The case of promoting food delivery “Japoshka”

Promoting food delivery in Ukraine is quite complicated. The competition in this niche is relatively high, and the format of running a food delivery business can complicate filling the site with text descriptions and changing the visual/technical part of the site. When working with a large food delivery service, it is necessary to competently interact and establish communication with specialists from other industries – SMM, PPC, general marketing, development, and others. So, how do we promote food delivery effectively, what goals do we set for ourselves, and how do we achieve them?

Setting project goals

Japoshka is a chain of restaurants and food delivery points in major cities of Ukraine. It is a recognizable and large brand originating from Kharkiv. Over time, the company has opened delivery in Poltava, Odesa, and Kyiv. Priority categories for promotion are sushi and pizza. There are also secondary categories of requests—burgers, shawarma, work, and others.

The customer sets the project goal – to reach the TOP 1-3 on priority queries in priority regions – Kharkiv, Odesa, and Poltava (+ with time opened delivery in Kyiv). In addition, internal goals were set during the briefing in Around Web – to increase commercial traffic on target queries, to rise to the TOP of Google for secondary groups of queries, to increase brand awareness and to find growth points for the overall marketing strategy through SEO.

Promotion strategy for a food delivery service

The promotion strategy we composed covered several global areas—the keywords and semantics of the site, metadata and content, technical aspects, backlinks, promotion of goods, and others. Let’s consider some of them in detail below.

Keywords and semantics of the site

Keyword analysis was carried out comprehensively, in just a month of work we have completely collected the main semantics and part of the secondary (products, blogs, other landing pages). All groups of keywords were added to position capture services for effective tracking of results, hypothesis testing and other purposes. We also created several separate reports to track ONLY the queries prioritized by the customer.

To ensure completeness of the semantics we analyzed the blog and, at later stages, optimized several articles, which allowed us to improve branding, strengthen category pages and provide more traffic to the site, but the main efforts are, of course, focused on the site categories.

A big point of growth was the addition of neighbourhood pages to the semantics at the second stage of promotion; with the help of technical implementations and content/metadata development, we introduced pages like “sushi left bank”, “pizza obolon” and got a very big increase in site visibility and traffic, as well as increased the share of traffic from Kyiv.

Metadata and content

The site menu is almost the same in different cities, the site has three language versions, which means we get from 4 to 12 implicit doubles for each page in the menu catalog (about 280 pages in total). At this stage we understood that proper uniqueization will bring success to the project, but if Google starts gluing and cannibalizing pages – we won’t get rankings.

That’s why we decided to write unique metadata for all categories (about 280 pages), abandoning templanization and automation. Templates were written for products – catalog of which is not tied to the region (one page, regardless of the selected city). Metadata were also created and filled in manually for all service pages, blogs, promotions and vacancies sections and other lendings.

Text descriptions were also written uniquely for at least one language version, and translations into other languages were made (here, we were protected by the hreflang attribute); unique texts for all language versions were written for priority pages.

Metadata and texts for the whole site were fully worked out in a record three months.

Technical part

The technical part of the project, with four regions, a large number of restrictions on the part of general marketing, complex functional solutions, and a high site load, requires competent elaboration, wide experience of technical SEO specialists, and communication at the level of teams of various outsourcing contractors and customer representatives.

First of all, the problem of different domains was solved; each region was on separate domains .kh.ua, .od.ua. Specialists of Around Web company decided to unite domains into one – yaposhka.com.ua and redirect all others to it. Thus, the existing cities (Kharkiv, Odesa) would strengthen the new ones (Poltava, Kyiv) due to the common domain rating, and also would allow maximizing the time and budget allocated for promotion. For the solution of this goal, we created the Terms of Reference (ToR) with in-depth analysis of domains, building a map of redirects and recommendations to unify the site’s functionality, delimitations of regions/languages using JS and many other tasks.

After the site was implemented (on the test domain), an initial audit was conducted, followed by several stages of edit implementation and the site’s implementation on the product version, namely on the domain yaposhka.com.ua. Then, an additional full audit of the site was conducted, which included not only the technical part but also the analysis of content/backlinks, usability, and E-E-A-T.

As part of the audit, considered all aspects of the site, including optimization of crawling and indexing (site mapping, setting robots.txt and meta robots, optimization of canonical pages and pagination and others), also set the rules for bypassing language versions and hreflang attributes. Work was done to improve the mobile version of the site and viewport tags. Rules for adding schema.org micro markup and many other works were set.

After optimization of the main technical part, additional analyses and point implementations were regularly carried out, which allowed not only to reach the TOP for priority queries, but also to widely cover semantics and get more traffic on target queries.

External promotion (backlink part)

When promoting links, the emphasis was placed on outreach – a way to obtain links through personal communication with the owner of the site or his representative and exchange the link for a benefit (mainly material).

The main reference mass was built on the priority categories – “pizza delivery” and “sushi delivery.” A well-designed anchor list allowed for the avoidance of spam and the maximum quality of the promotion of categories to the desired result. A distinctive feature of the reference promotion of the company “Japoshka” was the choice of sites – we focused on the search for regional resources (for example, for Kharkiv – news resource Kharkiv) and thematic sites of high and medium quality. The budget laid down at the first stage of work allowed us to fulfil the client’s goals without additional costs.

A small number of crowd links were also built to dilute the link profile and create a more natural picture of the external promotion of the site.

Results

For 16 months, we provided a high level of content, link, and technical optimization, covered the niche’s semantics, and brought the site to the top among all competitors in Ukraine.

Ahrefs screenshot of the project’s share in the Niche across Ukraine:

Ahrefs screenshot of traffic growth and number of keywords in TOP-20 for two years:

Screenshot of the growth of positions of the most prioritized queries of the site for one year (from 21.06.2023 to 19.06.2024):

Today the company is rebranding and moving to a new domain – yapiko.com.ua and continues SEO promotion and cooperation with the company Around Web