SEO + Content Marketing Case Study

From Zero to 1 Million Impressions, 5,600 Monthly Clicks

In this case study, we will go over actionable SEO strategies and tactics for a website to rank consistently for hundreds of terms on the first page of Google.

This site was a new domain with no history in a highly competitive niche — cooking — that went from nothing to one million impressions and 5,600 organic non-paid clicks per month.  If you’re interested in the actionable takeaways that led to its SEO success that you can apply to your website, read on.

Website Background and Niche

This website specializes in cooking lessons for kids. It provides detailed cooking lessons that kids can follow. Each recipe has step-by-step video tutorials that kids teach to kids. In addition to the video lessons, there are hundreds of blogs written about many of the ingredients, along with blogs on kitchen safety and more.

The site is thus informational in intent but full of helpful content.

Cooking is a highly competitive space, and this website ranks ahead of some of the most authoritative sites on the web, including but not limited to, Masterclass, Target, Walmart, Wikipedia, and other cooking-focused sites.

The Amazing Google Organic Results

Here’s a shortlist of the website’s Google organic accomplishments:

• 1 million impressions per month
• 5,600 clicks per month
• More than 750 unique search terms on the first page of Google
• The monthly cost to buy this traffic in Google Ads is $51,700!

The SEO Factors Important to the Website’s Success That You Can Use Too

Quality Content–Lots of Content

Textual Content

There is a full lineup of step-by-step recipes that are categorized into the following buckets:

• Breakfast
• Lunch
• Dinner
• Snacks and appetizers
• Desserts
• Baking
• Agua frescas
• Mexican Salsas

Blog Content

The website has dozens of blog posts about many of the ingredients that were used in each recipe. Overall, the site has hundreds of pages.

We also linked internally from each recipe post to each blog post about that particular ingredient.

And we linked each ingredient blog post back to each recipe that used that ingredient. Internal linking is an important on-page SEO tactic that can have a significant impact on rankings. 

Embedded YouTube Video Content

While not necessary, embedded video content can help you rank and capture traffic.

All the recipe pages had embedded YouTube video instructions. Step-by-step cooking videos for kids. This keeps engagement high on the site. It also provides kids and parents with two types of content for a recipe. Not everyone wants to read, and conversely, not everyone wants to watch a video. I use this strategy on the 39 Celsius website too. A related blog post here on using YouTube video embeds to improve SEO and grow first page keyword rankings.

Site Organization — SEO Silos

Site organization is important for the human experience as well as for search engines and Google. Internal linking strategies play a key role.

There needs to be a data-driven strategy in what content is produced and also how it is organized and linked internally. From an SEO perspective, this is referred to as a Silo strategy. Silos could be thought of as chapters and within each chapter are sub-topics.

For example, on this site, we have recipes and cooking lessons organized by breakfast, lunch, dinner, etc. Below are dinner recipe examples. This could be considered the “Dinner” silo. And as mentioned above, we link internally from each recipe ingredient to the blog post about that ingredient.

On-Page SEO

When a search engine crawls your site and its pages, it’s essential to have the information on a page focused and consistent from top-to-bottom so it is clear what the page is about.

This means, that whatever keywords phrase or topic you’re aiming for needs to be integrated into the page’s Title tag, Meta Description, an H1 tag and perhaps a few times throughout the content depending on the length of the content. Thus, when the search engine scrolls through the page’s html code from top to bottom, it sees your keyword in all these places used consistently and understands what the page is about.

Technical SEO

There are many aspects to the technical side of SEO. But two areas that will help you rank higher, and in our case study here, helped this site capture more search traffic include:

• FAQ and Video Schema Markup
• Mobile Responsiveness of your website

Rank In Many Different Places Within Google

There are many places within a Google Search Results Page where you can rank your site.

Your goal is to rank your site in as many places as possible. Think of the search results page as the shelf space at your local grocery store – there are only so many spots, and you want to own as many as possible.

Case Study Summary and Key Takeaways

SEO can be hard and takes time. But quality content should be at the core of everything you do. If you satisfy the searcher, you are in the game at least.