FBP Rewind: How to Increase Your Organic Traffic with Keyword Research with Aleka Shunk

This episode is sponsored by Clarity. Here's the thing. We know that food blogging is a competitive industry, so anything you can do to level up your content can really give you an edge. By fixing content issues and filling content gaps, you can make your good content even better. And wouldn't it be awesome if you could figure out how to optimize your existing blog posts without needing to comb through each and every post one by one? Or I know some of you have done this. Create a mega Excel sheet with manually added details for each post that's soon to be outdated anyway. That's why we created Clarity to save you time, simplify the process and make it easy. So with a subscription to Clarity, you can clearly see where your content needs to be optimized. Like which of your posts have broken links or missing alt text. Maybe there's no internal links or what needs to be updated seasonally. Plus, you can easily see the impact of your edits in the keyword dashboard for each post. Here's a quick little testimonial from Laura and Sarah from WanderCooks. They said with GA4 becoming increasingly difficult to use, Clarity has been a game changer for streamlining our data analytics and blog post performance process. That's awesome. That's why we built it. And it's so fun to hear from users like Laura and Sarah. So as a listener of the Food Blogger Pro Podcast, you can sign up and get get 50% off your first month of clarity. To set up your account, simply go to Clarity. That's C L A r I t I.com food that's clarity.com food thanks again to Clarity for sponsoring this episode.

Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro Podcast. For those who celebrate, we want to wish you a Merry Christmas Eve and we hope that you are listening to this week's podcast episode curled up by a fire with a nice cup of peppermint hot cocoa. We know that this is a holiday week for many people and so we are rewinding it back with this week's podcast episode. We call these our Food Blogger Pro Rewind Episodes because we love to take this opportunity every year to highlight some of our favorite episodes from the last few years that seem to really resonate with listeners. This week's episode is with one of our Food Blogger Pro experts, it's Aleka Shunk and she is here to talk all about increasing your organic traffic with keyword research. If you missed this episode the first time around, now is Your moment to listen to it. There are so many great takeaways from this episode that will transform the way you think about keyword research. It is really a can't miss episode. Now I'm going to let Bjork introduce the episode and kick us off.

Hey, everybody.

Excited for you to be tuning into this podcast episode.

We're going to be talking about all things keywords. And for those of you who are.

Like, I kind of know what it.

Is, but why is it important? How can I be doing it? What's the best software? We're going to cover it all. We're going to try and cover both the basics, what it is, why it's important, how you can strategically think about keywords as it relates to the content you're including. And we're going to be covering some of the more advanced things, even kind of the, the, the different philosophies around keyword research. And in trying to figure out how you can balance inspirational content with strategic content. And for those of us who hate the idea of keywords and just love creating content, what are some ways that you can really lean into both the strategy, but also not let go of the inspiration? And for those of you who love to geek out and keyword research is your thing and it's the sweet spot for you, and that is your art. We're going to be talking about how you can. Well, the purpose of all of this, the reason that we are having these conversations is because we want to help you figure out how you can do your craft better. In this case, we speak to people who publish content online. It could be a blog, but oftentimes we are talking to people about social media, we're talking to people about business strategy. We try and cover it all, but all in the food space. And the conversation today with Aleka Shank from Cooking with Keywords, that's her course, but she's also a blogger and she's going to be talking about how she approaches keywords research from a blogging perspective.

At Leka's Get Together, we're going to.

Be talking about that. We're going to be covering this idea of keyword research and what it is, why it's important, how you can be using it, whether SEO is the number one thing that you're thinking about and trying to do, or if it's a compliment to something else that you're focusing on. All of us will be able to take away different pieces from this interview and apply them to our business. I know it was true for me as I had this conversation with Aleka. There was a lot of inspiration that came out of it for me and learning as well. So let's go ahead and jump into this interview. Aleka, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you so much for having me. I am so excited to be here. I've listened to Food Blogger Pro podcast for the last five years and it's what got me started in the first place with blogging. So I'm so excited to be here and I feel like I kind of checked off a box of my bucket list being here.

Totally one of my favorite things for doing this. As long as we have which five years, it's like, you know, there's some podcasts that started out 10 years ago where it was like super early and you know, we were kind of right in the middle when people started talking about doing podcasts, why it would be an important thing. But, but we've continued to do it. And I think that's the one thing. If you've got podcasting stats, it's like, you know, I'm making this up. 80% of stats are made up on the spot. This is one of them. But, you know, it's like, it's, it's a high double digit percentage of podcast. Make it like three episodes and then they, you know, fizzle out of yourself. So the reason I say that, though, is because one of the things that's really fun about having done something for five years and done something in the space of like working with other business owners or creators is I feel like five years, like three, four, five years is the mark when you, it kind of gets to the point where you can actually do something substantial, you can learn something, you can start to work on it, you can get traction, and then you can get to the point where you are, where you're coming on because you've developed an expertise, you've developed a skill, and it's probably in the category of kind of that 10,000 hours. Malcolm Gladwell talks about that, where you've, you've been able to dedicate a lot of time, a lot of energy, a lot of learning around a skill, and now you're able to come on and teach other people about that and also have a successful business in that space. So what did that look like for you when you were starting in that early stage five years ago, listening to the podcast and now where you are now, what that transition look like and what were you doing at that time five years ago?

Yeah, so I think a lot of bloggers, including myself, can agree that we start off blogging thinking, or I should say food blogging thinking that all of our recipes are going to get seen right away and they're better than everybody's and we're going to be the exception and we're going to get all this traffic immediately, which completely didn't happen. I think that's the norm. But it takes like a year or so for you to realize that your recipes are not going to rank on their own. They take some work and there's strategy behind it. And you know, for the first year I wasn't seeing much success at all. And I think it took me at least two years, if not three, to really get completely comfortable with keywords. The first, I think it was two years in, I was stuck at about 10,000 monthly sessions. And I know we're not supposed to compare, but I would always compare to other bloggers and I would think I'm so behind, but I think that's more normal. But I knew that at that point, going on to the three year mark, I wanted more success. My goal was to make money off of it, which I feel like everybody's goal eventually is, and to make it my full time job. So I started to take it a little bit more seriously and really focus specifically on keywords because I'm not a huge blogger. And I feel like that is something that smaller bloggers, those that start off, have complete control over, unlike backlinks to an extent and other things involved. So only a little bit control. But keywords, if you know what you're doing and you have the right strategies, you can really outrank a lot of other bloggers. I was like, I'm going to take this little piece of SEO and I'm going to run with it and learn everything I can about it.

Yeah, it's, it's one thing that's great about that. It actually ties into a question. We have a Food Blogger Pro Podcast Facebook group. So if anybody's interested in joining, you can just Google foodblocker Pro podcast and then you'll see that group. You have to, I think you have to apply. I don't know what it's called on Facebook, but people, yeah, request. Thank you. But one of the things that we use that for is like to get questions from people who listen to the podcast because otherwise it's just me asking for my perspective. Which works out okay some of the time, but other times I forget perspectives from other people. And one of the questions from Sunila Cammie, she says tied into this, how can smaller bloggers use keyword research to their advantage. And she says, what you talked about here, we know that food blogging is very competitive. There are already plenty of big food bloggers in the food niches that occupy the coveted top spots in Google. So you already kind of addressed that. But can you talk about, number one, what is a keyword? We're going to start basic. And then number two, what is keyword research? This is a three part question, which is a terrible interviewing tactic. But number three, why is it important for people in the early stages, who might be beginner bloggers, to think strategically about keyword research?

Okay, I'll try to remember all those questions. So first, what is a keyword? And it's so funny you say that or you ask that because that's, you know, you think you know what a keyword is. I talk about it in the course, like right away, off, off the bat in my intro. Because no matter how long you've been blogging, sometimes you, you don't, you assume things and you don't really know or you're afraid to ask simple questions like that. So you come, you don't want to come across like, you know, there's no stupid questions. What is the keyword? It's, it's what users type in Google. It's a query. It's and, and it's something that took me a long time to figure out. It can be more than one word. Even though keyword is singular, a keyword could be two, three, four words together. So that's something that took me a little bit to understand. And it's something that, you know, it's very important because the ultimate search engine, Google, is what people use every day, multiple times a day. And it's how our recipes are going to be organically found by typing in these queries, how you know these keywords. What was the second question? See, I forgot.

So keywords, basically anytime that somebody's going in and searching something, so a keyword could be, it could be blueberry muffins. It could be how to make blueberry muffins. It could be best blueberry muffins. It could be healthy blueberry muffins. Right. We could go on and on and on. To your point, it's a little bit confusing because it sounds singular, but really it's a query that people are typing in to get a result and to draw the full picture as publishers. One of the strategies, one of the main strategies is figuring out how we can rank for a specific keyword. And that being, it's Free to get that traffic. And so if for every person that visits, you can make one penny and you get 1,000 people to visit, then you've made $10 and so or a thousand page views, however the numbers you want to use. So you can start to play the numbers game a little bit if you're monetizing the ads, if you have a product, you know, it's even better because you might get more money or more revenue when somebody visits. So we understand keyword, it's kind of keyword, it's queries, essentially something that somebody searches using what we're going to assume to be Google in a search engine. So then the second part of the question is keyword research. So yeah, we know what a keyword is. What does it mean to like research a keyword?

Yeah. So basically keyword research, I mean, it's kind of hard to talk about that without talking about a tool because that's where we would keyword research. Starting off, I just use Google itself to do research. And fortunately Google does provide certain things to help kind of give you an idea of what people are searching for. Right. So you as a user, if you're typing in a keyword like pizza, it's going to, Google is going to recommend keywords or other links, URLs, recipes related to that because they want to serve you as best as possible. So when I started off, I used Google itself to kind of search what other keywords or what keywords are most likely search. If you're not targeting highly searched keywords, you're not doing it right. You know, a lot of people say, well, I'm ranking in a top position for this such and such keyword. But if that keyword isn't, if nobody's searching it and the volume's not there, there's really no point. Right.

So do you have an example.

Yeah. An example of a keyword that. Yeah. One of many of my recipes when I started off I have, yeah. My creamed corn biscuits. I talk about that in the course. Creamed corn biscuits. Right. I loved creamed corn. It was like a Thanksgiving side dish recipe. But starting off my, my blog was just all bite sized food, all finger foods. And I'm like, how can I make creamed corn finger food? Right. So I threw it in a little biscuit cup and I called it that. Nobody's searching for that ever. Right. So nobody found it unless I directed them to it using, you know, social media. But organically, forget about it. You know, maybe I can rank for, you know, creamed Corn, but that would be on the eighth page of Google. No one's ever going to find it. So there's. And if you type in creamed corn biscuit cups, there I am at the top. But that means nothing because nobody's searching. Right?

Yeah.

So I think that's important to understand the difference between ranking in a top position for something that's actually searched versus something that's not searched at all.

Yeah. And that, that's kind of. And maybe we'll, we'll get here with the next question is maybe a good lead in. But that kind of becomes this complicated in between then because it's like I could create a recipe called Bjork's Favorite Peanut Butter Pickle Sandwich. But if only 30 people are searching that month, like one person a day in the entire U.S. let's say, or globally, one person searching that a day, it's not going to really make a meaningful impact. But then if you go to the other end and you are trying to rank for chocolate chip cookies, like there are so many people searching for that and so many sites that are really well established. So you have to like, my understanding is like you have to kind of land somewhere in the middle. Then is that then where third part of the question, keyword research, comes in?

Yeah, for sure, for sure. Like we, you know, the goal is to rank, you know, put yourself in a position to rank for a recipe as quickly as possible with the most search volume, with the least competition. Right. That's like the three things you look for really. The two things, low search or low competition, high search volume. I think we all know that if you know anything about keywords, I think that's pretty obvious, but really targeting something that's not so competitive and really focusing. And I know we've heard the term long tail keyword many times before, but it's basically targeting a keyword that's not so specific, not a little bit more, not so broad, something that will increase your chances of being found. So, and I talk about in the course, you know, using modifiers and you know, creating the perfect, really crafting the perfect title tag because I think that is so often overlooked every word in your H1 and your title is super important and should be used strategically and not just thrown in there carelessly. So I think that's super something that a lot of bloggers initially, I know I did. I just kind of crafted the title that I thought was. Sounded good and was clever. Right. I didn't really focus on, you know, any strategy or, you know, any thought behind it. So.

So a couple of things that you said there that I think would be good to point out. First, modifier. So can you talk about what a modifier is and maybe give an example of what that is?

So like pizza recipe with mushrooms, right? The modifier can be like with mushrooms or it can be homemade pizza recipe. So basically extra keywords that are not necessarily your target received keyword, but you're creating that longer tail keyword by adding these modifiers or extra keywords onto it. You know what I'm saying? So like homemade recipe with mushrooms, the modifiers will be like homemade or with mushrooms or something like that.

That makes sense. And so the idea is that let's say you're just starting out, maybe it's year one, maybe it's year two, and you're doing a pizza recipe. One of the things you could do is you could say, hey, that would be really awesome if I could rank for any time that somebody searched pizza recipe. Because you'd get thousands of people visiting your site. But what I hear you saying is you could do that, but you'd probably need to be a super established site, right? Like New York Times is probably the number one, you know, or a site like that. And so you need to think strategically and say, if I can't rank for that, how do I rank for something that still might get traffic and it still might be the same recipe, But I'm kind of focusing a little bit more by adding a modifier. So if it was a pizza recipe, for me, my favorite is pineapple pizza, right? So like, and also probably long long tail in that there's not as many people doing pineapple or pineapple pizza as like pepperoni pizza. And so you would add a modifier and there'd be less people searching for it, but also less competition. So the other things that you had mentioned that relate to that are being really intentionally you said with your H and your title tag. So can you talk about what those are, why that's also important when you're thinking about keywords?

Sure.

Well, your title tag is basically the result that comes up in the SERPs in Google on the pages. That's what shows up.

SERPs being just as a real quick explainer search engine result page.

Yep, yep, search engine results. So the results that Google's providing all the pages. So and then your type, your H1 is your actual recipe title, which shows up on your post itself. And usually they're the same. A while ago, I would encourage people to kind of tweak Your title tag a bit to entice people to click on your recipe by adding certain words, which sometimes works, sometimes doesn't. But keep them as similar as possible. But crafting it so that. And you have to think about things like the title tag. I think it's like 60 characters. They give you. You don't want it to cut off. Especially if it's an important keyword that people are looking for. If you cut off the pineapple on your pizza, people don't see that they're not going to click. So trying to keep it short and sweet but still add those long term keywords and make it the perfect length. And targeting the perfect keywords is important.

Can you talk a little bit about adding in the items that encourage people to click? Because I think that's a little tip that not as many people know about. And is that something that you do? Is that something that you see a lot of other people doing?

Yeah, it is.

How do you do that in a way where it separates from the blog post versus a search result?

So it's something that I do occasionally when I feel like it's super necessary and maybe I feel like something that will make it pop from the other results. The other 10 results on the first page. It does. For example, a word like the best. Right. Well first of all, better make sure it's the best. Right. I don't want to just throw this into every recipe title but that obviously if I'm the user I'm going to probably click on the best pizza recipe as opposed to just a general pizza recipe. It's going to make me more interested in that. Easy, quick, from scratch, five minute. Those are like those, you know, those keywords that are going to really make your result pop, stand out. And I usually will. We'll examine all the results on the first page first and the titles and see not. And I don't want it to look, blend in and look just like everyone else's. So that's usually the cases where I will add a word or something to my title tag. Yeah.

It reminds me of in the early days when I was figuring out what does it look like to be an entrepreneur. I would wholesale shoes from Chicago. So I'd like get shoes shipped up and then would list them on ebay and then ebay you'd have to pay additional for like putting a little star by it or like getting it bold or like to change the result in a way that looks. Yeah. And the nice thing is with this it's you can do that and it's free. Like, you can. If you're intentional about adding some of those things to your title tag, then it might encourage people to click, which obviously is a great thing because more people are then coming to your site. So are you doing that with Yoast? And how do you do that in a way where it doesn't also update your blog post? Because the title in your. The H1, like the blog post title wouldn't include that. But what I hear you saying is the title would. Is that right?

Yeah, I don't want to. Like, I know that this is something that it's something recently that we're encouraged as bloggers to keep the title tag in H1 as closely related as possible. Right. But if we were to change it and add a word or something, then. And if you're not a food blogger, I feel like with Food Blogger, it gets a little bit tricky. But even if you're not a food blogger, something that you can take advantage of, the Yoast plugin on the bottom gives you the opportunity to change it right in that bottom window under the above, the meta description, and you can easily just, you know, change it there, and it will not affect your H1 at all. But more recently, I've been thinking, you know, if I'm going to add quick and easy in my title tag, most of the time, I'll just throw that in my H1 too. They're really, what's the difference? You know, so. Yeah.

Yeah, that makes sense. Cool. All of those are love, kind of the little tips, the tricks, and I think those are the things where, if you add those up over time, if you think strategically about how you're titling something, if you look at other search results and see what are other people saying, how are they structuring things? If you do keyword research and find, like, hey, here's something that has the potential to have a decent amount of traffic and isn't super competitive. All of those things add up over time. And the one thing we haven't really dug into yet, which is kind of the sweet spot of this interview, is the actual keyword research process. So what does that look like?

Like, do you brainstorm once a month.

All the different recipes you could create and then go in and research ones and try and find ones that are, you know, in your sweet spot? Like, how do you go about doing keyword research? What is it and how do you do it?

Yeah, so do I do it in advance? I wish I was that organized. I do not. I literally will keyword research words every day just because I I love doing it. And if I find a keyword, just if I and I randomly come across them every day, I'll search it up quickly and see if it's something I'm going to add to my and I do have an ongoing list, then I do it every day. But you don't have to. You can do it in monthly increments because I know it takes time to do quality, thorough, deep keyword research should take you a couple hours. And I feel like people don't and it does depend the recipe. Some recipes are a little bit more to the point and you don't need to dig that deep. If there's more variations of the keyword, then you definitely want to spend time looking through it. So what I would do is say talk about how there's three phases of keyword research. The first phase is like the best phase to research that is from scratch. When you don't have any recipe idea in mind, you're kind of just starting with a clean slate and you're, you know, kind of, you have a wider net to cast of keywords and you can kind of target whatever you want according to your niche and you kind of go from there and you can, you know, do your research ahead of time and collectively write down all of the keywords that come up for maybe you start with a chicken recipe and you notice that these keywords keep popping up or this cooking method keeps popping up, or this flavor, this, you know, something keeps popping up in your or this ingredient and you're writing it down and then afterwards you kind of craft and put together. It's so much easier to target that way because you're not held back or restrained by a recipe. Whereas in phase two is what I call it is after you already have a recipe. So it could be a recipe that you've been making for your family over the last few weeks or one that's been passed down and you want to share it with your users. And in that case, that phase is a little bit harder to keyword research after the fact that the recipe is already developed and you already have a set ingredients and cooking method. I mean, if it say it's a chicken Marsala recipe when it's delicious and you definitely know you want to share it, what direction are we going to just target chicken Marsala? Because I'm sure that's super competitive. If you're a larger blogger, maybe you can rank for it, but definitely not if you're starting off so it's kind of harder to tweak the title and your keywords when a recipe is already developed. So that's not the ideal phase to be in, but it's still possible. You can kind of maybe research certain cooking methods and if you happen to do it in a cast iron skillet and that looks like a keyword that is highly searched for that recipe, you can throw that in your title and it happened coincidentally, it worked out that way. And then the third phase is the worst phase to be in, but it's not, you know, still possible to do research that's after your recipe is already published and on your site and has been sitting there. Then you have to think about, well, I have to go back and update it and I realized it's not really ranking for any keywords. So how can I update it and optimize it to target a better keyword? Do I need to change the entire post? Do I need to delete it and just start over? Do I need to just tweak the recipe title a bit? Do I need to add some more sub sections or maybe some other questions addressed to better optimize for another keyword that I originally didn't think of? And that's definitely the hardest. And something that a lot of people ask me about when I do my coaching sessions is we kind of go through all those older posts and think about, well, what's worth updating? How can we update it? Is it even possible to update this and target any keyword then? If not, then we go in a different direction. So that's really the ideal process or phase is the first phase from scratch. And when I do that, I use the keyword research tool. It's a must. If you're not using a tool, you should definitely consider investing in one. There's keysearch out there which is I think $30 a month, very, you know, very manageable. It's not super expensive like the other ones are. You know, don't buy some Starbucks coffees for a couple of days and you can afford that. It's not, you know, it's not going to break the budget and it's very user friendly and just a must when you're keyword researching. So you kind of use that and get an idea of, you know, the competition level. And if it's really worth going after and use Google, always use the actual results to comp and see if it's actually worth it. Because I think we kind of rely too much on keyword research tools. Although, and I'm on it every day I'm on multiple tools. It's super helpful. It should not be the end all be all for deciding whether you should target a keyword because it's just a machine. It's just going to tell you things based on numbers. You are going to be the best person to evaluate whether that keyword is worth targeting. And you can see if you know the recipes are meeting user intent, if they're helpful, if they're optimized, well, which, the tool doesn't do that. So I think a lot of people kind of just look at a score and they're like, oh, there's no way I'm gonna be able to rank for this keyword. And you do a little bit deeper research and you actually read what's on the first page and you're like, oh, this is not, this is just because they have say a high domain authority, does it mean I'm not going to be able to outrank them?

So yeah, that's. So you mentioned tools and I think that would be one thing that people would be really interested in hearing about. You mentioned key search as one kind of a lower cost entry level, one that can do the job. What are the other ones? Just so people know kind of the lay of the land and if you'd be like, if you could like rank order them or just like, are they all pretty similar in terms of what you'd need? Is one kind of like, you know, a Lexus and the other is like a Ford Focus. What, what is the landscape of actual tools that you'd use?

So there are so many tools, some free, some paid. And I literally break this down in my course. The free tools, the paid tools, and I do a side by side comparison and a chart and tell you what the pros and cons and what I like from each tool. So because I think that's super important to understand before you invest in a tool, what it's going to offer you and what's going to be the best one. The most popular and the most used are going to be key search, Semrush and Ahrefs Keywords Everywhere is also a tool that a lot of people use, which is an extension and is pretty reliable. But I feel like it's not as popular. It doesn't give you as much as the other tools do. I use a extension keyword surfer that also helps and it's free. While you're on Google, just give you a quick idea of what you're kind of, you know, an approximate search volume and those are really the Top four that I talk about in my course. Well, really, just those three. Yeah, yeah.

And then can you talk about data as it relates to those tools? Because I think one thing that I found to be true for myself as I started to just get more into the world of all things online was I had this belief around, like, all data being accurate. And I think especially in this world, you start to realize, like, oh, this is incomplete data. And you kind of reference that a little bit by saying, like, you need to, like, check and look on your own to verify when you search that keyword, what does that look like? How does it. What are the results like? So how do.

To the extent that, you know, how.

Do these tools get this data? How much do you trust it? And. And what should publishers have in mind when they think about using a keyword? Research as it relates to the accuracy of the data? Well.

What'S recommended is KeySearch, because apparently it does use Google APIs, which is basically an interface that talks with Google and gives a little bit more, just more knowledge and more accuracy directly from Google. I think Keywords Everywhere also uses APIs. But from my experience, I've seen across, you know, compared to SEMrush and Ahrefs and KeySearch, which I've used them all and compared just. Just because out of curiosity, they're pretty close most of the time to each other. So I haven't seen a huge difference in those.

Sure.

Yeah.

You.

You had asked about.

Yeah, Just even I think that addresses it, like, is one considered more premium than the other. And the nice thing about a tool like key search is, you know, it's created with, I think, like, solopreneurs in mind a little bit more. Whereas, like, the Semrush. I think semrush is like a public company.

Yeah.

And it's so. It's like more enterprise y in terms of its pricing. It's like, you know, a department that would not blink at spending $500. Whereas if you're early in your blogging, like, you probably don't want to pay $500 for a tool.

Yeah. But with that said, and I agree, I think when you start off, you have a small budget and you need to kind of, you know, invest wisely. But I do think if you really want to bring your keyword research game to the next level and you're serious about this whole blogging thing, SEMrush and Ahrefs are 100% worth the money, in my opinion. They can do so much more quicker, give you so many More. They have so many more features. My favorite thing is really very often research a competitor. So if KeySearch says, you know, you can maybe rank for this keyword, I will check out and this gives me an approximate volume. I will check out the top results, really the first or second result in Google for that keyword, and then pop that URL into like an Ahrefs or SEMrush and see what traffic they're actually getting, what keywords they're actually ranking for. And those tools are. And you can do this in Keyword Explorer as well in Key Search, but it doesn't give you as much information as Ahrefs and SEM. It's really awesome. It can tell you your keyword history and if you're trending upward and on the right track. Because a lot of us wonder, should we update a post? We're not getting traffic. Where does it lie in the SERPs? Is it ready to update? All of us are so anxious to update posts. But sometimes if you see that keyword history chart just going up like a roller coaster, just hold off a little bit longer. Because sometimes it takes takes longer than 12 months or so, which is usually the recommended time to wait before updating, and it's on its way up. And Ahrefs allow SEMrush. KeySearch is starting to allow things like that as well. But I find they're not as user friendly as the more expensive tools. So I do love them. And if you can afford that, you definitely want to. And even if you can't afford it for 12 months straight, I encourage people to just buy one month subscription and do as much keyword research in that month as you can and then you can cancel it. At least you'll get a good amount of knowledge, you know, or information from.

That kind of batch. It.

Yeah.

And, and to be clear, the, the, those tools aren't actually the default isn't like $500 a month. It would be more like the more expensive plans. I think they're like, I'm looking at Semrush and It looks like 120. Yeah, 119.

Yeah.

And I think Ahrefs is similar and to your point, come with more features and functionality and whatnot. So how about this is more of less technical, but just a curiosity. So you know, in this world, people are doing similar things like publishing content on a blog on social media, but they're all coming to the table with different skills and interests. And I think for some people, the idea of keyword research is in, in their Sweet spot. They love the idea of doing that. Finding something that ranks well or has the potential to rank well. Spending time creating a recipe around that and seeing it perform well. Like, I have friends who. Not in this niche, but they love that. That's what they do. They kind of like, if they could just spend all day in ahrefs, they would. And then there's people who. On the other side, who it's like, please know, like, what I want to be doing is I want to be in the kitchen.

Yeah.

Working on a recipe that is inspired by a meal that I had when I was traveling in Italy last week. And I just want to create that recipe and not do keyword research against that.

Yeah.

You have advice for the people who would fall in that ladder, camp around, like, inspired creation. How can they still do that? To not give up on the thing that gives them joy, but to still be smart about it from a strategy perspective?

That's a great question. When I started food blogging, I would literally lay asleep or awake in bed at night just thinking of all the different recipe creation possibilities. And once I realized that those ideas weren't being found and that keyword research kind of sucks the inspiration out of us a bit. It was a little bit disheartening and kind of made me a little bit sad about the whole idea of food blogging. I really have to strategize. Why can't I just publish everything and anything that I want? Why can't I be creative? But that's the reality of it. We are competing with so many other people, so many other blogs, so many other websites, and this is the way it is. So do you have to sacrifice all creativity, inspiration? No, for sure, definitely not. But think about maybe doing a balance. You know, I still create and share recipes that I truly love, even though I know that there's not much volume out there. I will be honest. I rarely create a recipe that has zero search volume. Sure, I will somehow try to get in some type of keyword and there are ways around it. If you're doing the right research, you can still share that amazing nostalgic recipe that you had when you were a child and still target certain keywords that you just have to do the right research. And even if it involves maybe throwing one extra ingredient in or maybe cooking on the grill as opposed to in a skillet, or using an instant pot as opposed to, like this, you know, Dutch oven, certain things just to tweak it, just so you get the traffic. It's completely worth it. And that Motivation is going to keep you going if the inspiration is not always there. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, I think it's. I think that idea of balance is a great one where you're not maybe necessarily doing things that are a hundred percent inspiration and you're also not doing things that are a hundred percent search, unless you are somebody who loves that process doing keyword research and creating content around that. I think the other thing that's important to point out is it's like, what game are you trying to play? And if you're trying to play the game of search engine optimization, but you don't love the process of optimizing for search, then as a creator, it's probably worth looking at a different game to play or strategy if you want to say that there's lots of different ways that you can be successful as a creator online. Like, I see a lot of incredible, artistic, wonderful creators doing substack and, and they, and their, their strategy is they know that they have followers, they know that they don't want to play the game of search and try and outrank. And so what they do is they say, I'm going to speak to my creators or my followers and create in a way that feels like really organic. And it's an email. You don't have to optimize an email for search. So I think it's an important thing to point out as we as creators think about what is our best path. And if we're like, our only path is search, you know, I think it's, it's, it's important that we remember, like, there's lots of different ways that you can play the game.

Yeah.

Search obviously is a really important one. People talk about it a lot in this niche, but lots of other avenues to explore as well.

It's also important to point out that, you know, there are recipes that will get, will go viral or get a lot of traffic on other social media like Pinterest and those. It's funny because the more unique you are on Pinterest, the more successful I found. So it just, you know, it all depends if you really like a recipe. It could. I've had recipes that zero keyword, but Pinterest traffic is still. Even though Pinterest stinks right now, I think the traffic is still is coming from those pins. So it's not like, you know, and then if you do publish a recipe that you really like and you had zero keyword research done, you can analyze what keywords Google thinks is good for that recipe. And is in matching user intent. And you can kind of work off of that. And when you update it the next time, tweak it according to what Google is ranking you for.

Can you talk about user intent? What does that mean?

So that's basically, and it's so tricky because with recipes and this is the biggest confusion when it comes to food bloggers and the probably the most common question I've had in regards to like, you know, certain recipes and ranking and updating, it's basically, you know, creating what the user is looking for and what they're expecting if you're not giving the user. So if you're not giving the user what exactly they want or are searching, they're not going to click on your recipe or they're not going to spend a lot of time on your recipe. So the dwell time will be super low. Right. And you can check that in Google Analytics if you want, but that's a sign that it's not matching the right intent. Meaning if say somebody is searching meatball sandwich and you're not using maybe you're using maybe frozen meatballs and they don't want frozen, they want homemade meatballs or from scratch and you can kind of compare with the other recipes on the first page and if it's not matching up, you're going to fall in the rankings. And I see this so often, especially with like dietary niches and vegan, vegetarian, gluten free niches all the time where users will think or bloggers will think that they have the right keyword down but they're, they're not realizing that somebody may be ranking for what was one of the. I was working with somebody one on one a few months ago and the keyword was so specific and they basically took two modifiers or two long tail keywords and put it together. And I said, well, people may be looking for gluten free scones with blueberries, but are they? Well that was a bad example. The idea is that the user needs to know what to expect and if you're not giving them what they expect, it's not going to be found. Right. You got to make sure both keywords together are being found. Yes, they may be searching for, you know, this type of recipe, this type of muffin gluten free, but are they searching for gluten free pistachio scones? Do you know what I'm saying? Like pistachio scone recipe could have a super high search volume. But if gluten free pistachio scone recipe doesn't have a high search volume, the users are not going to be staying on the result, and Google's going to push you down.

Sure.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, it's almost like, you know, I think a lot of times come back to this core foundational piece of, like, what we're trying to do and what Google's trying to do. And what Google's trying to do, what any good search engine is trying to do is successfully match a search term to a result that's going to be the most helpful in our world. It's like, how do we give people the best recipe? Or, you know, maybe it's like a food process. Like, how do we give them the best explainer for how to make tofu?

Yeah.

And that's what Google's trying to do. And I think sometimes we get lost as publishers by thinking about what does Google want? But that's what Google wants is like, how to best serve the piece of content that is going to fulfill the intent of what the user is searching. And I think if we can keep that at the front of our minds, you can layer that with like technical best practice around search, which is important. It's foundational. But I think that is like an explanation of user intent. You know, to your point of like, hey, give the. Give somebody what they're looking for. And if you are going after a keyword just because you see it's really good, but then the content that you're serving doesn't match that, then Google is going to, through whatever means figure out, like, this actually isn't.

Even though you're, Even though you're saying this is.

By all the technical things you're doing, that this is the keyword when it comes to it, that's not actually what that person needs or what they're finding helpful. And what I hear you saying is in those scenarios that will be impacted by your ranking being pushed down or not as profound as possible.

Yeah, I use the results. I mean, Google tells you what it wants, right? Just look at the results on the first page and get an idea of what other bloggers are offering. If they're, if they're offering most of the recipe cooked in the oven and yours isn't in the oven, yours is maybe in the air fryer. Maybe that's not what users are going to like because either they don't have an air fryer or they weren't planning on that. So certain things like that, I think is often overlooked by a lot of bloggers, especially in the food niche, that it's just it's right there and it's free information. So take your time and analyze all of those. All the competition.

That's great. So Chelsea from the Facebook group asks, when should I be worried about competing with my own recipes? For example, if I'm trying to rank for blueberry muffins, shooting myself in the foot for also making a lemon blueberry muffin recipe.

Oh, boy. So that's. That's a great question. I feel like something that I used to always, you know, kind of get confused because we're encouraged, I feel like, to keep doing similar things. So I think we think in the food blogging, similar recipes. Right. But that's not necessarily true. I mean, lemon blueberry muffins and blueberry muffins are very similar. But if you think about it and keep in mind that our recipes are going to rank for the same keywords, many of our recipes, and it's inevitable, and that's okay to happen when it happens, but it's important that our target keywords are not competing with the other target keywords. Right. So lemon blueberry muffins. We could be ranking for blueberry muffins with lemon lemon blueberry muffins. Blueberry muffins. Just blueberry muffins, lemon without the width. So different variations of that keyword, and they all could have high search volume. And most of the time, your blueberry muffin recipe won't rank for lemon because that's a key ingredient. You can see the results on Google are going to be all blueberry muffins, no lemon. And the results for lemon blueberry muffins will be most likely all lemon blueberry muffins. So there's so much competition out there that Google's not going to rank your blueberry muffin recipe for lemon, because it's not. It's a. You're targeting an entirely different keyword, even though the recipe is similar. So to answer her question, I wouldn't be so concerned. It's very difficult to kind of compete unless it's super similar. But just to be safe, I probably wouldn't do or create a recipe that similar just because there's gonna. There's bound to be other smaller volume keywords like homemade muffins that essentially you could rank. Both recipes could rank for that keyword or moist muffins or from scratch muffins. Right. I mean, both. So do you want those keywords to compete? They could, and usually we don't want that to happen. So it depends on the recipe. I haven't found it to be much of an issue, but it is something that you have to keep in mind when you can control it. Try to make them a little bit more, a little bit more different than that.

Yeah, that makes sense. Like variety is probably going to be a good thing.

Yeah.

Compared to something that is so close. Like you don't want to do 10 iterations of blueberry muffins unless they're. No, probably not drastically different. So let's say that somebody comes to you and they say, I've never done any of this. I don't know where to start. Obviously your course, which you can talk about, is going to be super helpful in walking people through that. But just at a high level, where would you say the outline of how people can navigate next steps for starting to like, dip their toe into keyword research and start to learn a little bit? What would the outline of kind of those next steps be?

So I think there's. Other than purchasing a tool, you know, key search, we can start off with that. Get to learn and know the tool as best as you can and become an expert at the tool. Because a lot of us will use the tool and we won't. We'll only use one feature over and over again. But there's so many things and the tools are constantly being updated with new features that you're not, you're never going to be able to be an expert in keyword research or anything if you're not really fully learning it to its fullest, you know, capabilities. So. And I am going to create a course on just like Ahrefs and Semrush because I feel like those two tools are super competitive or super complicated and you almost need some guidance with that. But know the tool that you use and then it's important to once you have and you only, you kind of learn by doing and learn from your own rankings and your own blog. Once you have recipes that have been up and you think that you're doing a good job, keyword research, go back and revisit them and check out your traffic on Google Analytics and see if, if it's worth what you're getting. Check out your keywords, what you're ranking for. And I think a lot of us, the most important thing, a lot of us will be satisfied with ranking on the first page of a mediocre keyword that brings us decent traffic. But we fail to pursue that top highest volume keyword and it's kind of sitting like on the second page and we don't even know, say it's in the 11th spot. So it's at the top of the second page, and we don't even know it's there because we don't analyze and track our keywords, which I talk about in my second course. It's so important and something that a lot of people don't just. I don't know if they don't think it's worth it or they don't know how to do it, but it's so important because if that keyword is hanging out in the 11th spot, it's so close to being on the first page. And once it's on the first page now, it's going to start getting exposure and hopefully move up. And you can do things like push it out, maybe promote it on Pinterest or push it out to social more or update it a little bit or add more links to it to kind of just give it a little boost. And that is really the keyword that you should be. Don't give up until that keyword is in the top spot on Google. Don't be satisfied with just ranking mediocre keywords.

And I think that's where the strategy piece comes in. And if you are thinking strategically and even if you just layer in, if it's not the kind of thing you're super excited about doing, but, hey, you're going to get your favorite drink and sit down at Starbucks and look at, like, what piece of content is on the second page of Google for a keyword, and simply going through that process once a month, you're going to be able to save a lot of energy around generating traffic by thinking strategically how you can move that from the second page to the first page. I think that's a great point. And one of the ways that you could use those tools to say, like, hey, where. Where is this sitting right now? When I look at where. Where rankings are and. And how do I, you know, strategically, then, yeah, lift that ranking. And that could be an entirely different podcast episode around all the strategies rather.

Than strategies with that mindlessly updating. Mindlessly. That's not a word. Aimlessly.

I combine my own work, which I'm sure we can relate to, feeling like we're blindlessly working sometimes.

Oh, my gosh. But yeah, rather than just doing it with no, you know, strategy behind, it's.

It's.

You're wasting your time, essentially. So, yeah, that's great.

So you had mentioned your course a couple of times. Are there places that. Or there are places. Where are the places that people can check those out? You Know if they want to dive deep on this, how do they do that? Would love for you to be able to give kind of a promo on that so people can find that.

Yeah, for sure. So I offer Cooking with keywords is basically the umbrella of the school. So I have a keyword research course that I launched, you know, a year and a half ago that really is for beginner bloggers, advanced bloggers, you know, everyone in between. It's like my master course on keyword research and that you can find that on my blog. There's a link directly to the teachable site. And then I have my second course that I launched this year on rank tracking and analyzing keywords, which I think is like a nice segue from the first course. After you've been kind of established for a year or so, I think that course would really be perfect for you because like we said, you have to know where your rankings are sitting or else you're kind of, you know, putting your effort into posts that really aren't worth it. And then I also offer coaching, one on one, you know, to kind of go and go through your keywords one at a time and see what's worth putting effort in, what keywords may need a little tweaking, what keywords really are not doing it for you, and if user intent is being matched, all of that. So all that can be found at, on my website@alekasgettogether.com Great.

And we'll link to it in the show notes as well. Aleka, so great to chat with you. Thanks for all the information. Really appreciate it.

It was so great to be here. Thank you guys so much. And reach out if you have any question.

Hey there. This is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team. We hope you enjoyed that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Thank you so much for listening and tuning in today I wanted to chat a little bit more about one of the perks of the Food Blogger Pro membership. If you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you likely already know about these, but maybe you're a new member or you're thinking about becoming a member. And I just wanted to let you know about one of my favorite things in the membership. Every month we host a live Q and A over zoom with an industry expert and usually Bjork. They chat about topics ranging from republishing content to Google Algorithm updates, Pinterest or advanced SEO. Sometimes we'll do an ask Bjork anything or even questions about creating content plugins. Site speed, really. We cover every topic you might need to know something about as a Food Creator. As a Food Blogger Pro member, you're given the option to submit questions in advance or you can submit questions during the live Q and A and the guest and Bjork will answer your questions and provide feedback. It's always a really awesome opportunity to get advice and feedback from experts in the Food Creator community and it's just a really fun way to connect as members and get to know each other better. These Q&As are hosted live, but we always post replays on our site and for our members only podcast if you can't make it live. So anyways, it's just a really great feature of the Food Blogger Pro membership. If you aren't yet a member and this sounds like something you would like access to, head to foodbloggerpro.com membership to learn more. And that's it for this week. We'll see you back here next week for another episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Make it a great week.

Sam.