Are you a food blogger? In simple words, do you love to shoot food videos and run a YouTube Channel? Do you even own your food blogging website where you write food recipes for others to help out in cooking?
Are you doing everything and still not getting the necessary amount of response from your audience? It is time to up your game with the help of SEO tips for food blogging. Here is how you can make your food recipes rank on Google.
Google has redesigned its food recipe results layout many times, from adding a snippet of recipes to providing a swipeable carousel view. The latest change is much similar to its earlier swipeable carousel view. The difference is that it will also mention the rating of the recipe in stars, preparation time, reviews, calorie count, and ingredients required below the thumbnail.
How to enable Google to index your recipes in such a format? Here are some of the ways:
Use Structured Data
The best way to make your recipe Google SERP worthy is to organize the recipe content structurally. It means specifications like cooking time, ingredients, nutritional value, and so on should be mentioned on the top for google to identify your recipe first.
You can make use of a recipe plugin to structure your data accordingly. WordPress plugins like WP Recipe Maker, WP Tasty, and others can get the job done perfectly with minimal effort without requiring any coding knowledge.
Length Of The Recipe
There is a set word limit within which your recipe should be written. A recipe blog should at least be written in 800 to 1200 words depending on the requirement.
However, the key is the description should be understandable and easy to follow. Do not leave the instructions in between just because you have crossed the word limit.
If the recipe instructions are finished way before the word requirement, make sure to give an engaging introduction to the recipe. Entice readers to indulge in reading the full recipe by conveying stories related to the recipe using questions at the start and through other ways.
Use The Right Keywords
Adding the right keywords into your recipe content is how Google bots will find your content and index it.
The basic strategy to find the right keywords is to choose keywords that users would use to search for a particular recipe and then use a keyword rank checker to track their ranks. Use simpler keywords that the user would typically type in the search bar. Accommodate them at the right places in your content, like in the meta tag, description, etc.
Don’t be afraid of using the long-tail keywords as well. Long-tail keywords are preferably used to target Google voice searches. Voice searches are usually longer, and long-tail keywords, therefore, work well for them.
Also, since reputed and big publishers already occupy all the specific keywords and phrases, it is highly unlikely to make your recipe appear on top using the same keywords. However, take a different route like using ‘keto chocolate cake’ or ‘sugar-free chocolate chip cake’ instead of just ‘chocolate cake’ and check keyword rankings to make a big difference.
With the help of SEO tools, you can find the most used keywords to use in your content.
Fast Loading Website
The loading speed of your website matters a lot in ranking higher on the rank checker tool. You should either build a fast-loading website or optimize it later with the help of lazy loading images and other techniques.
The loading speed of a website is also essential to increase the dwelling rate of your website. No visitor would wait for more than a second to load the website. You can also choose to add a preloader option to buy time for the website to load completely. This option helps in keeping the visitor distracted with the help of graphics and quotes.
There are other WordPress plugins and software that helps in increasing the loading speed of your website. Plugins like W3 Total Cache, WP Smush, WP rocket are some of the best ones to use.
Insert Videos
If you already run a YouTube channel and post recipe videos, there is no reason why you can’t embed them to leverage your website as well.
Visual instructions are always the best approach for a user. Adding the YouTube video of your food recipes on your food blogs is the finest way to bring traffic to your website.
There are a plethora of video apps that can be used to shoot videos. However, if you are looking for some additional functionality like SEO optimization, keyword information, and such, here are some of the options: TubeBuddy, OFFEO, InVideo, and VidIQ.
Conclusion
Make sure to follow these tips to rank your recipes on Google. You can use a website rank checker to keep an eye on your website rankings and craft a suitable strategy accordingly.