Why Search Intent Matters for Food Bloggers with Liane Walker from Foodie Digital

Bjork Ostrom: This episode is sponsored by Clariti. You spend a lot of time on your blog content from planning to recipe testing, to writing, to promoting, but do you know if each of your posts are bringing you the most traffic they possibly can? With Clariti, you can see information about each and every post, which is automatically synced from WordPress, Google Analytics, and Google Search Console so that you can make well-educated decisions about where your existing content may need a little attention. Think broken links or broken images, no internal links or missing alt text. You can also use information that Clariti pulls about sessions, page views, and users to fuel the creation of new content because you’ll be able to see which types of posts are performing best for you. Get access to keyword ranking, click-through rate, impressions, and optimization data for all of your posts today with Clariti listeners to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Get 50% off of their first month of clarity after signing up. To sign up, simply go to clariti.com/food. That’s C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com/food. Thanks again to Clariti for sponsoring this episode.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and happy new year. We hope you had a happy and healthy holiday season filled with lots of delicious eat and good time off, and we are happy to kick off a new year with a podcast interview with Leanne Walker from Foodie Digital and the Sifter SEO newsletter. Leanne joins us to talk about what’s actually working in search for content creators right now, and she breaks down why understanding your brand, defining a clear niche and owning your expertise are more important than ever, especially as search continues to evolve. Bjork and Lean also dig into search intent, what it is, why it matters, and how mismatches between search intent and your content can quietly hurt your SEO performance. Leanne shares practical advice for writing clear more intentional recipe titles, avoiding the pitfalls of keyword chasing and how you can adapt to keyword research in a world influenced by LLMs. They also cover how to evaluate existing content using Google Search Console and how to spot opportunities in your existing content to better capture the attention of readers and keep them on your site. It’s a great practical interview that should start off your year with some good actionable items to improve your content strategy and hopefully your site traffic. Without further ado, all at Bjork, take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Leanne, welcome to the podcast.

Liane Walker: Hi, Bjork. Thank you for having me.

Bjork Ostrom: You’re one of these people who lives in a world that’s important for us as food creators to be of because you have two different businesses, one where you’re helping food creators in the day-to-day, another where you are reporting on industry related trends, news, information around the world of SEO specifically for food creators. Am I right?

Liane Walker: Yes. This

Bjork Ostrom: Is called Sifter, S-I-F-T-R, and it’s one of my favorite conversations to have, which is not only somebody with a deep expertise in a certain area, which is content creation and search optimization, but also somebody who has that specific expertise within the specific industry. So before we jump into talking about all the nitty gritty details about search, can you talk a little bit about your entry point into this work?

Liane Walker: Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. Seems like a lifetime ago now. Well, I’ve been a content strategist for a very long time, for a number of years, and about I guess maybe eight years ago I was working independently and I took a contract where I was invited to help a big brand that was looking to get into the nutrition space. So during the course of my research, I was looking at a lot of recipes, healthy recipes for this nutrition company, and I was deep in the weeds and looking at different scopes of work that they were very interested in maybe launching products into. And when I was looking at all these recipes, I had just started digging into the hood and I could really see that there were a lot of things that were quite broken with what I was finding, but I didn’t really understand why, because every time I would Google it like, oh, well, it seems like there’s information about that online. It seems like there’s a tool that could maybe fix that. It seems like there’s troubleshooting information out there. Why are there these things that are kind of broken,

Bjork Ostrom: Broken brick in what way?

Liane Walker: Let’s say there was really incomplete recipe structured data or there were some that weren’t even outputting recipe structured data. That’s a really simple example. So I actually flipped some of my insights to my colleague Carla, who’s now my business partner at Foodie Digital and at Sifter, and I sent him to her on a Friday night and I was like, Hey, over the weekend, just take a look at this. Am I wild? Am I really seeing these gaps? Why do they exist? Do you see them as well? And Carla’s a software engineer, and she and I had worked together for many years and I really trusted her opinion. It was really on a whim that I flipped her that information. She’s like, yeah, I’ll take a look at it. Monday morning. She was like, whoa, did you land on a gold mine here? She was like, yeah, I also don’t understand why all of these things are either broken, misused, seems like there’s a gap in knowledge.

And she and I really started to dig into that together thinking that our combined skill sets, I’m a content strategist with sort of deep expertise in search marketing, and then she’s a software engineer. We thought, oh, maybe we’re the right people to solve this. I’ll be straight up that we were both working big corporate contracts, which can be a little bit tiring. We had young children at the time and we were maybe both kind of starting to look for that off ramp a little bit, and corporate jobs pretty inflexible. We were looking for a little bit of an off-ramp. So

Carla sent me an note back Monday morning and was like, wow, huh. And I quite literally Bjork, I put a note on Facebook, I said, does anybody know anybody who runs a food blog? I’d love to talk to a food blogger just like firsthand. And actually someone I went to high school with went to Yale with an individual who had started a food blog and is still a foodie digital member today actually. And I just reached out and he said, Hey, I have some questions for you. Can we get in touch? And we did. We talked on the phone for about 25 minutes and I heard kind of her perspective and it was hugely helpful and it really made me realize in that moment like, oh, we’re the right people to solve these problems for these folks. We started a proof of concept group. We took on, I think mean, this is a minute ago, we took on I think 12 food content creators, food bloggers, and we worked with them for free for a year while we were doing our corporate contracts and we just help ’em solve problems and the idea was, is there work here?

Can we actually support these individuals well and effectively and with results and SEO is a slow burn, but after about six months, the results started to roll in and we were like, okay, hold up. There’s really an opportunity here for us. We told the proof of concept folks, we said, Hey, we’re going to incorporate we’re start a business January one who’s in all 12 signed, and it’s just been a snowball since then. That was the beginning hearing first Sam. That’s

Bjork Ostrom: Awesome.

One of the things that we talk a lot about on the podcast, which is if you are creator and you’re building a creator business, there are lots of things that you are going to need to do within that business, and it’s important that you are not the one doing all of those things, and it’s also important for expertise to exist within your ecosystem for those things. And so great example of that content strategy, like you talked about search related to that content strategy. I think about it even within my own life, I think about this idea of a personal board of directors who are the people that I go to for the most important things in my life, whether it be spirituality and faith, whether it be personal finance, whether it be relationships within our business. It’s almost easier to think about that. Who are the people that we go to learn about or to us with accounting and finance?

We’re the people that we go to help us with organization and systems. We’re the people that we go to help us with content strategy, search engine optimization, and the more that we can find those people that become our learning sources or our touch points, the more efficient that we can be in our businesses because we are not then having to solve that or go out and learn it on our own. We can learn from those people or partner with those people to get answers to that. Can you talk about within the group of creators that you work with right now or even what you’re seeing within the broader marketplace for this industry, can you talk about the things that you are seeing working well for people who have content businesses? From a general content perspective or even more narrow from a search perspective,

Liane Walker: The individuals who I think are thriving right now really intimately understand their brand. They intimately understand what they want to be known for, the type of recipe they want to be known for, and they know how to find their right reader. So they are the people who often when I’m doing introductory calls with individuals who are on the foodie digital wait list to come in, I’ll say, okay, succinctly summarize for me your subject matter area of expertise, and there’s a lot of folks who are not able to do that Bjork quickly. Well, that should really roll off the tongue. There’s some people who know it instantly, and that’s kind of always a little bit of a interesting turning point because when somebody is not able to succinctly summarize what their subject matter area of expertise is, it also is kind of a little bit of a clue that maybe their content strategy is going to have some topical drift in it, meaning that they start driving a little bit all over the road rather than having a really clear understanding of who their right reader is. I think one of the misconceptions with search marketing is that every reader is a good reader. They’re not. Yeah.

Can

Bjork Ostrom: You talk about why that is? Maybe an example of why every reader’s not a good reader?

Liane Walker: Yeah. Okay. I’m trying to think about a really great way to teach with an example. We love to do that. So I mean, you want to attract the right reader to you. I always communicate this to foodie digital members. You want to attract the right reader you in the first place because when you attract the right reader, they’re way more likely to stay, right? You’ve managed their expectations while they know what they’re going to get from you, they’re way more likely to scroll. They’re probably much more likely to click on internal links or other things, and they’re more likely to engage. These are the kind of user metrics that we need to grow today in search marketing. I mean, Google’s monitoring these types of things, clicks in particular, and so attracting that rate reader in the first place is incredibly important. I often say it’s better to never get clicked on at all than to get clicked on and bounced off of, and why is somebody going to be bouncing off of you?

Maybe they thought they were going to get something from you or your recipe when they clicked through, they suddenly realized, oops, I don’t have that ingredient, or, whoa, I didn’t know this was an instant par recipe plot twist. So we often coach foody digital members, avoid the plot twist, manage the reader’s expectations upfront, and when you do, you’re actually going to be almost like qualifying the people who click through, because again, I’ll repeat that. We teach that it’s much better to never get clicked on at all than to get clicked on and bounced off of because Google monitors those clicks.

Bjork Ostrom: Point being, if there is an indicator that a search agent like Google would see that there’s a mismatch from their search intent, Hey, I’m searching in this world. I’m searching for this recipe. I think this recipe is going to be a good fit for me. I go to this page, actually it’s not a good fit. I’m going to go back. Eventually they’ll find one. Hopefully that’s a good fit. There might be something in there that would be an indicator that the last place that they landed resolved their problem. That was the thing that helped them. And what Google is trying to do constantly is figure out how can they surface the most helpful content that they can and increase shareholder value, which is a whole nother conversation around capturing some of the value on the page. But generally what Google is trying to do is how do we surface the most helpful content? We’re also seeing Google get into creating some of that content, which we can get into down the line with AI overviews. But what you’re saying is, as much as possible think about how to get somebody to your site and stay on your site. One of those ways is to match the intent of what they’re searching to your posts. What are the other things? Well, and maybe can you talk about what is search intent and how can we be aware of that as creators?

Liane Walker: Okay, so actually I wanted to make sure that I articulated well, so I have a little definition here to help us along. Okay. The challenge I think in search marketing is a lot of these definitions tend to be a little bit vague, so I’d like to get into some specifics. So what is search intent? So matching search intent means creating content that aligns with the reason or purpose behind a user’s search query. It’s about understanding what the user wants to know. That’s quite vague, so we often coach community members here at Foodie Digital to stop thinking about Google so much start thinking about the person at home, what do they actually want, stand next to somebody who’s in a rush while they’re trying to cook, trying to figure out the method that they are going to be cooking with. Is it going to be slow cook for today?

Is it be they’re thinking about time a lot and a lot of people are thinking about ingredients as well. So let me give you a really quick example of maybe a mismatch of search intent to help demonstrate what matching search intent really looks like. And this is a real life example from auditing a community member of Foodie Digital. We had a member who came in the door, our technical house was in great shape, excellent. We were able to move on to content strategy quite quickly. She’d been losing traffic for about a year and a half, and she really couldn’t put her finger on why she’d done the kind of rounds she’d had lots of input and audits done. It was very clear to me after auditing the site that she was not attracting the right reader. Let me give you an example. She was jumping into her cured research tool and she was chasing queries that were vegan specific, but when I looked at her site, I’m like, why does she have vegan queries on her site or recipes titled as vegan

Bjork Ostrom: Because she wasn’t a vegan site.

Liane Walker: She had, yeah, next post over is a steak.

Vegans want really particular things. They’re searching for particular ingredients that they cook with quite regularly, but in addition to the fact they’re certainly not looking to land on a site that then also has lots of different meats, et cetera on it, this gal had been just targeting the keywords of vegan, but she had sort of lost sight of the fact that actually her right reader wanted something that was dairy free. And so that was the sort of the mismatch in the intent there. And then of course, that showed up in titling and that showed up in how she was writing her blog post introductions, how she was marketing her recipes as well on other distribution channels, Pinterest, social media, et cetera.

Bjork Ostrom: Are you saying that that’s how you discovered that? Can you talk more about the dairy free? So in this exercise, I think you’re like, wait a minute. The point specifically around, Hey, I see there’s a keyword opportunity,

Liane Walker: But

Bjork Ostrom: It doesn’t fit within the context of my brand, and that I think is an important piece. It ties in this idea of brand. Sometimes we hear people talking about brand, it’s abstract. What does it mean? That to me is a great example of a brand consideration. Similarly, I think of some of the other people we’ve interviewed on the podcast, Amy from Yummy Toddler Food or Beth from Budget Bites. Like if Amy suddenly did this five course meal post, it’s like, wait, this is about how to feed your kids well. Or if Beth from Budget Bites did a post and it was this over the top gold sprinkled steak, it’s like, okay, that’s obviously a brand mismatch, but sometimes we can get lost in the keyword opportunity. Hey, I see this is low hanging fruit, I should do this. Well, yes, but does it fit within your brand? So I think that makes sense important to point out. I think what would be harder for people to understand is then what is for people who haven’t defined it, then what is my reader looking for? You mentioned in this case the non-dairy. How did you surface that versus just like there was something that was performing well that was non-dairy, so that would then become a self-fulfilling prophecy? How do you sort through that to figure out what your brand is?

Liane Walker: I mean, I think you have to spend a significant time amount of time thinking about your brand before you develop your content strategy. A lot of parts of what we do when we are coaching individuals thinking about their long-term content strategies, what are you not? It’s okay to not be everything to everybody and understanding there are going to be a whole sets of queries that will never be relevant for your brand, for your content strategy. You are not the right person to deliver on that search intent. So I think accepting what you’re not and almost having a list of here are things that I’m not going to pursue, is going to allow you much more of a narrow focus. And once you have much more of a narrow focus, and you can really start spending time on articulating that particular recipes, search intent. So for example, let’s go back to the sort of vegan dairy-free mismatch. This individual had been titling many of the recipes as vegan such and such when in fact it should have been dairy-free such and such. The recipe really did not change at the end of the day. Let’s say it was made with cashew cream, that was just her substitution. So as soon as she started to reframe that recipe as dairy free, that reader that she was attracting, she maybe she titles it such and such with cashew cream that reader’s seeing that title Cashew Cream, that reader knows it’s going to be dairy free and they’re more likely to look at that hopefully title if they see it in the search results and go, oh, that’s the right result for me. I’m going to click on that. And they see those titles directly from within the search results. Of course, the image plays a large role in clicks and conversions. Ratings play a large role in clicks and conversions, but what we spend a lot of time on at Foodie Digital is articulating that search intent in your title. The algorithm turns incredibly hard on our titles and when we are clearing

Bjork Ostrom: That, can you say that piece again? The algorithm, what

Liane Walker: The algorithms? Well, the core updates in our experience turns incredibly hard on the titles we write, meaning

Bjork Ostrom: It prioritizes them.

Liane Walker: I don’t necessarily know that it prioritizes them. I think what we notice at Foodie Digitals, when a member alters a title, updates the title tweaks a title to be more clear, improves the focus of that title, and that recipe’s title actually articulates the recipe is about much more clearly the algorithm. Is it the chicken for egg or egg before chicken? Are the clicks coming because the reader’s expectations are managed a little bit better and they’re like, oh yeah, that’s the rare result for me. Or is it the algorithm that’s going, oh, this title is a better match for the recipe itself and then lifting it. That’s the sort of stuff that of course we’d love to know, but what we find at Foodie digitals that when members actually write much more articulate titles that were reflect with, the recipe is actually about in support of their bigger brand over time, they start to get those wins.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, this is I think a really important key feature because, so in the world of consecration, there’s a thousand different things that we could be optimizing. The recipe itself, the images, the flow of the content, the titling, the email that goes out to support the content, but within the context of search, one of the things that is at the top of the list, we don’t know where is title when you were talking about title within this context, are you talking about the H one title that see on the post as well as the title within the code, or is it just the title of a post within the code which shows up on a search results page?

Liane Walker: No, I’m talking about all the titles, post title, yos, SIO title, recipe, card title. I mean, one of the things that’s really unique about recipe search is it’s deeply dependent on the outputting of recipe structured data, and that is because we have the Recipe gallery that exists in search and it’s very prominent on mobile. It’s also very prominent on desktop, and in order to be a recipe to gain access to that recipe gallery, we’re a significant portion of clicks are earned. We know this because if a recipe drops out of that gallery clicks plummet, you need to be correctly outputting structured data. And when you look at where that recipe gallery even displays on a mobile device, I know it’s a little pushed down right now because a lot of AO overuse triggering, but I mean, that’s the title in the recipe card. It’s actually remarkable individuals. How many food bloggers are not aware of that? That title drives a significant portion of the clicks and conversions that you’re going organic clicks and conversions that you’re going to see on a daily, weekly, monthly basis and sort of not articulating what your recipe is right for or who your recipe is right for, excuse me. And what your recipe is about in that title is just a massive missed opportunity.

What we talk about at foodie shows, we call these blanket titles. Any foodie digital member would know that and we don’t like to see them. You’re leaving characters on the table. There’s a lot of expectations

Bjork Ostrom: Like literally word characters. You have more that you could do to align or motivate somebody to click on a piece of content.

Liane Walker: Absolutely. Right. So it’s just a missed opportunity and it’s because again, folks have been taught for a really long time. They jump into their keyword research tool, they see that focus keyword, and that’s the one they stick to and that’s what they write to. It’s why we get a lot of same across the recipe. Search results, results, results. The gallery can look like almost every single title is identical. Best. You’ve seen those titles too before. I’m sure you guys write really snappy and excellent titles. I think with pinch

Bjork Ostrom: Lindsay, it’s not me. Yeah, I’ll credit to Lindsay and Jenna on the team. I won’t take any credit or I will take credit publicly, but privately I’m not doing it.

Liane Walker: But your brand comes across in your title. But I also think that there are titles that are more descriptive like such and such with potatoes or whatever it might be, and that’s an excellent way to both manage reader expectations but also match search intent. So one of the ways in which search intent goes awry is through keyword chasing, which is really common. I just kind of want to normalize that experience for a lot of people. It’s how search marketing’s been taught for a very, very, very long time, but the introduction of natural language processing, which is a technology, has really changed how the algorithm responds to individual words algorithm. Can you talk

Bjork Ostrom: More about that?

Liane Walker: Okay. I will often say to people, because thrown so many expressions against, so I’ll just see what really lands with people to kind of deepen the teaching, get it to stick, and the one that always sticks is exact match keyword use is dead, like natural language processing killed it. And I know that sounds incredibly dramatic, but sometimes you get people to really sink into understanding the message. You have to be over the top a little bit, but it happens. We jump into cured research tools and we start looking at exact match keywords. We see a little green light. We see all these little things in our cured research tools, and we think I’m just going to write to that. But the focus keyword for a recipe has nothing to do with the reader’s intent.

A recipe for, let me give you an example here. I actually wrote one down because I wanted to bring good stuff to this call. So let’s say our focus keyword is dairy-free scalloped potatoes. Okay, well, that’s our focus keyword in our cured research till we see it there. It’s in the long list of words. Great. What else? Okay, we have to get outside of that focus keyword to start unpacking the reader’s intent. So we have to start asking ourselves questions like, okay, well what type of potato do they want to use to make those scallop potatoes? What type of cooking vessel or cooking method do they intend to use when they’re going to be making those scallop potatoes? Is it going to be in a slow cooker? Is it going to be in a casserole dish? There’s actually a lot of standalone search and intent for what are the best type of potatoes for scallop potatoes.

Now, that’s not a keyword to chase. That’s intent. That’s being revealed through the keyword research around just a common problem that people have at home. Usually we’re making scallop potatoes on a fancier gathering and we want to nail the dish. We want to make sure we use the right potato. So articulating that, let’s say Yukon gold potatoes are the potato used and the recipe you’ve developed is incredibly important to help match that intent. Now, I’m not going to get into natural language processing and the meaning of unlocking of individual words, another episode, but I think starting to think through some of those things that the reader cares about at home after you find your focus keyword is going to allow you to match search intent much more closely when you write. Okay.

Bjork Ostrom: And that would be what you’re talking about is within the post itself, what does it look like to do a good job of helping somebody who is searching for this?

Liane Walker: Yes.

Bjork Ostrom: So it’s a little bit of either through actual user research, like you talked about that one year of just working with creators, it’s user research in order to then launch your business. Then you know what they want, what the problems are. So there’s that either through user research, asking people, Hey, if you’re going to make this, what questions would you have? Or through your own expertise through years, decades, whatever it might be, intuitively understanding that these are going to be the questions, the curiosities, the help that people would need when they move through this piece of content. Your point in is to think holistically about what it is that you’re writing about. In this case, it’s a recipe and scalloped potatoes with some specific dietary considerations that plays out in the paragraph. So how we’re actually the paragraphs, how we’re actually structuring and writing about the post, and then are you saying it also then ties into how we are titling it and being strategic with that,

Liane Walker: And in some cases, and that’s the hard part, that’s the creative execution. I always coach foodie digital members and sifter readers to think this is creative work. And oftentimes when you are trying to write a really snappy title, don’t just write one title, write five and then ask which one makes the most sense to you? Which one do you actually think is the most actionable or is the most descriptive? Now, I don’t want folks to overfocus on their titles either. You can also match intent quickly and easily in the introduction that you write at the very top of a post, right? The algorithm has moved far past needing to see something in an F-A-Q-F-A-Q schema was retired or sunset as a schema type for recipe sites, I think almost two plus years ago. So I don’t want people to think when I say, what is the best tape of potato to use to make Gallup potatoes successfully, that shows up in some sort of expandable f aq, not at all to be contextually woven into the writing. So that means actually penned an example so that I could read it out today. So for the gluten-free dairy-free SC potatoes, maybe our opening snippet looks like my recipe lightened up. Dairy-free scallop potatoes come together effortlessly in one pan using gluten-free biel, shallots and scallions, like a classic ogre tent. It’s an elegant holiday side dish or make a head option for a NIK that you can serve alongside rotisserie chicken, roasted pork wine, et cetera. It uses unpeeled Yukon gold potatoes.

Bjork Ostrom: Love that. So point being you touch on the pieces that you have kind of promised in the title. You’ve done some keyword research. You understand there’s an opportunity here, you realize it’s going to be a good fit within the context of your brand. You have done the creative work around thinking about how you can help people be successful with a piece of content. Then there’s also some of the structural components, like you talk about having this kind of block of text above, but basically what we’re trying to do is help people know that they’re in the right spot and doing that in a way that we would use natural language. If I was communicating to you, if I had a little recipe card and you came up to me and you were like, what is this? How would I describe it to you in a way that feels like a match? If you’re the person who had done that search,

Liane Walker: And let’s unpack that a little bit. I think it’s really good, Bjork, right? If you’re standing in the kitchen with me and I’m making dairy-free, gluten-free scald potatoes, you’re having an experience, you’re seeing me go out and grab Yukon gold potatoes, you have life experience that a recipe potato looks different than a Yukon gold potato, and I start slicing them, the robot’s not coming over for dinner. Robot doesn’t know what type of potato is being used. It doesn’t have life experiences, it doesn’t have perspective. It doesn’t know what a recipe potato is versus a Yukon gold potato hasn’t been to Thanksgiving dinner. You know what I mean? So when we are trying to match search intent, we have to close the gap on those experiences and that understanding for the robots. That’s what natural language processing ultimately is about. When you begin to understand the role natural language processing plays in search marketing, you really begin to understand that exact match purities is dead, and then you really begin to know, oh wow, I can just write this naturally into my opening copy snippet or in a paragraph in my post without having to stuff anything, without having to bury it in an F, a Q without having in any way have written for a and make it contextually relevant for the person at home.

Hey, go grab those Yukon gold potatoes, and guess what? You don’t have to peel them or you do peel them. So that’s like real life kitchen stuff and people find tremendously helpful, and when you match that intent, Bjork, give satisfied them, they’re more likely to stay on the page. They know what they’re going to get from you, and they’re going to start scrolling.

Bjork Ostrom: And your point with the natural language processing, I know we don’t have to get deep into it, but that kind of the before and after, hey, before these algorithms, these bots that are coming to your site and crawling and trying to understand what your content is about, before they weren’t as good at crawling a piece of content and understanding in natural language what it was about, so it had to be more structured and concrete in order to help guide these bots. Like, what is this content about? Now? They’re much better at understanding natural language, and so you don’t have to be as structured because they understand the natural language more. Therefore, you are more free to speak naturally, as long as it’s still comprehensive. Is that getting at what you’re saying?

Liane Walker: Absolutely. As long as it’s still comprehensive, as long as you’re not leading anybody astray and as long as what you’re writing is a true representation of what your recipe is meant to or how you developed it, something that I think comes up a lot in talking, so many food bloggers is accepting what your recipe is not. So one of the objections that will often come back, let’s keep going on the scallop potatoes example, but the people are, but I don’t want my scallop potatoes only to rate for queries related to Yukon Gold. I want it to be relevant for all of the scallop potato queries. I’m like, but that’s incorrect. That’s a mismatch in intent. You are actually not a relevant result or recipe result for a scalloped potatoes made with, let’s go ahead and say, maybe yours is onion free. Somebody wants it with onions or someone wants it with ham, or somebody specifically has recipe potatoes. They want to make it for that. It’s okay to go, oh, I’m not the right result for them. People want their recipes to rank for

Bjork Ostrom: Everything,

Liane Walker: All the queries. It’s not about ranking for all the queries. It’s about ranking and converting on the queries that are relevant for your brand, your content strategy, and ultimately the recipe that you developed.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, a great example on an extreme, I forget exactly what it was. This was a few years ago, we had a recipe that was getting a decent amount of clicks, a ton of impressions. We didn’t pay super close attention to it, and it was something like tacos and then it completely fell off and we’re like, oh my goodness, what happened? And what we realized is when we went back and looked at the data, it was ranking for something like tacos near me or something where it’s like, so is great. We’re getting a lot of impressions. We’re occasionally getting some people who would just by chance click on it. But the search intent was very obvious, not a match for a recipe, it’s just people who wanted to get some tacos, buy them, they wanted to purchase tacos. And so it made sense that eventually the algorithm got smart enough to be like, wait, this isn’t a good match because this is a toggle recipe. It’s, it wasn’t taco. So I don’t remember what it was, but that was the basic idea. And then there’s all of those little versions of that that might have to do with dietary considerations or specific questions that people have about ingredients and whatnot.

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So getting back to the titling, I think that’s important to talk through. Then what you are doing is creating both an intent match, but also something that’s compelling. And I’ve seen people do, they’ll use parentheses to say something like five ingredients or super easy or dairy free. Is that a little bit of the strategy around titling is thinking about how to create something that’s compelling?

Liane Walker: Yeah. I mean, in order to get clicked on, you need to be noticed, right? There’s tens of thousands of individuals ranking with their recipes. So I mean, she’s noisy out there, so in order to get clicked on, you need to be noticed. So I think that’s a huge part of it. Foodie digital members probably who are listening would have a laugh when they heard you say five ingredient or super easy. They know I’m coming with a question, what does that mean?

Bjork Ostrom: What’s below that?

Liane Walker: Or what does super easy mean to somebody else? Like, okay, what’s super easy for you? Bjork may not be super easy for me. You may be a super skill cook, and I may be a bit of a beginner. What does five ingredients

Bjork Ostrom: Probably the other way around, but I can roll with it.

Liane Walker: I don’t mind a three ingredient that’s really implying simplicity or this is going to be quick, but four and five ingredients. I don’t love to see those because I’m like, oh, tell me what’s the most compelling of those four or five ingredients. There’s got to be one that’s the anchor, and I’d like to know what it is.

Something that I want to unpack here is we’re very lucky in recipe search. There are so many different ways for a recipe to be made. It can be made with potatoes, without potatoes, it can be made with carrots. It can be made without carrots. And so when you write a really clear, clearly articulated title, you are making sure that the individual’s about to click on you understands what your recipe reflects as opposed to what another recipe reflects. An example that I believe, I’m going to pinch this one from the sifter team, but let’s take a strawberry banana smoothie. There’s a lot of ways to make a strawberry banana smoothie. It can be made perhaps with cottage cheese and it’s can be a little higher protein. It can be made with Greek yogurt. It can also be made with almond milk. It could be made with soy milk.

The list goes on. It can be made with fresh strawberries. It can be made with frozen strawberries. It can have vanilla added. It can not have vanilla, it can be yogurt free. There’s a lot of different ways in which that individual recipe can be developed. You have to write your title to reflect that, right? Somebody who’s going to convert and click on a strawberry smoothie with cottage cheese, strawberry banana smoothie with cottage cheese, that’s an entirely different search and conversion than someone who’s going to be clicking on converting on a strawberry banana smoothie with Greek yogurt. So our title sort of ensure that we’re getting that right click to our site, and then we have that. We’ve invited that right reader to us, and then we’re able to hold their attention because we better manage their expectations. Nobody wants a cottage cheese plot twist and the recipe card. If they get there and their surprise by that, you’re risking a potential bounce.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. I think of Mr. B too often talks about within the context of YouTube content that he is always thinking about the thumbnail, the thumbnail, the thumbnail, the thumbnail. The thumbnail is what gets the click, but then as soon as people click, how do you get them to stay? And YouTube is a very different algorithm, but it’s still a Google algorithm. It’s still people who are working within the same context of attention, capturing attention. And that to me is the core of what we’re trying to figure out. How do we capture somebody’s attention, get them to click, and then get them to stick around? I also think of way back in the day, my entrance into entrepreneurship was selling shoes on eBay. So I’d wholesale shoes from Chicago. We had this tiny condo in a one car garage, and we would store ’em in there.

I’m sure it was such a pain for Lindsay to have all these random shoes. You’d sell ’em on eBay, but you’d have to pay extra on an eBay listing to have the title bolded and to have stars on it because that just meant that more people would click on it. And the amazing thing for us within the context of search is we don’t have to pay extra to get more strategic around the titling. The important thing to your point then after somebody clicks is are they going to stick around? Is it going to be a good experience on the site? Some of that is science, some of that is art. It’s also brand. All of these things play together holistically. A couple other specific questions around title that I’d be curious if you have opinions on. Have you seen people using emoji in titles and

Liane Walker: Yeah, no opinion. I think the jury’s out on that one. I think emojis and posts, yes, for sure a lot. There was a hot minute there where everyone was putting emojis alongside their table of contents, which again, I don’t think that didn’t help, didn’t hurt. Maybe it was just kind of something to spice at the page. I would say I’m probably not a fan of an emoji and a title. I’d be like, ah, just use the characters. Be descriptive. So I’d probably ask that one and vote no, but I would like to be proven wrong with some good click-through data.

Bjork Ostrom: And then related to that, let’s say you are trying to improve some of these things. How do you know where to start? What is the most valuable return for your time from a starting point?

Liane Walker: Okay, I don’t want anybody to think here that I’m suggesting cured research is in the backbone of a successful search strategy. It is. It’s where you go when you mine for intent, but when you’re logging into your keyword research tool and you find your focus query that you feel like is relevant for your brand and your content strategy, I want you to jot that down and then keep going. Ask yourself. I will often coach to say at the intersection of asking type related questions, what type of, okay, so what type of dish is this? Is it a side dish? Is it a dinner? Am I describing that that dish is type or that recipes type? Is it a dessert? Is it no bake? Is it, et cetera? Again, at the intersection of type, perhaps you’ve got an ingredient there. Well, what type of mushrooms are being used?

What type of pesto is this? We all know that there’s many ways to make pesto. Is it made with basil? Is it made with pistachios? Is it a with spinach, et cetera? Just if you ask yourself questions about type, it’s going to naturally bubble up different types of intent. You’re going to have to look at the recipe you developed and go, oh, what type of pesto did I use in this chicken pesto pasta. Oh, mine is made with basil. Maybe I shouldn’t just title my recipe. Chicken pesto pasta. Maybe I title my recipe chicken pesto pasta with basil pesto. If I could pull up the cured research tool right now, you would see that there’d a lot of standalone intent for that recipe in particular. So asking yourself questions about type and having it be a little bit divorced from the cured research and the volumes and all those things that you see.

I’m just thinking, how do I correctly articulate what is in my recipe? That little prompt I think will get you started and maybe even halfway to more descriptive language. Almost immediately. Foodie digital members know the second they bring up individual ingredients, let’s say cabbage. I’m like, what type of cabbage? Napa boy, et cetera. What type of potato mushrooms, common? What type of flour? That’s a huge one, right? For baking and dessert, if you’re using almond flour, I mean, that’s potentially a gluten-free query, right? Or if you’re using oat flour. So just even inviting yourself to think about type is going to get you started.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And then how about looking at your existing content? You have 500 recipes and one of those, two of those 50 of those are probably going to be good candidates to revisit and do some optimizations to help improve click-through rate, and well, yeah. Let’s just start with click through rate. Is there a way to surface that data easily to see what the opportunities are?

Liane Walker: Absolutely. So we use Google Search Console here every single day. It’s free, so it’s the most effective tool to be able to monitor your organic click through rate really, really clearly. You don’t want to be monitoring click-through rate by page or post. That’s the language that’s often used among food bloggers. You want to be studying your click-through rate by query. And in Google Search Console, there’s a really quick and easy way to enable a column that reveals a click-through rate to you. By Query Query. I loosely coach foodie digital members to think a good click through rate for a standalone recipe query is about 8%. This is for a single recipe, okay? I’m not talking roundups or anything like that, but for a single recipe a fairly, that’s a good click-through rate. A really good clickthrough rate is about 10%. An excellent click-through rate is 12% or higher.

And if you’re in the 20 and then you’re crushing it, that’s an outstanding click-through rate. But monitoring click-through rate by query or studying that will help you identify queries in your search console list that are under 8%. And then you can start to look here, oh, am I leaving some clicks on the table? If it’s converting at 2% query, is there something here that, is there some intent that I have not leveraged in my title writing in my introduction? And so that’s the first place. I mean, there’s a lot of different places to do this, but that’s probably the quickest and easiest place to point people because that sort of 8% turning point, it’s a good guide.

Bjork Ostrom: And I suppose that also would take into consideration that click-through rate would be lower. If you’re lower on the page, your impressions would be higher and the click-through rate would be lower because of position. So it’s probably you would need to realize that you’re both optimizing position, which would increase click-through rate, but then also optimizing the actual click-through rate regardless of position, if that makes sense.

Liane Walker: But those

Bjork Ostrom: Two are probably intertwined.

Liane Walker: Absolutely.

Bjork Ostrom: As it goes up, the click-through rate goes up as the click-through rate grows up, potentially also the position goes up.

Liane Walker: But also something that I think is worth mentioning here at Bjork is that a lot of food bloggers will overfocus on in their big volume queries.

Sure, the scope of the opportunity is terrific, but if you have a lower volume query that you’re, let’s say, going to Spitball, but like 200 searches a month, maybe that doesn’t get a lot of people very excited. But let’s say you’re ranking in position four. Well, if you revisit that post to better match search intent, what the percent Home actually wants, and you manage to get clicked on and you make your way to, number one, you’re going to get a lot more clicks to your site. So you’re strengthening that clicks rate on a lower volume query as well. And oftentimes those tend to be the easier place to start. Bigger queries, more competitive things are going to move a little bit more slowly, but I don’t want people to sort of skews as they always do to those bigger volume query conversations, just because it’s the scope of opportunity is massive. Some of those lower volume queries you strength and click through from eight to 10, maybe 12%. Yeah, you’re going to feel that in a really positive way.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. And then how about after somebody’s on the page, we talked about are you doing a good job of matching user intent? Is there a way through data to know if you are matching user intent, Google Analytics time on page? That would be the first thing that I would think of. But are there other things that you would suggest for knowing if you’re doing a good job when you’re making those updates?

Liane Walker: We don’t spend a lot of time on time on page here. I think that’s a tough metric today. I think it was a little bit more reliable years ago. I think attention spans have gotten a lot shorter. I think jump to recipe has altered that a little bit, so I think that one can be a little tough. The way in which I study it, let’s talk about a particular post to see if it’s doing a good job of matching intent, is leveraging the individual poster page filter and Google Search console. So you can take an individual URL, run it through and you can see the range of queries that it’s converting on or gaining impressions for, and you can look at that list. Maybe one recipe has, let’s say a half dozen queries that are contributing to its click portfolio. Are they all on the money or are some of them really, really off?

And it’s going to be pretty obvious the ones that are off. But you can also not just look at that list of being like, is it on the money or not? But like, yikes, where have I left things on the table? If we go back to the chicken pesto pasta example, is anybody saying any queries converting on basil pesto for this chicken pesto pasta? Have I just left those clicks and I haven’t gone out and tried to grab them? That’s probably the top way of understanding. Am I matching the intent well or am I leaving some clicks on the table here?

Bjork Ostrom: Sure. And within Google Search Console, looking at the post URL from that, it will surface data for you, which is the queries that are going through Google that people have used and then clicked in impressions and whatnot. And what you’re saying is you could look and see as you are improving a piece of content, does that expand? Does it get wider? Are there more queries that people are using to now discover your content? There’s not an easy way to see that other than observationally. Number of queries isn’t a data point

Liane Walker: Within Google

Search Console? No, I wish. I think that that would be outstanding for recipe publishers. There’s this sort of false of narrative. A lot of people will use cured research tool to do keyword tracking. That’s quite literally tracking that individual keyword for that one recipe. These keyword research tools are tremendously helpful for other things. We just don’t love to use them for keyword tracking because it misses the nuance of this niche, right? I can describe a chicken pesto pasta in a dozen ways. That means people at home can too. They’re searching for that recipe in the way that makes the most sense to them. Maybe they actually search chicken pesto pasta with penne.

So it’s going to be very difficult to see that those relevant queries for that one recipe in some of those keyword tracking tools. That’s why we like to use GSC because it gives you the fullest picture and it gets people to really understand that there isn’t one keyword to chase. I think success looks like when you have one recipe that is ranking for let’s say a half dozen, maybe even up to eight to 10 closely related queries to what your recipe is about. Now, not all of them are going to convert in the same way. Not all of them maybe are going to convert at that 12%, but it’s understanding that there isn’t one way to describe a recipe. So there shouldn’t be just one keyword to chase. There’s one recipe that can be described a bunch of different ways, and then ideally, that larger list of queries shows up in your search console account.

Liane Walker: And if it’s bigger and that all those queries are on the money, great, then you know that you are heading in the right direction.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. I think it paints such a good picture around the balance that we have to strike as creators, which is we have to understand how these search engines are working. We have to understand technical SEO, we have to understand structured data. All of these are really important, and we have to understand the human who’s typing a search query in going to our page and looking at it and thinking, is this what I need? And your ability to do both of those things really well is what results in success as a content creator within the context of publishing content to a blog or a website. Because you can get really good at the technical stuff, but if then somebody comes, we use this as you and I were chatting Spotify, it’s like you could get really good at understanding the mechanics of Spotify as a musician and a recording artist, but then if somebody presses play on your song and they’re like, oh, this isn’t for me, or This isn’t great, or the quality on this is bad, they’re not going to listen to that song.

Similarly, you could be the best songwriter in the world, but if you haven’t figured out distribution channels or if you’re not working with somebody who understands distribution channels, people aren’t going to be able to hear your music, even though it’s really incredible. And so we need to find the balance between the two of those things. And some of us are going to be really good at the technical, and some of us are going to be really good at the creative, but our work, our job is to figure out how we can level up and also work with other people who are really good at doing what they’re doing. I know that Foodie Digital at this point isn’t taking on new clients, or there’s a wait list so people can sign up for that, but Sifter is a newsletter all around the industry, things that are happening, news that people can sign up for. So maybe you can talk about that as we close out here. It’s been such a great conversation.

Liane Walker: Yeah. Well, we started TIF Drive. It’s really outcome of the wait list getting wildly out of control. I mean, we had a Tiger by the tail there for a while, and what we realized is there’s a lot of people who are hungry for a different way to approach this work. A lot of people tell us our approach at Foodie Digital like, wow, you guys, this is what I thought SEO was. And I love hearing that, right? Because I think there’s sort of that era of hardcore cured chasing and writing for robots and stuffing FAQs into things.

It’s over. And in order to compete today, I always say this to individuals I’m talking to, but the tactics and approaches that got you from point A to point B are very likely not going to be the same tactics and approaches that get you successfully from point B to point C. And so Sifter really operates in the point B to point C approach. I joke internally with the team, I kind of call it, it’s like the un-au, we talk about a lot of things to do with SEO, but it’s an really approachable tone of voice. There’s no jargon. Probably the top feedback we get back from individuals who are subscribers is the recipe specific examples. If you listen to lots of different SEO podcasts, I mean there’s people listening to that information. There’s travel bloggers listening to that information, it’s not recipe specific, and when that guidance isn’t recipe specific, it can be misunderstood.

So Sifter really just focuses specifically on the recipe search scenario and then unique circumstances and opportunities of food bloggers, big, medium and small, and how that’s, it’s an evolving field, but I would say it kind of skews on the more advanced side of things. But what we know from our time, operating foodie digital, that’s what people are hungry for. Most food bars got the one oh ones dialed over the years as foodie, digital audited, like people are coming in the door of pretty clean technical houses and now they’re looking for new ways and new approaches and new opportunities to grow. And with the introduction, of course, AI mode and AI overview, really understanding the underpinnings of natural language processing, the role topical drift plays in our content strategies, these are the types of topics that sifter tackles.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s awesome. Link to it in the show notes, otherwise people can check it out.

Liane Walker: I have it open here just so I didn’t say it incorrectly, but it’s sifter seo.com.

Bjork Ostrom: Leon, thanks so much for coming on. Such a joy to talk to you. You have such a deep knowledge in this world, and I know I’ve helped a lot of creators and we’ll have to have you back on again. So thanks for coming on. Yes.

Liane Walker: Okay. Thanks so much, BJO. Thanks for having me.

Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily. Thank you so much for listening to that episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, we would really appreciate it if you could share it or leave a rating or review wherever you listen to podcasts. Since we are kicking off not only a new year, but a new month, I wanted to give you a little update about what you can expect in the Food Blogger Pro membership this month. If you are not yet a Food Blogger Pro member, you can head to fu blogger pro.com/membership to learn more and join us. Otherwise, if you’ve already joined us, here’s what you will see in the membership this January. We are kicking off on Thursday, January 8th with a brand new coaching call between Bjork and Davia Delgado, the food blogger behind Raven Cake’s Bakery. The next Thursday, January 15th, we’ll be releasing a brand new quick win course all about internal linking on your food blog.

Lastly, we will be hosting a live q and a on Thursday, January 22nd with Allie Gruer all about email list best practices, how to welcome, nurture, and engage your subscribers. If you would like to submit a question in advance of that q and a, you can just head to the live q and a section on the site, add the event to your calendar and submit a question. We are really looking forward to kicking off the year on the right foot and hope you’ll join us in the membership next week on the podcast. We will be welcoming Phoebe Lapine, the food blogger behind the food blog Feed Me Phoebe, it’s going to be a great episode and we hope you’ll join us. We’ll see you next week. Hope you have a wonderful week.