in instances of them for our clients over the past year. Where there used to be one, now there are consistently 2, maybe 3 for some queries.

To us, this is a new area to take up some real estate. Especially for the search terms that are showing a lot of affiliate articles. To rank for these, we’ve noticed two things: 1) you’ll want to properly set up schema for your products and 2) you’ll want to optimize Google Merchant Center for the particular query you’re going after for each product (but PLEASE do not keyword stuff)

PS - you can now track the performance of your products in the Popular Products pack in Search Console under Search Appearance > Merchant Listings.

2. Topical Authority

You’ve seen us talk about this a few times already throughout this article. It's really important to us.

You can think of topical authority as you exhausting all the questions someone may have about your brand. If they want to know about dry shampoo, you’re there to answer any and every question they may have when it comes to dry shampoo.

This does a couple of things for you. It shows Google that you’re an authority on the relevant subject and because of that, Google will naturally begin ranking you higher for queries related to that topic. The more trusted you are on a subject, the more traffic you can get.

So for each product or collections of products you have, build out a list of the questions people search for and start building content around that. It will do you so much better than putting up random posts!

3. TikTok SEO

We all remember the crazy amount of articles that came out about Gen Z using TikTok as their search engine instead of Google. So it’s been interesting to watch how exactly TikTok has been gradually transforming elements of the app to be more search engine focused.

So the question right now is, is TikTok SEO a thing yet?

The answer - kind of but not really yet.

BUT you’ve definitely seen the search snippets at the top of the comments or as a comment itself.


 
 

And one thing we’re noticing is that more and more of these snippets are being framed as questions and leading users to videos optimized around that question. The crazy part is, the accounts that do this are usually the SMALLEST accounts and they’re racking up views.

So the takeaway here, like with a lot of SEO-geared content, is answer questions in your TikToks!!

Any other burning SEO questions you have when it comes to SEO for CPG? Let me know! I would love to include them here.

Grace Wilkins