How Emma Duckworth Doubled Her Pageviews by Focusing on SEO | The Food Blogger Pro Podcast

So you could see, okay, you had this period where you were like starting and you knew that you wanted to get to this point. It was kind of the nine month mark. And then you started to see traction. You started to get sponsorships or working with brands to do their content. March 2020 hits. That all goes away. But as that door is closing, the cookbook door opens. So you're hanging out in the cookbook room for a while. You get that all taken care of. The room is complete. You shut that door and now you're standing in the hallway and you're like, what door do I open next?

Precisely right. Precisely right. And that was the. And it was the. The realization that suddenly, yes, I've got time now, so to speak. The client work is not coming in as much as it was before COVID hit. Where else can I put my focus on? And for me, that was the blog. I knew that people were earning from this.

Yep.

It's a, it's. There's so much time taken.

Yeah.

And, and cost as well. Running it.

Sure. Yeah.

As inefficiently as I was doing it that there is so much that take out. Takes out of you to. To create the blog post and the recipes.

Yeah. I think people don't realize how much goes into it a lot of times. Yeah. I mean, we all do. Everybody who listens to this podcast does, but.

Yeah, exactly. But there's general public don't. But. And I just knew that either I'm going to just transition this to a portfolio website and it's pure imagery, or I'm going to make this work. So it's another one of those. Right. Ever.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Pretty. When I want to do something, I'll either, you know, I'll go for gold on it. So it was a very much a. I need to learn how to do this. Either I can YouTube it, I can google it, or I can look for someone who can help me. I can. Part of my belief is that you have to invest.

Yeah.

To educate yourself if you want to do it with any form of speed.

Yep.

So otherwise you could be, you know, willy nilly youtubing or googling or. But they're not putting the pieces in the right order. So.

Yep. So what did that look like for you and what were the areas that you focused on right away? Um, you had photography down. But you know what, what were the things that you're trying to figure out?

SEO. The whole package of SEO. I had absolutely zero idea. So. So I was looking to do a course in SEO And I'd actually spoken to a blogger friend of mine and said, what's this course like? I really need to knuckle down on this to get this blog up and running. I want it to be successful. And she said it was Ari from well Seasoned Studio. She said, okay, stop, stop, stop. Don't sign up to anything. I have this friend Icicle who runs Foolproof Living. She's an SEO guru. She's been doing this for years and she's just starting to look for someone that she can mentor and sort of impart her knowledge on. Yeah, let me connect you guys and take it from there and then you can decide. So I said I had a chat on Zoom and. And I sort of. I took a leap of faith. And she took a leap of faith in me because she wasn't set up. It was sort of her hand a little bit quicker than she might have wanted to do it. Yeah, we get on. Let's do it. Let's work it out. Let's do it together. And so we sort of entered a three month mentorship which. And that looked like three hour calls a week for 12 weeks.

Yeah.

And we went into everything.

Yeah, tell, tell us about it. What were the things that you feel like were most helpful? And we'll link to her familiar with ICE in the, in the work that she does. We'll link to her site. Yeah. What, what do you feel like you learned knowing that you were coming in, knowing the term SEO, but not much around it. And also can you share, like where you were at and maybe where you ended up as you kind of went through the process with your site?

So, so at that point I was. So my blog was at about 65 posts. Had about 65 posts on there. So very small number. And I was at about 18,000 page views. Sessions by Shift Fluke.

Yep, sure. Having content on the world and people coming across it. Yeah, yeah.

Complete luck mostly. Actually being driven by social. So not by Pinterest, not by keywords. I had no idea. Keywords? What?

Right, right, right.

And so we started at the beginning. We started with my avatar of who's the blog for? What are you talking to Emma. And you know, that was quite a. Really have to step back, realign myself, really think, what am I doing? Where am I going with this?

And what did you land on?

It's a blog for. Well, we got down to specifics, like, sure. Type of person. So.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Family woman. She likes to bake. She's from America but lives in Europe, so it loves the Sort of European edge. She loves easy weeknight baking for her kids during the week to bake after school for the kids. And then on weekends she likes to stretch her wings a little bit.

Sure. More time and yeah.

More advanced recipes.

And do you imagine like when you're writing content is one of the things you do imagine writing for that person?

Yes, I do. Now it's hard. We'll go into it but at the minute just purely re. Optimizing all the old posts and republishing, just going through all the old content because it's so thin. So now would I choose the content that I've got on there? Maybe not sure because I didn't know about it beforehand before putting it on there. I was very much. Which is the worst thing you can do, isn't it, for a blog? I was very much creating for me.

Sure.

Pretty. All the different things are pretty. I was doing it for me and yeah.

Yeah, it's a. I think it's a simple concept that's really hard to actually implement, which is, you know, on this podcast, for example, I think the best podcast interviews are when I think about what are other people maybe thinking about and try and ask those questions versus I think it's okay if I just ask questions that I'm curious about, but if I start to think about who are the people that I know listen to this podcast and when they're listening to this, what are some of the questions that they might ask, that's when I feel like podcasts are at their best similar with content. Who are the people that are going to be reading this and what are the things that they're going to be most needing or wanting to read?

Yeah, yeah, precisely. So we, we started from ground zero. We. We tore apart my blog. What needs to change? You know, I wasn't on. I was using Foodie Pro, but I wasn't on Feast Design Plugin. My head in the sand when that came out. Yeah, yeah, that was out. So I had to shift that and restructure the blog a little bit. And the category.

What were the. What were the things so familiar. Skyler. And you know, folks will see them in the Food Blogger Pro membership forums occasionally. They do great work at Feast. What were some of the things that you liked about the Feast plugin and what were some of the changes you made from a site structure perspective?

It's super easy to. Not easy. I'm not technical. Right. This is where I struggle the technical side of things. But I managed. I got about 80% there of doing it by myself on a. What you call it, staging site. And then I just need a little 20% of help from a web developer just to make those changes. It was the homepage is obviously now on the modern homepage and the sidebar. So putting more content on the homepage because before it was just the latest recipes, which is common for newer bloggers, just to put archives.

Sure, sure.

Whereas now you've really got to, you know, I taught me it's putting as much as you can on there in a very structured way, but with links and so your different categories, your best. Your best posts on their seasonal content. And then what else did we do? Just looking at the categories that I had split up and linking recipes on the little intro and the categories.

Sure.

Yeah. We just really looked into everything on the website and what performing posts were because I didn't know. Another Google Analytics. Yeah, Search console.

Yeah. And. And when you found out the posts that were performing well, what did you do? Like, what was it with those that you said? Great, I know this now. Do you like email folks about those? Do you link back to them more? Do you try and create similar things that are a little bit different? Like what was the strategy around? Because it's like one thing to know, but then it's another thing to know and then actually do something with it. Was there something that happened out of it?

Yeah, definitely. I mean she taught me about, you know, your content buckets. You take your, your posts that are doing well and we. What else can you create around those posts to be able to lift that one up and lift the other posts as well. So the rising tide lifts all ships. It's our mentality. So that's why we're really focused on me re optimizing all the old blog posts and updating them rather than keep putting out.

Yeah.

Continuing to put out new stuff when weighted posts that will keep me down. So I look forward to when I've finished optimizing all the posts to then be able to create the content that I know will lift. Because a lot of my how to posts, they're the ones that see the how to make this cottage. How to make sweet short crust baked making rich dough. Those ones are the ones that are really how to make scones, plain scones. They seem to be the ones that are doing super well. So it's leaning into that and going, okay, well let's build on that.

Yeah. And how can you kind of create content around those? Or maybe you have specific recipes that are kind of one off or maybe it's supporting recipes. It's almost like a kind of a hub and spoke mentality where you have a hub of something that's kind of pillar content. That's pretty significant, performing well, building things around that to kind of support it. Maybe those supporting pages also do well. But it's kind of like you're becoming an expert on a certain category of really niche baking or a niche type of recipe.

Yeah, exactly. So there's, I mean, there's. You can. I've got a notebook full of ideas of posting on what to do.

Yeah.

In the future.

Right, right. But for the time being, optimizing and improving. Yes.

So that's, that's very much our strategy for the time being is getting the. All the old blog posts optimized. Keyword research, you know, we learned. I learned all about that.

Sure.

Email marketing, Pinterest.

Yeah.

A free ebook on there to try and test people to sign up and subscribe.

That makes sense. What is the, what is the tool that you use for keyword research?

Key search.

Okay. And then can you talk a little bit about how that works, like what you've discovered in that process in regards to keyword research and things you've learned?

Yeah, sure. It's what I've learned is finding the keywords that you can, you can, you can create content around that is not so high up on the difficulty level. So you're trying to hit the long tail keywords instead of saying chocolate chip cookie. You know, the competition is too high. So much volume around that that I'm never going to be able to compete with everyone else. But if you, I don't know, for example, brown butter or chocolate chip cookies, then suddenly the search volume is still there.

Yeah.

But the difficulty is not so high. So.

Right.

You can, the aim is obviously to rank on the first page.

An idea being you can go a little bit more long tail.

Yeah.

For something that's a little bit more niche, maybe there's not going to be as many, you know, searches for chocolate chip cookies with like Hershey's Kisses, for example, like, but you'll, there won't be as competitive and so you'll be able to potentially rank higher and get traffic and over time you can probably start to level up those keywords and get.

A little like, you can go from.

So what did that process look like and what was the traction you were able to get in terms of kind of building from the starting point of kind of not really thinking about search, having 60 recipes, having a little bit of traction? Were you Able to see results in terms of like search picking up and actually getting traction along the way.

Yeah, it took about six weeks, two months because at the same time my husband and I. So I finished my mentorship with ICE and then my husband and I opened up a street coffee business.

Cool.

So that then took up time and so it was like, oh, finished mentorship. But I can't get into it just yet. So I sort of had to park it a little bit or so. Six weeks, uh, and then it was like, right, no need to get back into this. And. And then it was about six weeks later where I started to see the numbers slowly tick up. I was like, is this just enough? And it'll go back down again and, you know, happen. And it keeps dropping, going out, dropping.

Yeah.

But so now it's. I would say I've re upped. I've updated about 25% of the blog now. So not masses. Still got a lot to go, but it does. Most of them need reshooting. So I do process images and all of them. So yep, it's a full workaround. Pretty much starting from scratch again with them, but sure.

But starting to see traction in the payoff from that work.

100%. So end of April, I was around 19,000 page views April, May, whereas now I'm at 42.

So it's doubled. Yes.

Yeah, yep.

And that comes from not even publishing new content, just looking at old content.

There's a couple of new content.

Sure.

On there, but maybe I'd say five.

Yep.

So nothing. Certainly not one a week type thing. So. And like, you know, it takes. For me, I find it. It's a long process to write blog posts. I don't know how people turn. Turn out one a day.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It applies logic to me for sure. Yeah.

And I think, I think there's something to be said about producing less that's higher quality as opposed to trying to get more.

Yeah, yeah.