Optimizing SEO for Food Bloggers: A Guide to Boost Your Online Visibility

Optimizing your website for search engines can be one of the best and most consistent way of gaining traffic to your blog, and this especially applies to cooking and food blogs. When people are looking for recipes online, Google is often the tool of preference, and that's why it is important to rank high on the search engine results.

While cooking blogs can still follow a lot of the rules of SEO that also apply to most other blogs (like technical SEO and off-page SEO), there are some principles and techniques you can use in order to leverage the food blogging niche. This article will go through some of the most important food blog SEO fundamentals and tricks.

Use structured data

A lot of SEO for food blogs comes down to using structured data. Structured data (or rich snippets) is a way to provide Google with specific data that is important for a specific page or website. Google will use this data to display highlighted and better results to users when they land on the search result page.

Rich snippets for cooking blogs

For food blogs, one of the most important types of structured data is the Recipe model that can make your recipe show additional elements on search engine results, for example an image, ratings and cooking time.

As cooking blogs consist of mostly recipes, having good recipe SEO is crucial and getting featured on Google as a rich snippet will make your posts more visible and likely to get clicked on. Users can also gain an overview of the recipe before they even land on your page.

How to make recipe structured data

Structured data is applied to a page by either including an HTML script with JSON+LD structured data (recommended by Google) or by including Microdata attributes on the HTML elements that hold the appropriate data for the rich snippet.

Structured data for a recipe on chocolate chip cookies would for example look like this:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
    "@context": "https://schema.org/",
    "@type": "Recipe",
    "name": "Chocolate Chip Cookies",
    "image": [
    "https://example.com/photos/cookies.jpg",
    ],
    "author": {
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Lars Salling"
    },
    "datePublished": "2023-03-04"
}
</script>

Google will find this element and use it when displaying your search result.

While there exist structured data generators and other tools for creating your own rich snippets, having to manually update and manage structured data on your website's pages can quickly become tedious which is why a lot of people use plugins and SEO integrations that automatically syncs the structured data with your blog posts. If you use Wasabee for your cooking blog, your recipes and blog posts are automatically published with rich snippets built-in.

Focus on internal linking

Internal linking is a way to create more context and connections between different pages on your website. This makes it easier for search engines to understand the content of your blog and can have a possitive effect on your overall SEO profile.

Internal link best practices

The links you create between your pages and recipes still need to make sense in order for search engine crawlers to make sense of your content. If you are for example writing a recipe on how to a specific christmas dish, it can be a good idea to provide links throughout the recipe to other related dishes that could go well with the current recipe.

Having tags or categories displayed on your recipe pages can also be a good way to create context throughout your site.

Write content for your recipes

An important aspect of SEO for food bloggers is to create content that get picked up by Google. Writing some background information and providing context to the recipes that you feature on your cooking blog can be a good way to incorporate some keywords that might be picked up by search engines which will let your content rank better. The content you provide for your recipes should still be relevant for the recipe and you need to be careful not to discourage visitors from finding the actual recipe or confusing them.

It can be a good idea to do some research on what keywords for food and recipes match best for your content.

It is often a good idea to provide a "scroll to recipe" button that allows users to skip the text content in order to go straight to the recipe at hand. Visitors that are interested in some of the background information will have the freedom to read it all through before proceeding to the recipe.

Provide eye-catching meta information and page titles

The page title and meta description of your recipe pages are crucial in catching the attention of people using search engines. Try to be creative with your titles and create short and concise descriptions that entices users to click on your recipes. Just like with structured data mentioned in previous chapters, the page title and meta description is often managed by installing SEO plugins which makes handling page information much easier. This is also already a built-in feature in Wasabee that both allows automatic or custom meta information.

Find food related keywords

While not exclusive to food blogs in general, it is a good idea to analyse potential keywords that you can include in your blog content in order to make your recipes and blog posts easier to rank on search engines. In order to find SEO keywords for food blogs, you can use a service such as Semrush in order to find both short- and long-tail keywords that might be related and appropriate for your recipe.