Never be late to find the best SEO for your Food Blog. Once you are done with your first few post in your food blog, you need to find the SEO that will suit your blog to find a good audience.
Many have inquired about How to crack the SEO for Food Blogs.
Read about How to start a food blog
For You, we have done the best research and come upon the best SEO strategies that could be quickly unraveled.
SEO is Search Engine Optimization which is associated with google. As we know, Google is the best Search engine platform, and Google continues to dominate the search engine market, with a market share of 92.47 percent as of June 2021. So to rank #Top is our ultimate aim with SEO.
It turns out that online recipe SEO has a few extra hurdles to clear. On the other hand, some of these obstacles benefit from genuinely leveling the playing field for newcomers to the food blogging world.
But never back off from your success, it might be difficult, but it is never impossible.
Quest for the Right Recipe and Right Keyword
The most crucial component of food blogging is still thoughtfully crafting material for your target audience and focusing on what they are likely to search for. In the context of SEO, Google described this concept as E-A-T (expertise, authority, and trustworthiness).
Your recipe should be unique, fresh, and contain and target long-tail keywords. It also aids in the development of some frequent queries that your audience may have.
Table of Contents
Make some creative recipes using hot food topics.
Have you run out of new cooking ideas? At exploding topics, find a new food trend.
Food keywords that are less competitive yet still trending can be found. This keeps your new recipes fresh and ensures you have a steady stream of hungry diners eager for something new. It also aids in search engine optimization for emerging culinary trends with keywords that are still too competitive.
Categorized And Tagged Recipes.
For any WordPress blog with a lot of content, creating categories and tags is essential. If you’re a food blogger, you’re undoubtedly already aware that categories and tags allow you to organize your recipe archive pages by dietary requirements, ingredients, times, and other factors. This is highly beneficial to both visitors and search engines. Therefore you must understand how and when to use categories and tags effectively.
We emphasize this because categories and tags can quickly become overwhelming based on our experiences working with food bloggers over the years. You should limit yourself to a few broad categories for your material and then utilize tags to narrow down your options.
Find Your Long Tail.
Long-tail keywords, perhaps? Consider the following scenario:
Let’s imagine someone wants to limit sugar while still enjoying a lovely chocolate cake that their grandmother used to make. There’s no perfect solution here, but you could expose guests to your keto-based chocolate cake inspired by your grandmother’s food. How would this recipe be discovered? They can look for “sugar-free chocolate cake” or “cakes made the old way, but without the sugar.” That’s how people search nowadays, especially with voice search.
You should figure out what makes your chocolate cake recipe unique from others.
Here are some ideas for how to set your recipe apart from others:
- In comparison to other recipes, how many ingredients does yours call for?
- How long does it take you to prepare yours compared to other recipes?
- Is there a particular ingredient or two in your recipe?
- Do you have any specific preparation instructions for your recipe? No-bake, one-pot, and so on.
- Is your dish suitable for a special diet? Vegan, gluten-free, and so on.
- Is there any nutritional benefit to it? Protein-rich, low-fat, and so on.
- Is it appropriate for a special event? Halloween, Valentine’s Day, and other holidays
In the title, mention what makes your chocolate cake unique. Other suggestions should be written down and included in the keywords, description, and content. Cover all of the long-tail keywords that someone would use to find your unique recipe.
The Competition Is Tough, Research well and Find The keywords.
I’ll provide an example to demonstrate this tip. Imagine you have a fantastic custard cake recipe that you know people will enjoy. But imagine that because this recipe is on page 5 of the search results for your keyword, no one ever sees it.
What exactly do you do? The short answer is that you should optimize the recipe page’s on-page SEO. How can you boost your on-page SEO? By studying your competitors’ blog articles to see what kind of language, keywords, and structure they use. After that, you can work on improving your material.
Additionally, you may use an incognito browser window to Google your goal keywords to check what kinds of recipes are currently ranking.
When researching the competition for your recipe’s target keywords, look for the following signs:
- There are no exact matches for your keyword phrase in the top results.
- Most of the best-matched recipes haven’t been reviewed and come from lesser-known websites.
- The first few results are poor fits for the keywords’ aim. “Low-fat vegan strawberry cheesecake” does not yield low-fat results.
Find Recipes For Tomorrow
A food blogger’s life often entails baking pumpkin bread in July and trying out Thanksgiving recipes in September. Early distribution of season-specific material can benefit your readers who prefer to plan, but SEO for Food Blog is one of the main reasons it’s essential.
You’ve probably heard that SEO is a lengthy process. It will take time. When you publish fresh content, it can take weeks or even months of patient waiting or ongoing optimization for that piece to settle into a position that you are happy with. So go ahead and bake some summer pumpkin bread!
Quote The FAQ in Your Keyword
Finding and answering FAQs in your way and then adding these questions and answers to your blog post or recipe is a little-known SEO tip that will soon become widespread (so jump on it before everyone else does).
Why?
People commonly ask these questions, and if they are related to your topic, why not be the blog that provides the answers?
One way is to read through Google’s “People also ask” area and see if you can better answer any of those queries. Your recipe may be featured in a snippet if you respond to these questions with a more direct or relevant response. Some of the answers will most likely be useful to your audience. Google considers a positive SEO indication. You have more engaging users and longer, more meaningful content.
More questions will show when you click on the most relevant topics. Move your cursor up the list to get back on track if the questions start to veer off-topic. Once you’ve compiled a list of 5 or 6 questions, respond to them in your own words and include them in your post. Make sure your responses are brief and to the point. Various WordPress plugins can help you add FAQ structured data to your posts. One is Yoast’s “SEO” plugin. Another is the Gutenberg FAQ Block.
Here are some suggestions for selecting questions for your recipe FAQ section:
- Examine the questions that people pose.
- Think about how good the response is to your reader.
- Assess the relevance of your target keywords to the query and answer.
- Make a list of a few aspects of your dish as questions.
Craft Your Recipe Page Title And Meta Description
In search results, your meta description tag may appear next to the name of your dish. When a recipe is posted on social media, the description is frequently included as a recipe summary.
A well-written meta description encourages readers to go through, and the click-through rate of your recipe page affects its capacity to rank [Moz, 2021].
To strengthen your topic, include your target keywords in the description. Length is also significant. A description that is too short will not provide adequate information, while a description that is too long may be cut off.
Your description should be one long sentence or two shorter sentences to make your description right. The ideal character length is between 80 to 320.
One of the most crucial information for your recipe’s online identity and search engine optimization is the title tag. A distinctive, short, and descriptive title tag should always be included.
Your recipe’s specific target keywords should always be included in the title tag. You can optionally include your blog’s name, separated by a “|” or “-.”
The title tag should not be excessively long or short. If your target keywords are too long, they will be considered less relevant in the phrase, and if they are too short, they will be highly competitive. The recommended length for your title is between 20 and 60 characters.
Here are some real-life examples of well-crafted web recipe titles:
Strawberry Chees Cake Recipe No Bake | Taste of Home
Ratatouille | Bon Appetit
Vegan Garlic Pasta | Minimalist Recipes
Create a Simple URL that is SEO-friendly.
The recipe link is another ranking element for your target keywords for search engines. Your recipe URL should be brief and straightforward, with no dates or subcategories.
All of your target keywords should be included in your URL and your title and meta description. The ideal practice is to use “-” to separate the terms. The longer your URL is, the less weight your target keywords will receive, making your recipe link short and sweet.
As any skilled SEO would tell you, long URLs do not perform as well as short URLs. What gives? It could be related to how search engines process URLs when crawling the website.
An example of a long URL is shown below:
http://myfoodietraveler.com/category/italian-food/the-best-italian-firewood- pizza–2021/
For the same recipe, here’s an example of a short URL:
http://myfoodietraveler.com/the-best-firewood- pizza/
The second URL is preferable for various reasons.
It’s simple to figure out what the post is about (for humans and robots).
The URL isn’t cluttered with categories or stop words. While categories can help with SEO, you don’t need to include them in your URLs.
Best WordPress Plugins For Food Blogs.
This pertains to WordPress users, but many food bloggers use the world’s most popular content management system. Why not, right? It’s ideal for the task, plus there’s a sizable WordPress food blogging community. WordPress is an excellent platform for developing an SEO strategy, and many recipe plugins are built with SEO in mind.
Great WordPress recipe plugins:
WP Recipe Maker is our go-to tool for recipe optimization. There are a lot of settings and choices in the plugin, but you don’t have to utilize them all. You do not, however, need to be an expert. The basic default settings will arrange your recipes in the required format for SEO.
A new plugin for food bloggers with several excellent features: Visitors can fill out a recipe submission form on your website. Individuals can propose their recipes. The analytics dashboard allows you to explore the most popular recipes and study their statistics in terms of total likes and ratings. There’s also a floating recipe bar to assist users in preparing meals, social sharing buttons, and extensive documentation to ensure you don’t get lost.
WP Tasty is a paid plugin created by the expert food bloggers at Food Blogger Pro that focuses on establishing the ideal format for your recipe so that it can be found in search.
Mediavine’s Create is a new recipe card tool that we’re also using. This plugin is designed for the new WordPress Gutenberg editor and is completely free. It’s simple to set up and add recipes. It also looks fantastic and integrates seamlessly with WordPress.
Utilize Structured Data
What does structured data entail?
Simply put, structured data is a method of organizing your recipe’s text and layout so that Google can recognize all of its features. Search engines need components like directions, ingredients, nutritional information, video, and photographs to interpret your content. The easier your material is to read for search engines, the more love it will receive.
Structured data appears to be complicated. It is indeed difficult to implement. However, adding structured data to your website has become more accessible. There is no longer any reason to be without it. And the traffic and exposure increase that a structured data setup can provide make it all worthwhile.
One option is to add the code to each page of your website manually. This is the most sanitary method, but it takes time. If you have a virtual assistant, this could be their job.
Using a tool that adds structured data to your material is more manageable than adding code.
There are numerous methods to accomplish this, and it can become pretty confusing, but a decent plugin will take care of the majority of the work.
Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP
You may also utilize recipe plugins like WP Recipe Maker Pro to arrange your information correctly.
To see if your post, recipe, or website adheres to the standards and best practices, use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool.
Update To Voice Search SEO
Voice search is quickly becoming one of the most popular methods for finding information. You’re missing out on a lot of Google traffic if your recipes aren’t voice-optimized.
The results of voice searches are brief. As a result, keeping answers to essential queries short and snappy makes sense. Voice search is a crucial aspect of SEO for culinary blogs.
You may be wondering why you should bother. You say, “Who will read your recipe when they simply want a quick answer?” That is an excellent point. However, by answering various questions, you will earn Google’s trust, and your website will rise in the search results for the necessary keywords.
However, this does not imply that your recipe or article should be limited to one-line replies in 300 words.
Longer material (in general) appears to do better. However, this does not imply that you must produce 10,000-word books. However, it would be best if you endeavored to write as much as you are necessary to address a topic thoroughly. To write what you know about baking rye bread, you might need 2000 words. Don’t stop until you’ve covered everything in that instance. Include a segment at the conclusion with frequently asked questions to catch some of the extra voice search phrases.
Have a Quick Website
Create a quick website or hire someone to do it for you. The Google Search team has been urging website owners to enhance the speed of their sites in recent years (how quickly pages load for the reader). Speed is becoming a significant ranking component.
Said, pages that load slowly do not make the top ten. Websites not in the top ten Google rankings receive extremely few visitors.
Hundreds of factors can affect page download times, but issues with render-blocking JavaScript and CSS are two of the most common. Both of these issues might drastically slow down your website.
W3 Total Cache, a website performance caching plugin, allows you to customize Javascript and CSS files, so they don’t slow down your website. WP Rocket is a popular alternative that is likewise much easier to configure and includes several features that W3 does not.
Another concern with food blogs is the use of large photos. This is an image-heavy specialty. People want to show off their beautiful photography with their culinary masterpieces. However, directly uploading 5MB photographs from your DSLR camera will break your website.
Reduce your photos’ image dimensions and quality to the point where they still look great but don’t consume all of your server bandwidth. Photoshop is more than capable of lowering the size of an image. Check out Pixlr for a free online alternative.
ShortPixel is a WordPress plugin that automatically optimizes your photos for mobile devices and converts them to Webp, the new web standard for fast-loading images.
Mobile phone connections are slower than desktop or laptop connections in the home or workplace. This is especially true for mobile phones that do not connect to a wifi network; people never wait for your recipe to download; that takes ages,
Deal With Your Audience
You will have to deal with two types of audience who prefer the content alone, cut the crap kind, and read into the deep of it with anything your mind pours out into it.
We believe they decide to write about whatever they want (after all, it is their blog!) and can help with SEO.
Long-form content of high quality is valuable and, in many situations, required for success. Food bloggers are distinguished from large recipe collection sites by these personal stories, which benefit search engines like Google. They also give food bloggers the ability to monetize their work by placing advertisements. Sure, no one enjoys promotions, but since most food bloggers provide their recipes for free to anybody on the internet, this is one method for them to be reimbursed for their efforts.
The user experience on your blog is critical. You don’t want people (especially mobile users) to abandon your site due to frustration with seemingly endless scrolling or difficult-to-close popups.
Here are two suggestions for striking the perfect balance:
- If you’ve written a longer-than-usual recipe post, consider including an anchor link that allows impatient users to jump right to the recipe.
- Make sure to evaluate your site’s usability regularly to ensure that your adverts aren’t too invasive or difficult to remove.
Optimized Images are Always SEO Worthy
Food bloggers understand the importance of having amazing photos and images in their recipes more than other people. Nobody wants to read a post with bad pictures. If the photo in Google Search does not represent your blog content, don’t anticipate visitors.
It’s even more crucial to execute Image SEO now that image search is gaining traction thanks to mobile phones and more robust AI.
This is how you do it.
- Make photos that people want to look at and click on.
- To make images load faster, reduce their size (dimensions) and weight (kb). Use a compression plugin to minimize the size of the photographs further.
- Images should have descriptive filenames, descriptions, and Alt Tags.
- Create Pinterest photos to take advantage of Pinterest SEO.
- Make photographs that others will want to share, and make it simple for them to do so (Pinterest pin it plugins are a great way to do this)
Last Words.
Naturally, SEO enhancements do not end there. We can drill down into the details until it becomes complicated. Please get in touch with us if you have any questions concerning SEO for food bloggers or Recipe SEO. We enjoy answering difficult questions. In the comments, please tell us what you think about this article.
Your first Intention was how to write a blog; once you have mastered it, then comes the SEO part you have almost learned by now. To be a complete SEO master, you need to practice using the given information. The more you dedicate your knowledge and practice it, the more you get better output from it.
Some Final Advice On SEO for Food Blogs
- Internal linking always helps you make your audience more pleased as they might get answers to their queries on reading your blog.
- Provide the Audience with Mobile-friendly blogs, too, as they could use your blog anytime, anywhere
- This busy world always needs an easy way to get their content, so make sure you have a video version of your content to help them with information.
- Ascertain that your website has an SSL layer. The use of HTTPS rather than insecure HTTP has become critical. If you don’t follow the recommended web standards, your blog will lose rankings.
- Use a good WordPress theme or get someone to do it for you. Even with a beautiful theme, bringing it to the point where it’s perfectly optimized for your visitors is a lot of work.
The StudioPress Foodie Pro theme and the Astra Theme are two of the most fantastic food-focused themes for 2021. Both themes are updated and maintained to the highest standards regularly.
Still Confused, We are with you. Make sure to get to us.
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