2E7's 9th Annual BBQ Gathering

Its about the time of the year where my secondary school class plans the annual barbeque gathering to catch up. Since I haven’t helped plan since I graduated secondary school, I decided to do some research to see how I could help out. This year will be the 9th year we've had a BBQ gathering, which is a pretty amazing feat. Still don't know how we managed to start this tradition when we were only 13 years old.

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The very first thing I did was to Google “Bbq Singapore”.

The first result for “Bbq Singapore” on Google was Great BBQ Food Catering by Spring Ocean, followed by BBQ Wholesale, HungryBBQ and Premium BBQ Meats Catering. These were Google Ads on the search engine, which meant that the companies bid and paid for these spots. As part of an attempt to harness SEO for the company I was working for a few years ago, I installed an extension that showed me the volume of each search per month and the CPC. For the keyword “bbq Singapore”, there was 1,600 searches/mth and the CPC was $0.74.

As I scrolled down, I saw that BBQ Wholesale was the 1^st result that was organic. So this meant that they had 2 results on the first page, which increased their chances of being chosen by the searcher.

So, how did BBQ Wholesale become the 1st in organic results?

Here are some of the reasons that I think contributed to their 1st place.

1. Content & Inbound Links

With Google Panda, Google Hummingbird and Google Penguin, it is now more important than ever to engage in ethical, white-hat SEO techniques to improve their organic ranking. For BBQ Wholesale, it is obvious that they understood these challenges and implemented various content marketing tactics through their social media channels to create inbound links.

For example, they used a blog to provide relevant information to their consumers, such as “8 Genius BBQ Hacks to Amaze Your Guests”, or “How to Light Up Charcoal Fire Like A Pro”.



They also use Pinterest, a relatively hard social media tool for brands to master, by creating boards with recipes in marinating barbeque food, cleaning tips and more.

YouTube, Facebook and Instagram are other forms of social media tools that BBQ Wholesale uses to generate quality content and inbound links to the website. These third party links to the main website serves as a form of approval in Google’s search engine algorithms, implying that many people are interested or find this link the most relevant, thus pushing the ranks higher. 

2. Mobile Friendliness

Mobile friendliness is extremely important to consumers these days. Many of us use smartphones to surf the internet more often than desktops or laptops. Moreover, with the ever increasing micro-moments throughout the day, people are now, more than ever, relying on mobile phones to look for information. It is important for companies like BBQ Wholesale to ensure that their websites are mobile-friendly, to improve their opportunities to capture and convert this group of people.

Definitely, BBQ Wholesale has noticed this segment and ensured that their website is mobile friendly. You are able to clearly see the menu, package and check-out systems. Compared to My BBQ Place, where you can’t even view the list of items within a package on their mobile website, I would definitely prefer to purchase from BBQ Wholesale instead if I mainly used mobile to do my research.

BBQ Wholesale Mobile Page

My BBQ Place Mobile Page

3. Page Speed

As someone who simply refuses to wait for websites that take longer than 10 seconds to load, page loading speed is an extremely important factor. When websites take super long to load, it makes me feel that the company is unprofessional, and can’t be bothered to upgrade their website to cater to potential customers like me. Also, in today’s time and age, most of the websites load extremely quickly. So when websites load slowly, I get the impression that they’re still living in the stone age.

Luckily for BBQ Wholesale, as seen below, their page loading speed is fast, which is great for people like me! (Google's algorithms also takes note of the loading speed)

4. Keywords

For Keywords, I used Spyfu to check the top organic keywords that led to BBQ Wholesale’s website:




Then I checked the keywords that BBQ Wholesale used on their website and realized that they are using a black hat technique as well, by including meta keywords:




It seems to be that BBQ Wholesale is using both white hat and black hat techniques to improve their organic rankings on the search engine. Nevertheless, meta keywords, while useful, are no longer an important part of the Google ranking algorithm as they realized that sites can play them through keyword stuffing.

After breaking down how BBQ Wholesale got their 1st place ranking organically, I realized that SEO is not as difficult to understand as it seemed to be. I used to think "oh SEO means paying money to bring up your ranking" - which is actually more like SEM, and wanting to do SEO but never knowing exactly what to do to. While it seems like it is a lot of work, its not impossible to achieve what BBQ Wholesale has done. 

Anyhow, I should probably get back to actually planning my BBQ.