Safer Food Group

The client

The Safer Food Group offers award winning online food hygiene and safety training. They have 20 years experience in the industry and are the leading company in providing effective learning solutions to both individuals and businesses in the food industry. All courses are fully accredited by QUALIFI or RSPH and CPD and businesses can take advantage of bundle savings when they purchase five or more courses for their team. The Safer Food Group works with the likes of the NHS, Brent and Just Eat, delivering exceptional training and customer service. 

The challenge

As the courses can be purchased online, Organic Search was an important channel for reaching a new audience and acquiring new customers. With strong brand presence and interest, we knew that we had to increase organic visibility and reach for key commercial terms and improve non-branded traffic of the site.

Organic performance had stagnated for the past year and with the rise of AI Overviews and changing consumer behaviours with the advent of LLMs, we had to consider different channels. Alongside this, competitors were bidding on The Safer Food Group’s brand name which only proved how well-known and well-regarded the company is within the food industry space. 

What we did

Content strategy and implementation 

We reviewed the existing content on the website and carried out keyword research to find opportunities for new long form content creation and page optimisation. It was really important to ensure the main pages contained as much valuable information as possible and consumers found them easy to navigate and convert on. 

Our content strategy included keyword research but also predictive SEO. We focused on writing about topics that are important for the industry even if no search volume existed yet. To create the content, we collaborated with the amazing team at SFG who have years of experience within the space and could bring the level expertise and trust we needed. Shortly after we started to see increases in traffic and even revenue coming from this long-form content which was great to see and proved that focusing on your audience should always be the place to start with content.

Technical optimisation

We carried out a technical audit and worked with the team at The Safer Food Group to implement our recommendations. Technical SEO is the bedrock of good site optimisation and small changes helped us improve rankings for key terms. 

Google Business and Local optimisation 

As part of our roadmap, we optimised local listings and added a lot more information to their Google Business Profile to strengthen the brand’s appearance in search. With healthy brand search volume and competition bidding to appear for ‘Safer Food Group’, we wanted to ensure the brand SERP is as detailed as possible. 

Organic and paid collaboration 

The paid and organic specialists worked together to identify areas of optimisation both from a brand and non-brand perspective. We shared data on keyword search volume, conversion rate and opportunities where both channels can work together to increase revenue.

One of the opportunities we found was around increasing revenue from Level 3 Food Hygiene Courses. We found that Level 3 generated the second-highest revenue for Organic, but was a very competitive keyword. Paid, on the other hand, did not generate a lot from Level 3 keywords. On the back of this finding, we pulled Level 3 into a campaign of its own. As organic ranked higher and higher on Google, we also moved spend away from Google to Bing to improve the overall revenue and ROAS we were getting from Paid.

The results

Organic revenue increased by 60.2%

In the first five months of the year, we have seen strong growth in organic revenue from content that we have optimised and created. A 60.2% increase year on year in revenue has proven that despite AIO impacting CTR negatively, ranking and appearing in top results for the right keywords will still bring relevant customers to your site. 

Non-brand traffic increased by 180%  

We knew brand demand and search volume were healthy so our main focus was growing non-brand traffic from high value commercial keywords. The growth in non-brand clicks year over year has been really impressive and has reflected in increased revenue from the content that was created and optimised. 

Brand impressions increased by + 70%

In the same period of time, we have seen a growth of 70% in brand impressions year over year. 

Organic position growth 

We also achieved a 100% growth in positions 1-3 and a 47% growth in positions 4-10 in the first five months of the year.  

Organic revenue from AI platforms increased by 166.5% 

Total search should be part of any company’s online marketing mix and here at Hallam, we are looking at ways of improving visibility and performance from AI platforms. The Safer Food Group saw a 166.5% increase in the first five months of the year compared to the previous period. We are seeing a shift in consumer behaviour not only when it comes to informational queries but commercial questions, where LLMs can save time in research. 

Paid revenue grew by 96% and ROAS grew by 34% YoY

Through account optimisations and collaborations with Organic, paid revenue grew by 96% YoY and ROAS grew by 34%. We saw an 82% increase in transactions so AOV also grew YoY. We are now expanding paid activity into Meta for further growth.

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