Food blogging is a competitive niche, and it can be difficult to stand out from the crowd. You need to be sure that you’re doing everything in your power to attract new readers and keep them coming back for more. For that reason, it’s very important to do SEO for food bloggers.
Search engine optimization helps your recipe, food contents rank highly in search results, so you can be easily found by the people most likely to enjoy your recipes or food blogs. The higher you rank, the more traffic you get, and more traffic means more opportunities to grow your readership and generate revenue from advertising and affiliate sales.
If you’re a food blogger and don’t know where to start with FOOD SEO, we’ve got you covered. Below, we’ll share 10 best tips & tricks on SEO for food bloggers for optimizing your food website or blog.
How to SEO for food bloggers
Are you a food blogger trying to get more traffic to your food website? SEO is a great way to get more traffic to your food blog website. It basically refers to what you can do on your site or in your food blog posts to help them show up higher on search results.
But SEO can be overwhelming and confusing, especially for food bloggers. Where do you begin? What should you focus on first? What’s actually worth your time?
1. Find out what keywords to target
Keyword research is a huge part of SEO, so first up, you need to find out which keywords you want to target. The best way to do keyword research is to start by thinking about your audience and what they might be searching for.
If you are just starting your food blog, you probably should not choose a highly competitive keyword with a ton of monthly searches as your primary keyword. It’s best to start with lower-volume keywords that are more specific to your niche and get more targeted traffic from the beginning. Keyword research is an important part of your food SEO, but it’s not the only part.
2. Create content that’s unique
When anyone searches for content on Google, the search engine will rank websites and blog posts according to their content quality. If you want your recipe website to achieve a high ranking, then you need to create compelling and unique content.
SEO for food bloggers is a bit different from SEO for other blogs. Because the search results for recipes are more competitive, and because Google has stated that you need to do a better job of creating unique content, you need to make some changes to your food, and recipe posts.
You will want to create a title tag for your blog post that is under 60 characters. Titles that are too long will get cut off in the search results, and make sure that each page on your site has a unique title tag. Search engines will penalize sites with duplicated content.
If you notice that there are other blogs out there ranking high for the terms you are targeting, check their title tags to see if they have different variations of your keyword phrases. This can help you identify additional keywords that you may want to try targeting.
To effectively boost your blog’s search engine rankings, you need to know what keywords to target. A keyword is a word or phrase that people type into Google or other search engines when they are looking for something on the internet.
So, every blog post should have one H1 tag containing your focus keyword. You can use keywords effectively in H1 tags, sub-headlines, H2 tags, and content. Don’t make the mistake of stuffing too many keywords into one post, you risk being penalized for keyword stuffing and your article won’t be as effective.
5. Be sure to optimize your images
Images are a great way to add visual appeal to your blog, but they can also be a great way to signal search engines on the topic of your post. One of the most important elements of food blogging is the image.
It’s what captures people’s attention and makes them want to click through to the recipe. It also gives you an opportunity to place keywords in your alt tags, captions, title tags, and file names. And images size is more and more important in your food SEO, because low sizes images load very fast, so focus on image sizes.
- Also read: SEO For Travel Websites | 10 Travel SEO Tips
6. Implement structured data markup
Recipe markup is a new form of structured data that enables websites with recipes to be eligible for inclusion in Google’s Recipe View. With this special view, potential readers searching Google can see a summary of information about your recipe, including the image and rating.
When they click on the link, they’ll be taken directly to your recipe, and food post. Be sure to use proper recipe/food markup so that Google understands what type of content is on your page.
7. Create internal links
Internal links are hyperlinks that point at (target) the same domain as the domain that the link exists on (source). In layman’s terms, an internal link is one that points to another page on the same website. They are commonly used in the main navigation, and they are an important part of on-page SEO, so be sure to include them in all new posts, but don’t forget about old posts.
If you’ve created a post about a certain recipe, or food in the past, and you’re creating a new post that relates to it, create an internal link in your new post that points back to the old one. This helps search engines understand the relationship between the two posts and will help both posts rank better in search results.
8. Build dofollow backlinks (off-page SEO)
Backlinks are the backbone of a successful blog. They are one of the most important factors that determine how well your website ranks on search engines. In fact, if you link out to high-quality authoritative sites, like government or educational sites (such as .gov or .edu), search engines will reward you for it.
Dofollow links help Google understand what sites are relevant for certain keywords. If many high-quality sites are linking to yours, it will be ranked higher in search results. This is why link building is such an important part of any good SEO strategy.
- Also read: 40 FREE Dofollow Guest Posting Sites List
9. Optimize page loading speed (desktop & mobile)
Actually, page speed is only one piece of the puzzle, but it’s an important one. When it comes to search engine optimization (SEO), it’s all about content, right? Not so fast. In many ways, the technical aspects of your site can have a significant impact on how well your website ranks.
A series of recent Google algorithm updates, known as the “Speed Update,” has made this even more apparent. The Speed Update awards higher rankings to pages that load faster than their rivals, so if you want to stay competitive in Google’s search results, you need to pay close attention to how fast your pages load. Read it if you want to increase website speed.
Share your food blog posts and website on social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube. Your social media audience can be a great source of traffic if you learn how to promote your blog in a way that encourages readers to click through and visit your website instead of just reading and scrolling away.
The best way to do this is by sharing a compelling headline with an image and then linking that headline directly back to your blog post. When social media followers click through, they’re sent directly back to your website, where they can read the rest of your content in its entirety.
Bottom line
If you’re a food blogger, good SEO can help you build a loyal following, create passive income and become an influencer in your niche. But it’s not as easy as just writing a bunch of food blog posts. You need to do keyword research, optimize each post, and then promote your content on social media or through email marketing.
