Ned - Founder at NotAnotherBill
Low hanging fruit for subscription box services
When I do SEO for any company I always like to prioritise the so called low hanging fruit as you want to get the ball rolling as soon as possible. Then you can dedicate time to the more strategic, longer term initiatives.
For subscription box companies there may be plenty of easy wins to be had, but ultimately it's going to depend on the size and shape of the company. If you're a start up or just getting off the ground then you may be a bit limited here, whereas a more established company likely has lots of data to work with, more brand awareness and so more branded organic traffic, and so most of the low hanging fruit will be available to those subscription box companies that have grown organically (without SEO consideration) but which now would like to scale their growth. Those such companies may have overlooked simple tweaks or adjustments, or may have the data at their fingertips - they've just not spotted the opportunities that are present.
Easy win 1 - branded queries check:
One such easy win would be to start typing your product name in Google - see what search terms auto-populate, so those are the terms that have fairly high volumes which are brand based:
You can also look at the "People also ask" box that appears within Google to see the typical questions a user may ask in relation to that product/brand.
Search for each term that appears and check - how does your brand try to capture those searches? For example, do you have a page on your site that is dedicated to reviews of your subscription box? If not this would be one such fix to make. Capturing people who are looking for reviews of your product is essential - they're clearly low down in the purchase funnel, they just need to validate that your product is the one for them.
To take this thought further; maybe having done this you feel that someone who reads reviews of your product on your own website is going to be hesitant to take them as being 100% genuine - you're not going to publish bad reviews on your own site after all. So, see which other sites are ranking here in Google. Maybe there is potential to team up with a relevant external site to "encourage" them to start ranking for those terms too, to capture additional volume.
This could be achieved by teaming up with an established blogger to ask them to review your subscription box, or reaching out to the various "round up" style sites and to see if they wanted to feature your boxes.
Easy win 2 - non-brand keyword volume check:
It should be fairly easy to determine the non-branded search volumes that you would want your subscription service appearing for within Google. This might be "fitness subscription box", "dog food subscription box", "beer subscription box" and so on. Hopefully categorising your business in this way isn't difficult, but if it is you may be able to look at broader terms "subscription gift ideas for men"... etc.
Take the terms and use a tool like Google Trends to determine search volumes over the past 5 years for that query. More often than not you may identify interesting trends, like a sharp uprise in searches in the lead up to Christmas.
In the example above for "coffee subscription" searches we can note two interesting things; firstly there is a surge in searches for that term in the US a few weeks leading up to Christmas, and secondly the search volume has been rising steadily year upon year.
So with the above if I was working with a coffee subscription service I'd suggest that if they are running PPC campaigns they may be interested in having adverts visible for those terms in the leadup to Christmas (but being very mindful about budget constraints), but on top of that they should really look to adjust their site (and SEO rankings) in the run up to this period in a bid to capture more of this search demand at this particular period of time. This could be by tweaking page titles and meta descriptions to cater for the Christmas gift searcher, having adjusted on page copy (Christmas imagery, messaging) to really convey that you are a great suggestion for a Christmas gift, and so on.
Off-site SEO for the above might look like pitching to relevant blogs and other websites that are likely to be able to rank organically for these terms (aka they have good authority) as to how your coffee subscription box makes the perfect Christmas gift. Maybe if you're lucky you even have data to back this up - like how sales go up by X% from November to January with people desperate to gift coffee subscription boxes to loved ones, and so on. Journalists love bite-size figures and it gives your outreach a lot more weight then just giving your word for it.
Whilst the second example here perhaps isn't so much "low hanging fruit" it's still a really easy way to check for search trends within your industry that you really should be aware of, if you weren't already.
Easy win 3 - piggyback on other sites to grow awareness
This is actually an example that works quite well across multiple industries every since Google's switch towards greater matching a user's search intent. Having worked in the travel industry for several years I saw this happening first hand - independent hotels went from being able to appear highly in Google for "hotel with X facilities near Y attraction" to being beaten to it by the online travel agent (OTA) giants like Booking.com, Expedia or TripAdvisor. This is because these sites provider a better match for the user search intent; they deserve to rank higher because they provide a result which includes many hotels, not just one. Someone looking for "hotels in city" or such a broad query unlikely wants to be greeted with each hotel website as a result, but they instead want to see a page which contains several hotels and summarises the key information nicely. Google likely saw this pattern occurring at scale and so it gave those OTA's greater search visibility.
I think the same happens across the internet with many other verticals, and subscription boxes are no different. If someone is searching for a broad query like "beer subscription boxes" then they likely want to see a roundup style page that discusses several services, vs seeing the beer subscription sites returned individually as search results. Sometimes you do still see this happening, but mostly I see blog posts and articles from news sites which rank highly for those queries.
So in the above scenario I believe that subscription services should look to piggyback on other websites where they know it's important for their brand/service to be listed. There are several reasons to take this approach:
1 - You grow your brand awareness. People who read that website, or see that page ranking highly in Google will learn about your subscription box and they may click through to your website (and potentially subscribe), or they may Google it later - which will lead to more organic, branded search traffic.
2 - If a link to your website is included in the article it will help directly with SEO rankings, but even if your product is just mentioned this can have a positive impact on your SEO rankings (it's classed a citation for your business).
3 - I believe that by having visibility on sites that talk about a topic related to your subscription box, over time your business will be associated with that term from a search engine POV, and you will see that you rank organically for relevant, non-branded search queries. So by having a presence across many sites where your category is discussed can have a long term impact on your organic search performance.
To achieve this you will need to ensure you have an active media and PR approach and that you're keeping SEO in mind when looking for those kinds of opportunities. Keep tabs on tools like Help a reporter out (HARO) and reach out when a journalist is looking for your kind of subscription box (which happens surprisingly often!) and do your own manual outreach to those publications that you think a) could rank well if they wanted to target your particular non-brand queries, b) have a big audience which overlaps heavily with your target audience, and c) sites that have their own organic search authority (use an SEO tool like Ahrefs, SEMRush or Moz to determine this).
