We’ve known for some time that Canadian Food Focus is an effective way to reach urban consumers. The key has been to provide practical, actionable information that consumers are actively looking for and to focus on food — the part of agriculture that consumers care most about.
Canadian Food Focus is a national organization that began as a program of Farm & Food Care Saskatchewan back in 2019. It consists of:
- a website and social media presence that answers consumer questions
- an influencer program that provides farm tours, webinars and other learning opportunities to dietitians, chefs, educators, journalists, policy makers and others
- stakeholder outreach to help organizations throughout the ag sector communicate more effectively with consumers through our channels
The numbers speak for themselves, with more than 10 million engagements over the past year—people actively engaging through comments, likes, video views, shares and so on. Canadian Food Focus now has almost 40,000 followers and over 11,000 receive a monthly newsletter with articles, videos and recipes featuring Canadian ingredients.
Consumers are finding and returning to Canadian Food Focus because it is one-stop shop: a single authoritative space where they can find answers to anything agri-food. It is a huge advantage and opportunity for the industry to work together to engage, educate, and empower consumers.
New project with Dairy Farmers of Canada
A recent project with Dairy Farmers of Canada (DFC) has brought to light new data that is highlighting how Canadian Food Focus is becoming the top source of information for consumers.
Dairy Farmers of Canada invests considerable resources in not only developing content and engaging with consumers, but also in tracking what topics are resonating, online search mechanisms, user sentiment, and where consumers are finding their information, among others. DFC analytics revealed that Canadian Food Focus consistently came to the top as a key source of answers to internet queries on topics related to agriculture, food production, food education, recipes, sustainable practices, and more.
Dairy Farmers reached out to Canadian Food Focus to propose a joint project to further improve online search results, to provide expertise to build our French-language content and to support adding information to answer frequently asked questions related to dairy.
One of the biggest factors driving the need for this project is the change in the way online searches are taking place. It used to be that when you typed a query into Google, a list of websites was returned where you could look for your answer. Now, artificial intelligence is analyzing the available information online and providing an “AI overview” answer to the query. Many users now receive AI’s answer to their question and have no need to visit the websites Google lists down below.
This is changing everything.
AI is changing online searches
How does Google (or any other AI tool) come up with their summarized answer? These AI searchbots are prioritizing websites that are:
- high-quality and original
- well-researched and backed up by links to other sites
- regularly updated and technically sound (site speed, mobile friendliness, use of tags and schema, etc)
- have high user engagement and traffic
One of the top criterion for AI search tools is authority score. This is a measure of domain authority, presence of credible backlinks, and online reputation markers, such as expert reviews, mentions and ratings. It’s really a way of measuring how much internet users trust a certain website to get answers to their questions. So sites like Wikipedia and YouTube rate near the top of the 1 to 100 scale. Other highly-rated sites include news agencies and some academic and government sites.
AI is using Canadian Food Focus to answer consumer questions
The big reveal is that Canadian Food Focus is highly rated on all of these fronts. Data from SEMrush, an online measurement tool, shows Canadian Food Focus with an authority score of 40. For comparison, Dairy Farmers of Canada, with at least 20 years of online communications and a significantly higher marketing budget, has an authority score of 46. There are only five consumer-related agriculture websites in the 40s.
Because of the breadth of content needed, amount of backlinks to other sites and investment in building a user following, to raise a site’s authority score even one point has been compared to “raising the temperature of the ocean.”
And because we’re talking about a trust measure, there’s only so far that single-sector organizations will be able to raise their score. When an organization only represents one group or region, it’s much harder for them to reach as high an authority score as an organization like Canadian Food Focus, which represents all of agriculture and food across the country. In fact, the best way for sector groups to improve their trust rating is to have their information echoed and validated on Canadian Food Focus platforms.
What an incredible achievement for Canadian Food Focus to rate so highly on trust, content, quality, engagement, sentiment and more – with only a shoestring budget, six years of hard work and a clear vision of how to reach consumers. With more investment from across the industry into Canadian Food Focus, so much more is possible to achieve our common goals to reach more consumers, crush misinformation and expand understanding of farming and food in this country.