Structured data is an essential part of giving Google the resources to display what are called rich search results.
As you can see in this screenshot, rich recipe results function much differently than typical Google search results.
Rich snippets for recipes contain the following elements:
- Cooking time
- Cooking methods
- Nutrition facts
- Recipe Category
- Ingredient List
- Instruction List
- Recipe Yield
Video Walkthrough
In this video, we talk about this SEO case study in-depth and share some of our strategies and implementations for this schema SEO strategy.
Recipe schema is quite in-depth and online recipe creators everywhere are learning how essential schema is to how often their results will be shown to users.
Why Recipe Schema Matters
How does schema boost my recipe SEO? Using your custom schema, Google can read and understand your recipe content in a unique way that will increase your impressions and bring new visitors to your website. As new recipes are released across the web each day, custom schema helps Google better identify your recipe so they can show it to people who care.
Should I add schema to my food blog? If you don’t have schema currently, you may notice that you don’t see much organic traffic to your recipes as they may be in the same keyword space as many high ranking recipes platforms like AllRecipes.com or Food Network.
I recommend all food blogs use schema to target specific keyword pockets. This is a very effective strategy in 2020, and Google will continue to optimize its analysis and understanding of recipe content.
How can I target my recipes? If your recipe has a specific demographic of people who are interested, use your on-page content as well as your schema to target them effectively. Let’s say you are targeting people who are looking for recipes that are Keto.
You should create a strategy that you use on every recipe for targeting specific keywords. Add the keyword to your meta tag, title tag, and inside of your recipe content on-page and your schema. This is the best way to optimize your recipes for specific demographics.
How Do I Create Recipe Schema?
Once you have recipes on your website, you will want to start adding a custom schema to each one so they will display rich information as they are served to people organically.
If you have a WordPress website, this article explains exactly how to add schema to your recipes. If you are not a developer, you can install a plugin that allows you to individually add script tags to the headers of your pages.
In the case of our website, we had a group of our interns work to generate the custom schemas as we were working with over 100 recipes to start. As we created the schemas, we went through each custom post and added the script into the header of the tag.
Is Adding Recipe Schema Effective?
In our experience, adding recipe schema increased our organic impressions and made our recipe categories more effective as landing pages.
For our recipe categories, we saw a 30% increase in sessions 2 months after adding the custom schema to each recipe. The schema helped Google organize our recipes per each category to begin displaying some of our low performing recipes
In terms of organic impressions, we went through the Google Search Console to look specifically at how our rich snippets were served. We saw a steady increase in our impressions of our recipes which led to more clicks.
Moving forward, we expect the implementation of the schema to work as an organic SEO engine, hopefully bringing thousands of more people through to our recipe pages.
Update After 6 Months
After 6 months of working with this client, we have seen some major successes when it comes to recipe schema. Looking specifically at rich results traction in Google search console, we can see how specific recipes performed and how adding structured data to the pages worked in gaining traction.
Looking at this 12-month overview screenshot you can see how by adding recipe schema we generated over 600K impressions for the website (and counting).
Why Are My Recipes Losing Traffic?
As you can see, in August we had a severe drop in traffic coming from rich results. Why did that happen? Google is often updating how they read and analyze structured data and it’s important that you stay up to date with how they are seeing your website.
My team and I watch Google search console every day to ensure that structured data and organic search is staying consistent and is growing in favor of your goals. Over time, the Google search algorithms will change and affect how you are ranking, and it’s the job of your SEM team to manage these changes.
Let Me Build Your Recipe SEO Strategy
As one of the best SEO marketers working in the food blog space and the CPG marketing space, I am building the most effective recipe strategies for food blogs and CPG brands.
With a full team of developers that are savvy with SEO and a marketing team to support them, I am working to build a never before seen group of marketers that involve cutting edge technology every step of the way.
