Food Blogging FM 007: The Art Of Good Keyword Research

Food Blogging FM 007:

The Art Of Good Keyword Research Brought To You By: RecipeThis.com

Introduction Welcome to our seventh food blogging Podcast.

There is a lot of different information out there when it comes to keyword research.

One blogger will tell you to do it one way and then another will tell you to it do it the other.

So if you are new to keyword research you are likely to be left bewildered with all the different information that is available to you.

What I am going to be sharing with you in today’s Podcast is what I have personally found that really works.

You need to have a system in place with your keyword research so that you can increase your SEO positions quickly and easily. Just by making a few simple changes to the way that you choose titles for blog posts can result in you doubling your traffic each and every month.

Just think of the potential the 5 minutes that this takes per week to do on your traffic!

A Simple Tool Is All It Takes What you have to think of first is having a simple tool to do the magic for you. Back in my early SEO days I used Wordtracker at the time I had a whole range of niche sites from golf to wedding planning and it was important that keyword research was done and it was done good.

Wordtracker was the big one as it offered unbiased information unlike Google which was tailored towards selling Adwords so it wasn’t something you really wanted to get involved in.

I can’t remember the exact amount of searches you got with it, but you could do some excellent research and then work out what you wanted as your blog title.

But then things changed and they started to charge for the service. Plus their charges were really expensive for the little extras you got, so I would occasionally sign up for the free trial and then cancel before payment. But realistically I was looking for something good for the long term.

That is when I started using the tool at SEOBook.com which is a free tool and gives you everything you need.

When you sign up for a free account have a play with it and do a few different searches.

What you need to pay attention of is the keyword choices and then the daily search volume.

You want to be targeting a search volume of 10 or higher and never go below that as the search volume will be rubbish.

Also never go for the top result as everyone else will be. And if you can aim for what we call a long tail keyword.

A long tail keyword generally means that you have a long phrase as a keyword rather than a short phrase. So you might consider chicken curry to be a short keyword and how to cook chicken curry as a long tail keyword. Also because everyone is targeting chicken curry it is very easy to rank for the longer version.

So once you have finished playing with it among the different recipes you have done or want to do let’s crack on with using it for real.

Your Next Recipe So let’s say you use this for your next recipe rather than letting personal choice do the work for you. My next plan is to do a chicken curry in my favourite pan as part of my April month on one pot cooking.

In all honesty I would probably aim for a keyword such as: How to make a chicken curry in 20 minutes Or something similar that gets the point across. I also want to focus on the chicken korma because I am a wimp when it comes to spices. I put in chicken korma and only the top two search results have enough traffic:  Chicken korma  Chicken korma recipe Then the next stage is to open up those keyword results in Google search.

When you do this you need to make sure you are NOT logged into Google otherwise it will give results based on your browser history and not based on the general searches of others.

What you are looking for here is the lower the search results number as possible. So when it shows about ……..results below the search bar and above the results it actually means something.

You want to avoid any kind of keywords that has a number that is greater than 2 million. As that means there are more than 2 million pages competing for the front page.

In an ideal world you want your result to be in the top million and even better if you can find results that are in the top 250,000. I have in the past ranked for keywords in the top 25,000 so they do exist, it is just pot luck whether or not you will come across one or not.

Also when you do your search inside SEO Tool if you click on the US under the Google column it will open the search results in a new window for you and it will save you manually searching for it.

So I have decided to go with “chicken korma recipe” as my keyword. It gets 76 daily searches and has a competition level of 494,000 on Google.com so it ticks all the boxes.

Then all you would have to do is add some foodie bits to it and you have your title.

You could have:          

Chicken korma recipe Easy chicken korma recipe Chicken korma recipe (in just 20 minutes) One pot chicken korma recipe Chicken korma recipe with bombay potatoes The best ever chicken korma recipe Lazy 20 minute chicken korma recipe Chicken korma recipe with wild rice Chicken korma recipe served with cauliflower rice Healthy chicken korma recipe

So there you have 10 different suggestions. But do you know which one is best and which one is the worst? Well if your overall target is SEO and you don’t care about anything else then the secret is to have your keyword at the beginning of the title. So the five with the keyword at the beginning would be the best choice.

Secondly you want to be thinking about social media. For the best social media results you want a catchy title that people would want to keep for later and would want to try out. In which case the best ever chicken korma recipe would have their attention.

Because my theme for the month is one pot cooking that is cooked in 30 minutes or less the one I have gone with is: Chicken korma recipe (in just 20 minutes) Or if you are completely out of recipe ideas you can also search by your niche. So if you have a grain free blog you could search by “flourless” and then it will give you loads of different ideas. Can you believe that 1324 people per day search for flourless chocolate cake. I wonder if they ever found a solution?

Our Podcast Sponsor For this week our Podcast sponsor is the SEO Tool that we use for our keyword research. I don’t mind paying for a tool but for something like this I would not want to pay more than $12 a month. So when other companies want to charge you $25 a month and don’t offer much more than the free service at SEO Tool you can see why this free one is a great thing.

Also I love the fact you can click straight through for the Google competition of the keyword and to check out which of the big boys are ranking for the keyword.

Going SEO Rich

The next thing you need to think of is to make sure that your content that you produce is SEO friendly and ready for a hit by the search engines.

You need to tick a few boxes. They are not hard and once you get into a routine you will do it without even thinking about it.

Your simple list is:         

The keyword must be at the beginning of the title The keyword must feature in the permalink The keyword is in the opening sentence One of the mentions of the keyword in the post will be in either bold, italic or underlined Overall your blog post will mention the keyword three times or more The content will be at least 500 words Your title, first sentence and main keywords will be copied and pasted into the all in one SEO plugin or Yoast (depending what you use) Use similar keywords from Google for keyword selection Name your images after your keyword The permalink is easy because Wordpress does this automatically for you, so as long as the title features the keyword you can achieve the permalink.

If you notice on a lot of food blogs (including mine) the opening sentence will have the

recipe name in it which is all about SEO. It is important that your content is at least 500 words as Google gives priority to good quality long content with posts over 1000 words doing incredibly well.

When choosing keywords to go with your main one we suggest that firstly you go after the related searches at the bottom of Google and then secondly you think of other similar things you would search for. Or for plan C you could go after the SEO tool results that are further down the list and have less traffic.

By naming your image after your keyword you are helping with your SEO not only will you appear in the Google image searches but you will also get great SEO links when your images are shared on social media.

In the old day’s people would keyword stuff and have about 50 mentions of a keyword in an article. It reads very badly and Google hates it so PLEASE don’t do it!

If you go to our blog you can download the transcript to go with this Podcast where we have links to some our SEO blog posts which will help you get your head around the info above.

Food Blogging Q & A Each Podcast I pick a question that has been asked on one of the Facebook Groups and then answer it for you. For this session I was asked how to find out how popular your website is and how to take something popular and repeat it.

For this I use BuzzSumo.com the good thing is that it gives you the top 5 results for free so that you are not stuck with paying for expensive software. As it does cost $100 a month to pay for it.

But basically you can put your site url in or a name of a recipe that you want to research and it will tell you how many shares that recipe or website has had. So you can see which is your most popular recipe so that you can rinse and repeat.

From looking at it I can see (well at the time of recording) that my most popular recipe is “the ultimate airfryer burgers” with over 407 total shares. However this doesn’t count Tumblr and Yummly so in reality we are really over the 500 mark.

Now to follow the rinse and repeat model I can say that this post is popular because airfryer followers tend to be healthy and to get a healthy burger recipe ticks all the boxes.

You could then expand on this if you liked and have turkey burgers, copycat Big Mac, veggie burgers and a whole range of other similar things.

And I find that using a site like this can work as a fantastic research tool!

Round Up! Thanks for joining us in our Podcast and we look forward to sharing more of our food blogging wisdom with you in the future.

Links & Resources Mentioned In This Podcast     

SEO Tool Buzz Sumo The Ultimate Airfryer Burgers The Three Stages To Completing SEO On Every Blog Post Food Blogging SEO: The Secret SEO Strategy That You Must Follow On Your Food Blog  Tumblr  Yummly

How To Get Involved In Our Podcasts Our Podcasts are easily accessible no matter how you prefer to access them. You can download them as a PDF from our blog by going to recipe this dot com and visiting the Podcasts category. This is also very good for getting the links to material that is mentioned in the Podcast.

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Thanks again for listening and best of luck with your food blog.

Samantha & Dominic Milner http://recipethis.com And don’t forget to connect with us on social media:    

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