Our customers Anja & Matthias Würfl write an extremely successful food blog. How did they manage that? What can you learn from this for your blog project? And what should you consider when it comes to SEO? Find out more in their guest article for wp unboxed.

Cook a dish, take photos with your cell phone and write a few lines about it. Then place the text and pictures on a website and your first food blog post is ready. Repeat the whole thing two or three times a week on the side after work and in a few months the food blog will really take off. Well, that's not exactly what we thought when we launched "Die Frau am Grill" in the fall of 2018. But we did tend to imagine that setting up and running a food blog would be a little easier...

Wrong thinking. And in some cases even did it wrong. But no reproaches! We were new to the blogging world back then, and terms like keywords, SEO and ranking weren't even foreign to us. We simply didn't know them. The fact that our website still had almost half a million page views last December (2021) is thanks to a number of things: perseverance, time, struggle and money.

So that you don't have to invest the same amount of time, nerves and money, we have summarized a few points for you. This way, you can concentrate on the essentials: great pictures, great texts and then, with enough continuity, success will come all by itself. If we had had this knowledge back in 2017, the number of visitors last December would have been at least twice as high.

Your own food blog - just fun or more?

You should ask yourself this question right at the beginning: are you starting the food blog for fun? Or for fun coupled with the intention of earning money? There really are enough people who have absolutely no monetary intentions with their food blog, I speak from personal experience.

If you only publish your pictures and recipes (with or without additional text) on your food blog, you have a lot less to worry about. We'll take a look at what exactly below. But that doesn't mean that bloggers who are just having fun can stop reading now. Because they will also want to know how best to avoid a hacker attack. But more on that below with a detailed description of the disaster!

The Google universe, explained for beginners

For beginners, like we used to be. Not that we are now certified Google professionals. But I can certainly tell all newcomers a thing or two at this point that will literally bring a blog "forward".

So let's start with an example: Mr. Müller searches Google for tips on the topic of "grilling chicken wings". Naturally, he is shown thematically relevant results on the first page of the search results (in technical jargon "SERPs" for "Search Engine Result Pages"). And Mr. Müller will certainly click on one of the results on the first page.

You can state right away: if your website only ranks on page two of the search results or even further back, it almost doesn't exist for Google. That is a fact. The vast majority of internet searches even end with a click on one of the first three results!

The question of all questions is of course: How do you get there, i.e. to places one to three? Let me tell you in advance: Google does not display the results randomly. An algorithm calculates which website is at the top based on various factors. I have yet to read an article from anyone that lists all the factors, but there is a consensus on a few key ones. And these are also communicated by Google itself. Three very important ranking factors are:

Backlinks

Do many other websites link to my food blog? If so, that's a good sign for Google. At least if the links come from authoritative or prominent sites, for example from other long-established food blogs or news sites. Sites with particularly high authority are, to name a few industry leaders: bild.de, sz.de or spiegel.de.

Of course, you can also buy backlinks these days. For example, backlinks from Russia, some of which are very cheap. But Google is not stupid. Purchased backlinks can lead to a penalty in the ranking. There are countless articles on the subject of backlinks online, including here at wp unboxed. It's worth putting on a pot of tea and spending an afternoon at the weekend reading up on the subject. Preferably right after you have published the first articles on your food blog, not like us - over a year after the start.

Age of the website

Well, the longer something has been on the market, the better it must be, right? That's true in most cases. And the same goes for Google. Because Google first has to build up trust in a website. And if good content is published regularly over months and years, then the search engine knows: aha, I can display this URL of this website a little higher in the search results, because you can trust these people. One of the ways Google measures the quality of your content is by how many visitors stay on a website and for how long.

Core Web Vitals

This ranking factor was only recently introduced. There are also interesting articles on this on the Internet. Nevertheless, I would like to briefly discuss it for newcomers. One of these Web Vitals is, for example, the loading speed. Do visitors have to wait forever for the page to load? Or does it load completely in a fraction of a second? Furthermore: are there many pop-ups that negatively affect user-friendliness? For example, newsletter pop-ups or advertising that disrupts the flow of reading?

In addition: Does the page "float" or can it be scrolled up and down easily, especially in the mobile area? The free Google Search Console, which I strongly recommend you use, will tell you which improvements should be made to your site. And finally, a tip if you work with a lot of images, such as in a food blog: get a plugin that compresses the images right from the start. This saves a lot of data and therefore shortens the loading time.

Keywords and text length

You can create the most amazing and delicious potato soup, have taken the most beautiful pictures but your post doesn't appear in the search results? Well, that may be partly because you haven't written a detailed text about it, but have only published a picture, ingredients and preparation in text form. Google scans all websites in a fraction of a second when you search for "potato soup" - unbelievable, but true.

The search engine not only checks the ranking factors listed above, but also: did you even use the keyword "potato soup" in your post? How often? And in which places? In addition: how long is your text compared to the competing websites? If you're thinking: I'll just write some long text and use the word "potato soup" endlessly, you're on the wrong track. Google is probably not yet ready to recognize the quality of a text 100 percent automatically. But someone else will let Google know: the visitors to your website.

This is because they disappear after a few sentences have been read if the content is not top notch. And Google notices this very well. So: If you've spent enough time on Saturday afternoon with the aforementioned pot of tea dealing with the topic of backlinks, then you know what's coming up on Sunday: an intensive examination of the topic of "keywords" and WordPress SEO. An SEO plugin for your website is very helpful here. For example, the free version of Yoast already offers a lot of support.

Integration of videos

Video is king. This can be seen, for example, in the fact that while Instagram used to upload more image content than video content, video content is now on the rise. Likewise, social platforms such as TikTok are very successful with their video model, not to mention YouTube. Many people want more than just images and text, and Google is increasingly taking this into account in its search results. If you can now enrich your food blog article with video material, such as videos of the dishes, you're in luck.

If this is too much work for you, there are already videos available for many recipes - on YouTube, for example. And you can easily integrate these into your blog post. In other words: Have you made a delicious potato soup? Then take a look on YouTube to see if there is a similar recipe. Copy the video URL and include it in your blog post under the heading "Here's another delicious potato soup recipe in the video". The great thing about it: if the video is viewed on your blog, Google counts this time as part of the dwell time. And the longer people stay, the cooler Google thinks it is...

The right WordPress theme

An endless topic, that of themes. A WordPress theme is practically a prefabricated framework for your website, without content of course. Alternatively, you would have to have a website programmed. Themes are available ready-made for free or at a manageable cost, but having them programmed individually usually costs a lot of money. We have also opted for a theme.

Unfortunately, I can't give you any tips on which one to choose. Because it really is a subjective decision as to how you want to present yourself to the outside world. So the heading above this paragraph is actually not entirely correct, as there is no one right WordPress theme. The same applies here: take a look around the internet. I advise you to look at lots of themes and get to grips with the topic. Changing the theme in WordPress afterwards costs time and money. At least if you are not familiar with the IT behind your website and have to hire someone to do it for you.

Monetization

In German: earning money with the food blog. I wouldn't worry too much about that, at least not at the beginning. The reason: first of all, website visitors have to frequent the site. And that requires good content that is published regularly. Do you want to start with large display ads, set lots of affiliate links and perhaps even look for potential sponsors? All of this distracts you far too much from the important tasks - namely producing good content.

The issue of monetization usually takes care of itself with good food blogs. At least when it comes to sponsors: if the food blog is of high quality and has a wide reach, they will stumble in all by themselves.

Promotion: social media and newsletter

Nowadays, nothing works without advertising for your own business. And it should also be as cheap as possible, right? Then I recommend collecting email addresses right from the start so that you can send your newsletter subscribers the latest recipes once or twice a month.

There are many newsletter tools for WordPress, we use the one from Mailchimp, it's also free up to a certain mailing volume. I can't tell you whether it's the best tool because I don't know the others. In any case, we've been very happy with it so far. With a newsletter, you definitely remind your readers of your blog at regular intervals. And that also ensures more website visits.

The topic of social media is not that simple. As there are so many different platforms, you have to find out for yourself what works best for your content. For example, we have around 20,000 Facebook subscribers and just under 10,000 followers on Instagram. But we get very little traffic from these platforms. Pinterest is a different story. We also got started there much later than on Facebook and Instagram. Here are the website visits from Google Analytics that came to our website via social media platforms in 2021:

Security

This does not mean safety in the kitchen, i.e. not cutting your finger😊. Or, in the case of a BBQ blogger, forgetting to turn off the gas tap after grilling. The security of your website is of fundamental importance. And I'm speaking from personal and very painful experience here, as a glance at the following screenshot will show you:

A rapid increase in visitor numbers can be seen in the middle of the graph. At the beginning of 2020, Google started pushing our posts via Google Discover. The keyword rankings also developed extremely positively. Just at this time, our website was paralyzed by a so-called Japan hack. We were unable to access the backend - our system - for a whole weekend. But the hackers could. And they created thousands (!) of additional spam URLs under our root domain. What a mess!

Our IT specialist was able to restore the original version of our website from the previous week. But Google was not so quick and punished us massively. As you can see, the curve almost plummeted. And you can't rebuild Google's trust as quickly as you lose it.

Therefore: focus on security right from the start. And this has to happen on two sides: firstly on the website, get the right plugins for this. It's definitely worth googling "security plugins for websites" or simply reading this article. You should also make sure that the website host is doing everything possible to ensure security.

Shortly after the hacker attack, we switched to Raidboxes, installed two more plugins and have been surfing through the vastness of the internet with our food blog without any worries ever since...