In the past year, I’ve worked with multiple food blogs to increase recipe specific ranks to #1. I’ve also had a couple food bloggers who are confused by the process of ranking articles, and how competition works in this space. Before getting into the steps, I want to talk a bit about the food blog space.
Recipes are Competitive
We all know that popular recipes are quite competitive. If you do a search for a recipe like “meatloaf”, you’ll see that it’s highly competitive. With over 500k searches over a year, this is a great keyword to rank #1 for. If you dive deeper at the competitor websites, you’ll see names like allrecipes, Food Network, Serious Eats, and more.
It’s not impossible to beat these competitors, but with high domain authority, it’s pretty difficult to compete. One of my main processes in working with food blogs is to gauge which recipes they can contend with. If you have a smaller site, we would avoid focusing on high volume recipes with lots of competitors, and push towards niche recipes that have potential to grow with trends.
1. Audit and Analyze Your Website
Obviously, I would love to do this for you! But that’s not always the case. Much of my work revolves around teaching people how to utilize these skills yourself. Using tools like Search Console and Google Analytics, you can understand which pages are performing well and which pages need some help. This will help you step into doing the proper keyword research for your website.
- Highlight your top performing recipes for keyword research phase
- Mark your URLs and target keywords for each page to ensure nothing overlaps
2. Keyword Research Your Recipes
Keyword research is the backbone of SEO. This ties into understanding which recipes will be highly competitive and which ones will be easy to rank for.
Tools like Google Keyword Planner, SEMrush, or KeySearch can help you identify what your audience is searching for.
- Target Specific Recipe Keywords: Instead of broad terms like “chicken dinner,” go for more specific phrases like “easy chicken parmesan recipe.”
- Consider Seasonal Trends: Keywords like “Thanksgiving stuffing” or “summer BBQ desserts” spike at certain times of the year.
3. Structure Your Posts for SEO and Readability
A well-organized blog post helps both readers and search engines understand your content. After proper keyword research, you’ll understand which pages you need to optimize and how to improve your overall URL structure and readability.
- Use Headers (H1, H2, H3): Break your content into clear sections like ingredients, steps, and tips.
- Add a Table of Contents: Plugins like LuckyWP Table of Contents can enhance navigation.
- Include Jump-to-Recipe Links: These improve user experience and reduce bounce rates.