Ways Gousto Can Improve Its Conversions

Happy Friday marketing and SEO people! We hope the week has been good.

Marketing is a game of inches.

It never feels like progress when you’re drowning in an Ahrefs report or a 4000-word guide—but look back in a week or a month, and the picture is clear.

If you consistently do the right things, the results will come.

So, hang in there!

Today we’re looking at UK-based meal delivery company Gousto.

Our MD Doug is a big fan of the product and was interested in how they performed in SEO. He found some cool ways the company could think about conversions.

Over to Doug 👋

***

Gousto is one of the leaders in the UK meal kit subscription market.

Every week you choose some recipes and they send the ingredients and recipe cards . It’s a simple concept but very effective.

In 2020, around 380,000 households used the service.

I like the service.

✅   Reduces waste

✅   Promotes healthy cooking

✅   Saves money

Gousto has some competitors and the main one is Hello Fresh.

Gousto spends a lot of marketing dollars on brand as you can see this in their traffic data below.

The top 12 search terms are all branded.

The bulk of non-branded search comes from recipes.

For example, chilli prawn linguine generates 771 visits per month.

Most UK consumers will know the brand name or about the concept of meal kits.

I guess top-of-funnel marketing isn’t a huge priority and most dollars will go into the brand (TV advertising, billboards, PR etc.)

Here are two ideas from reviewing the site and Ahrefs.

1. Meet the people behind the business
2. High-quality comparison pages

Gousto is fighting a raft of enemies.

Direct competitors like Hello Fresh and other ways to create meals (supermarkets, Uber Eats etc).

And the biggest enemy of all: consumer apathy. Buyers like the idea, but they just need to take the plunge and give it a go.

What will help them take the plunge?

I’d love to see experiments with pushing the chefs and producers on the site more.

They dabbled with Meet the Chef six years ago HERE.

They mention suppliers HERE.

I think they should build out this content. Consumers care deeply about where their food comes from, and if they can tell stories about the people behind the food it will build trust.

Lots of consumers will be deciding whether to give Gousto or Hello Fresh a try. This is a crucial battleground.

SEO could help Gousto win the war—let’s take a look.

The keyword gousto vs hello fresh has a lot of traffic, and these are consumers down the funnel—Gousto needs to win them!

But it’s hard. You don’t have the credibility to give an impartial review as a brand.

But brands can rank for these pages.

We see this in SaaS all the time.

Here’s how they should do it.

💡 Create a page that directly addresses this search term and get the title, and on-page optimisation nailed.

💡Create a tick list of features and focus on areas where Gousto wins (ethically sourced ingredients, number of meals, returns policy etc).

💡Add favourable social signals. Gousto is outperforming Hello Fresh on Trustpilot, find as many of these signals and plaster them on the page.

💡Gousto is UK founded so you could play on the origin story.

💡Cite other independent reviews that position Gousto as the better option (there are many).

💡Add testimonials from customers that hit the key selling points—their product is fast, easy, healthy etc

The trick is to remain objective.The page is a compilation of credible proof that Gousto is the better product.

Gousto is a great brand. I love what they offer, and they could drastically increase their conversions with just a few tweaks to their content strategy.

By providing more human content and crafting high-quality comparison pages, Gousto can get an edge in the meal kit wars.

They get my vote, at least.