#6 SEO for Food Bloggers: Being Successful in an Incredible Competitive Space

Links from the Episode

Mentioned in the show

• Cup and Leaf [8:00]
• Blogspot [12:19]
• Moz [17:00]
• Ahrefs [17:07]
• Hashtag Jeff [17:30]
• Build your own content machine [17:58]
• Dr. Axe [22:07]
• Austin Brawner [23:02]
• Ecommerce Influencer podcast with Nat Eliason [23:02]
• All Recipes [25:07]
• Epicurious [25:04]
• The Kitchn [25:05]
• The Food Network [25:06]
• Parks and Recreation [38:50]

Articles mentioned

• Grow Your Pinterest: The 10 Best Practices for Growth in 2019 [32:50]

Show Topics

1:50 – Nora’s role inside Growth Machine and what she has to do to run her recipes blog on the side. SEO and search traffic.

3:19  – How much traffic is the blog doing now. What are the biggest sources of traffic. Steady and seasonal traffic from Google and Pinterest.

5:13 – Seasonality and blog visitors. People’s behaviour related to weather and new year’s resolutions. “New Year New Me”. Impact on healthy focused sites. Why Nora started focusing in SEO. The seasons with most traffic baking or special occasions type of content. Cup & Leaf example. 

9:45 – What were the motivations to start a blog about baking cakes. Stress baking, or blogging to release stress during business school. People asking for recipes, almost the same story for every food blog. Complementing with professional food photography. Health issues that forced to change her diet. Knowing the purpose and niching down. Keyword research. Online courses. Community in food blogging. 

16:16 – How to find the most useful SEO information. Google the specific questions and look for patterns in the most reliable sites (Moz and Ahrefs blogs). The courses Nora highly recommends for bloggers (Hashtag Jeff and Growth Machine free course). 

18:39 – Breaking down A Clean Bake visitors analytics. The problem with Medical content and how Nora avoided being hit by the Google Medical Update. How GM clients and others were hit by the Medical Update.

24:26 – SEO changes to the food and recipe space in the last few years. How competitiveness has changed really drastically and quickly in the last 5 years. Now it’s very difficult to rank, you’re competing with bloggers and content machines with entire teams creating content, optimizing pages, creating videos. Google Updates on food blogs.

27:21 – The correlation between Pinterest and Google performance. Traffic as ranking factor. Value in terms of traffic from Pinterest and Instagram. Topics that do well on Pinterest: food, lifestyle, travel, fashion. What food bloggers should prioritize.

32:42 – How do you start on Pinterest. Prioritization. Mistakes food related bloggers do. Portrait vs landscape pictures for food pictures. How to optimize for food porn. Passion is not enough. If you are not treating it as work, you’re not going anywhere. Finding your purpose. 80/20 planning for food bloggers. "Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing." 

40:07 – Find Nora at her site A Clean Bake, e-mail her at nora@acleanbake.com or follow her on instagram at @nora_acleanbake.

Nora and Nat are planning a Q&A episode about SEO, content, marketing, and everything related. So don’t forget to send your questions to nat@growthmachine.com or nora@growthmachine.com!

Go to growthmachinepodcast.com/freecourse to get the 7 part, in-depth series about building a blog to success. Go to growthmachinepodcast.com and subscribe for future episodes. Look for growthmachinepodcast.com on iTunes and Stitcher. If you are enjoying the show, leave a review!

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