A Step-by-Step SEO Audit You Can Run on Your Bakery Website This Week

This audit is designed for bakery owners and managers who have a website but aren't sure whether it's actually helping people find them on Google. You don't need to be technical. You need about two to three hours, a notepad, and willingness to look honestly at what you find.

This is not an audit for a brand-new website with no content. It's a diagnostic for an existing site—one that may have been built by a web designer, a family member, or a DIY platform—where you want to understand why search traffic is flat or why competitors keep showing up above you in local results.

By the end, you'll have answers to four practical questions:

• Is your site technically capable of ranking? (Speed, crawlability, mobile experience)
• Are your pages targeting the right keywords for how people actually search for bakeries?
• Does Google understand what you sell and where you're located?
• Is your local presence—Google Business Profile, citations, reviews—working for you or against you?

What this audit will not tell you is exactly how long it will take to see results after fixing these issues. That depends on your market, your competition, and how long the site has existed. Industry benchmarks suggest most local bakeries with consistent SEO effort see measurable movement in organic and local rankings within four to six months—but that range varies significantly based on how competitive your city or neighborhood is.

If you complete this audit and the gaps feel overwhelming, that's useful information too. It's a clear signal that professional help will move faster than a DIY approach—and knowing that early saves months of stalled effort.

Bakery websites are among the most image-heavy sites in local search. Product photography of cakes, pastries, and custom orders is essential for conversion—but unoptimized images are the single most common technical issue we see when reviewing bakery sites.

Start with Google PageSpeed Insights (free, at pagespeed.web.dev). Enter your homepage and your most important product or menu page. You're looking at two scores: mobile and desktop. For local businesses, mobile matters most—the majority of bakery searches happen on phones.

What to look for:

• Image formats: Are photos served as WebP or AVIF rather than JPEG/PNG? Modern formats reduce file size by 25–50% with no visible quality loss.
• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures how fast the main visual element loads. A hero image of a wedding cake that loads slowly will drag your LCP score down and signal a poor user experience to Google.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Images without defined dimensions cause page elements to jump as they load. This is a common issue on gallery-style bakery pages.

Also check your site in Google Search Console (free). Under the Coverage report, look for pages marked as errors or excluded. These are pages Google either can't crawl or has decided not to index. If your custom cake ordering page or seasonal menu page shows up here, customers searching for those services won't find you.

Score this section: Give yourself a point for each item that passes. Three or fewer points out of five means technical issues are likely suppressing your rankings regardless of how good your content is.

The goal here is simple: does each important page on your site clearly tell Google what it's about and where you're located? Most bakery websites fail this check not because of bad writing, but because pages were built for visual appeal without considering how search engines read text.

For each core page—homepage, custom cakes, wedding cakes, catering, menu—ask these questions:

• Does the page title (the text in the browser tab) include a descriptive keyword and your city name?
• Does the H1 heading match what a customer would actually type into Google?
• Is your location mentioned naturally in the body text, not just buried in the footer?
• Are seasonal or specialty products named explicitly? ("gluten-free sourdough" ranks; "specialty items" does not)

A practical test: read your homepage out loud. If a stranger couldn't tell from that text what type of baked goods you specialize in or what city you serve, Google probably can't either.

Menu and product pages deserve specific attention. If your menu lives as a PDF or an embedded image, Google cannot read it. That means every product name, dietary label, and seasonal item is invisible to search. Text-based menu pages indexed by Google can capture long-tail searches like "nut-free birthday cake [city]" that no competitor is targeting.

Check your meta descriptions too—these are the short summaries that appear under your link in search results. A blank or auto-generated meta description is a missed opportunity to give searchers a reason to click your listing over a competitor's.

In our experience working with local food businesses, the on-page content gap is rarely about writing quality. It's about specificity. The more precisely you name what you make and where you make it, the better Google can match your pages to the right searches.

Schema markup is code added to your website that helps Google understand the specific type of business you are, what you sell, and details like hours, price range, and location. Without it, Google has to guess. With it, you give Google explicit instructions—and sometimes get enhanced search result features like star ratings or product highlights as a reward.

Run your homepage through Google's Rich Results Test (search.google.com/test/rich-results). This tool shows what structured data, if any, Google can detect on your page.

For a bakery, the most valuable schema types are:

• LocalBusiness / Bakery schema: Confirms your business type, address, phone, hours, and price range to Google in a machine-readable format
• Menu schema: Marks up individual products or categories so Google can surface them in Knowledge Panels and local search features
• BreadcrumbList schema: Helps Google understand your site structure, especially useful if you have category pages for cakes, bread, pastries, and seasonal items
• Review / AggregateRating schema: Displays your star rating directly in search results, which improves click-through rates

If the Rich Results Test returns no structured data, or only minimal data pulled automatically from your platform, this is an area where a relatively small amount of technical work can have a disproportionate effect on how your listings appear in search.

Platforms like Squarespace and Wix include some basic schema automatically. WordPress sites vary—many have none unless a plugin like Yoast or Rank Math is configured. Shopify, used by some bakeries with an online ordering component, includes product schema by default but often lacks LocalBusiness markup.

Document what schema types are present and which are missing. Missing schema is not a ranking penalty, but it is a missed opportunity to give Google more context and potentially earn richer search features.

For most bakeries, Google Business Profile (GBP) drives more foot traffic than the website itself. It's the listing that appears when someone searches your bakery name, or when Google shows a local pack of results for "bakery near me." Auditing it carefully is worth the time.

Open your GBP listing as a customer would see it—search your bakery name on Google—and evaluate each component:

• Business category: "Bakery" should be your primary category. Secondary categories like "Wedding Cake Shop," "Cake Shop," or "Patisserie" help capture more specific searches. Many bakeries only select one category and miss relevant local searches entirely.
• Business description: Does it mention your specialties, your neighborhood, and what makes your bakery different? This is readable by both customers and Google.
• Photos: Are product photos recent and high-quality? GBP listings with frequent photo updates tend to see better engagement in our experience. Include interior, exterior, product, and team photos.
• Hours accuracy: Holiday hours, seasonal hours, and special closures should be kept current. Incorrect hours are a common source of negative reviews and lost visits.
• Q&A section: Check whether unanswered customer questions are sitting in this section. Unanswered questions are a missed trust signal and a poor customer experience.
• Posts: Has anything been posted in the last 30 days? Regular posts—for seasonal products, promotions, or events—signal an active business to both Google and potential customers.

For a deeper walkthrough of GBP optimization and local citation directories specific to food businesses, the local SEO guide for bakeries covers each of these areas in detail.

Score your GBP out of the six areas above. Two or fewer complete areas is a strong indicator that your local visibility is underperforming relative to competitors who have taken the time to fully build out their profile.

Star ratings matter, but review recency and content matter too. Google uses review signals as a local ranking factor, and potential customers read reviews before deciding where to order a custom cake or pick up pastries for an office meeting.

Evaluate your review profile across Google, Yelp, and any delivery platforms (DoorDash, Grubhub) where your bakery is listed:

• Recency: When was your last review? A bakery with 80 reviews but none in the past six months looks stagnant compared to a competitor with 30 reviews and three last week.
• Response rate: Are you responding to both positive and negative reviews? Responding to negative reviews professionally—without being defensive—demonstrates accountability and often matters more to new customers than the negative review itself.
• Content patterns: Read your one and two-star reviews. Are multiple people mentioning the same issue (wait times, order accuracy, communication about custom orders)? These are operational signals, not just SEO signals—but fixing them improves both.
• Volume compared to competitors: Search "bakery [your city]" and look at the review counts for the top three results. If they have significantly more reviews, that's a gap to close through a systematic ask-for-reviews process.

Your Audit Scoring Rubric

Tally your assessments across all five steps. Use this rough benchmark:

• 18–25 points: Strong foundation. Focus on content depth and consistent GBP activity.
• 10–17 points: Moderate gaps. Prioritize technical fixes and GBP completion before content work.
• Below 10 points: Significant gaps across multiple areas. The volume of fixes needed likely warrants professional support to avoid spending time on low-impact items while high-impact issues remain unaddressed.

If your score falls below 10, or if technical issues like schema markup, crawl errors, or site speed feel outside your comfort zone, that's a reasonable point to consider getting a professional bakery SEO audit rather than working through fixes trial-and-error.