{"id":4342,"date":"2020-03-21T04:38:32","date_gmt":"2020-03-21T04:38:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/foodiedigital.com\/?p=4342"},"modified":"2023-09-02T15:37:30","modified_gmt":"2023-09-02T15:37:30","slug":"food-blog-seo-isnt-magic-a-qa-with-liane-walker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/foodiedigital.com\/food-blog-seo-isnt-magic-a-qa-with-liane-walker\/","title":{"rendered":"Food blog SEO isn’t magic: A Q&A with Liane Walker"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Readers, hello! We’re sharing a fun Q&A with Foodie Digital member Ali Stafford of Alexandra’s Kitchen<\/a>. This post originally ran on Ali’s food blog on January 9, 2020<\/a>. Lots of gems and takeaways here\u2014enjoy<\/em>! Comments and questions welcome.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ali: It\u2019s been years since I\u2019ve talked about the \u201cblogging\u201d process here, but in the interest of helping any food bloggers out there, I\u2019m sharing something different today: a Q&A with one of the co-founders of Foodie Digital, a company I\u2019ve been working with for a little over a year now. As I reflect on 2019, I realize the biggest mistake I\u2019ve made as a food blogger is this: Not getting help sooner.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I love cooking, photographing, and writing, which was what food blogging was 13 years ago, when I started. Today, it\u2019s so different; there\u2019s so much more: social media, SEO (search engine optimization<\/a>), email, to name a few. Outsourcing work is an investment, yes, but it\u2019s foolish to think you can do it all yourself or, I should say, to think you can do it all well yourself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Foodie Digital focuses on WordPress support and SEO for food bloggers<\/a>, and before I was introduced to them at the end of 2018, if you asked me if I thought I needed SEO help, I would have said: what\u2019s that? I was clueless. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Before we dive in, let\u2019s start from the top \u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My Introduction to Foodie Digital<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Ali: A little over a year ago, an old friend put me in touch with a woman, Liane Walker<\/a>, who was in the early phases of a tech start-up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We chatted, and while the conversation was nice, I hung up the phone thinking we would never speak again. At that point, I had been blogging for 12 years, and I felt I could mostly handle my blogging responsibilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a thank you for my time, Liane took a peek into my google analytics, then gave me a few simple tasks I could do to 7 of my posts, which she said were performing well, but which she thought could be performing better.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I made the suggested changes, which included things like edits to body copy, to blog post titles, and to the meta description (a field I mostly had neglected). And while change didn\u2019t happen overnight, within a month or so, I noticed a considerable difference in how these posts were performing. One of these posts, in fact, has since become one of the biggest drivers of organic traffic to my blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Upon seeing this change, I signed up immediately to work with Foodie Digital. And as soon as I did, I realized how poor of a handle I had on my blogging \u201cresponsibilities.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My site, in fact, was kind of a mess: it was filled with broken links and unnecessary plugins; it had a messy, unfriendly organizational structure and it was slow (to name just a few of the issues). Foodie Digital\u2019s work began here, tackling all of these technical issues. When they felt the site was structurally sound, we began the SEO repair work by targeting the high-impact opportunities first (i.e. posts receiving the most traffic). This work was followed by manageable monthly assignments, which I still do today: every month I \u201crepair\u201d 5 posts, posts the Foodie Digital team sees potential in based on analytics\/performance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the start, Liane has emphasized this idea: \u201cIt\u2019s not woo-woo. If you do the work, things will happen, and it might be a slow-burn, but it will work.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A year later, I can tell you this: it works. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

My organic traffic has more than doubled in one year; my pageviews have reached an all-time high.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Q&A With Foodie Digital\u2019s Liane Walker<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Ali: Can you give people a quick background on your story? How did you get into this? Why food blogs in particular?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Liane: I had the idea for Foodie Digital in March 2018. I was in a very full season of life\u20143 kids under 5, I was just starting to feel the fog of my postpartum anxiety lift, and I was working remotely on 2 big corporate contracts. I was happy and tired, but fulfilled and slowly starting to feel like my clear-thinking self again.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was doing a lot of nutrition-related research at the time as a systems analyst, and noticed that the online recipe content I was looking at was broken.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every food blog and nutrition-related site I visited had something\u2014gaps in structured data, slow page speed, piles of broken links, unoptimized posts, tags that were indexed that shouldn\u2019t be, a jumbled mess of categories. You name it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I wasn\u2019t sure why stuff was broken though\u2014there are so many e-courses and blog posts out there about tech support, SEO, page speed and more. So I signed-up for three different SEO courses to see if the material was any good for food bloggers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Honestly, I didn\u2019t finish any of the courses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I couldn\u2019t justify spending 40 hours watching pre-recorded videos, and the content was so boring. I had school lunches to make and laundry to fold; I wanted to exercise. I wanted to meal prep. I wanted to spend time with my husband, and friends, after the kids were in bed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As someone who loves SEO and deconstructing content, I knew that if I didn\u2019t feel like taking these e-courses, a lot of other women probably felt the same way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My first phone call about Foodie Digital was to my friend Carla Ullrich<\/a>, the single most talented web developer I\u2019ve ever worked with. Carla is a master in the kitchen, and knows her way around a recipe. I told her what I\u2019d noticed, and after a few days of looking at this stuff on her own she called me back and said, \u201cThis is crazy. I\u2019m in; when do we start?\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She was so sure that we could help. I had a co-striver!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That same afternoon I posted a message on Facebook asking if any of my friends knew someone who runs a food blog.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Alexandra\u2019s Kitchen<\/a>, plus a handful of other food blogs, showed up in the thread. I reached out to everyone in the list, and heard back from all of the food bloggers right away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first time you and I spoke you were walking home after dropping your kids off at school. I also fit phone calls in after I drop my kids off at school because\u2014like you\u2014 I need to juice every small pocket of time I get.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They were too long, too complicated, too boring, and the tactics were too hard to implement at home alone behind the computer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Six short months later, Foodie Digital incorporated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ali: How is your approach different than other SEO companies?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Liane: Gosh, so different. Results are great and necessary, but at the end of the day we want our members\u2014all of which are women\u2014to feel seen and heard. We\u2019re building a real community, and without those two things the souffl\u00e9 will fall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We also focus 100% on food, nutrition and recipe content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

And we do both tech support and SEO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tech support and SEO converge all the time but for way too long they\u2019ve been considered separate practices. We\u2019re changing that and giving food bloggers holistic one-stop shop WordPress support. Our development team knows SEO and our SEO team knows HTML.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We also communicate clearly, openly and with intention. No smoke and mirrors.
And we\u2019re loads of fun! Right?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ali: What advice would you give to someone who wants to start a food blog? Is there space for another blog?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Liane: Niching is super important. So is patience.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Also\u2014new or seasoned\u2014it\u2019s important to send clear signals to Google about who you are, what you do, and what you\u2019re an authority in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

E-A-T, which stands for expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness is real, and applies to the content that\u2019s created as well as the person who creates the content.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you\u2019re like \u201cLiane, back-up, what\u2019s E-A-T?\u201d set aside 10 minutes and read this helpful post<\/a> from Moz (a trusted source of all things SEO) about E-A-T and SEO.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ali: What are some of the biggest mistakes you see bloggers making?<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

Liane: We\u2019ve audited and provided technical WordPress support for loads of sites and cleaned-up a lot of technical missteps. Based on what we\u2019ve seen, here are 4 mistakes a lot of food bloggers make (all 4 are easy to solve with the right support):<\/p>\n\n\n\n