Podcast Episode 1

 Hello, my friends. Welcome back to the Sassy Solopreneur podcast. In today’s episode, I want to talk about the SEO strategy that doubled my food blog traffic.

I have touched here and there about how I. started in 2016 with my food blog and it wasn’t until 2022 that I was able to scale and double my blog traffic, double my revenue, triple my email list. It’s incredible. And so I want to dive deep into that story and hopefully you can grab some golden nuggets from what I talk about today in detail.

Now, before we jump in to all things SEO strategy, I wanted to remind you to please rate and review the show. You can do so on Apple podcasts by going to the show page, scrolling down, leaving a rating, leaving a review. And if you want, you can also share on Instagram, any little bit helps. And I’m so appreciative of everyone that has rated and reviewed the show so far.

So thank you so much. And thank you so much for listening. Okay. So let’s paint the picture. It’s 2022. It’s the beginning of 2022. And. I was at a page view plateau. I had been blogging for six years at that point. And I was kind of at a halt. Okay. No matter what I shared, I wasn’t seeing much growth and I would only see some spikes here and there.

And it had been going on for a few years. And that was until in 2022, in early 2022, I was like, okay, I need to shake shit up here. Like there’s something that I. Have been wanting to do for a while. And that was to niche down to Cuban cuisine. And I remember talking to my friend, Isabel from Isabel eats. Hi, Isabel, if you’re listening, who has a very successful Mexican food blog, Isabel eats.

com. And her and I share that we’re both from Latin backgrounds and she niched down and is doing so well. And so I, for a long time, wanted to do the same. But I let the search volume always dictate that for me and always be like, well, there’s not that much search volume. You know, I it’s, it’s maybe too niche or I’m not going to be able to grow from this because no one’s really searching for this.

And so I always talked myself out of it, so to speak, which is kind of ironic because I actually started back in 2016 with Cuban cuisine. I was kind of like cubanizing regular meals like I would grab like a Christy Teigen recipe and then like just switch it up and be like let me add a little Cuban twist here and like I was doing stuff like that and then I switched to comfort food and I switched like a bunch of times guys like zero out of ten do not recommend do not do that but I did I did switch to more comfort food type of recipes.

And I found myself, you know, I’m here like, well, it’s been a couple of years and I haven’t gotten out of this specific page view number. And it’s kind of annoying because like, what am I doing here? Right. Not to say that if, if you don’t want to scale and you just want to live off of the ads forever, that is your choice, you can do that.

Obviously you still need to maintain the site because there are a lot of, you If you don’t pay attention to your site, you can get hit. So there’s that to also take into consideration. But overall, I didn’t want to just stay stagnant in this number. And I was, I think it was roughly like 150, 000 pages a month, like more or less, like it would waver between like 150, 180, and I was making.

Six figures from the ads. So it’s not bad, but it’s like, man, I’ve been doing this for six years now. I should be way higher. I should be at a different page view threshold, or I should be making a lot more money. And I figured the way to do that was to niche down and. As much as I resisted because I let the search volume dictate that decision for me I ended up making the decision to be like, you know what i’m gonna niche down I did reach out to foodie digital at the time.

I wasn’t working with them just yet So this was like january december january december 2021 january 2022 around that time and I had asked her advice I was on their wait list and I had asked if it made sense To niche down, even if the search volume was so low, because I mean, we’re talking like some recipes have a search volume of like a hundred or like 50.

And I’m like, is this going to be worth it? You know? And like, I just couldn’t wrap my head around how there are certain niches that have low search volume, but they’re doing so well. And then the more I learned and I got the blessing from Foodie Digital. And then I started to actually work with Foodie Digital in April.

I started to see the results. And so, so it’s January, 2022. I make that decision. I’m like, I’m doing this. I’m scared as hell, but I’m going to do it, you know? And so I started to slowly pivot my content. I started to update the current recipes that I did have that were Cuban recipes on my site. I was still kind of chasing the numbers here.

Because I didn’t know any better yet. And so I just little by little just started to pivot more insert clip here of Ross saying pivot as he’s going up the stairs. So I started to pivot little by little to more Cuban cuisine. And then I started working with Foodie Digital in about April or May of that year and Foodie Digital introduced me to the concept of semantic SEO and how with semantic SEO, you’re not chasing keywords.

And instead, you’re building your content based on primary topics and these topic clusters and subtopics and aligning that with your EEAT, which I talked about in the last episode. And so having FUJI Digital help me just understand that was such a game changer. It really was such a game changer. And so from there, just a few months later, so we started in April.

I’m not getting paid for this by the way, not sponsored, but I started to pivot my content and by about August or September, suddenly I saw this spike in traffic. So we’re talking about April, that’s like 4 months later, right? 4 or 5 months later, suddenly I’m like, oh my god, it’s working. I can’t believe it’s working, oh my goodness, I can’t believe.

That I stopped myself from pursuing Cuban cuisine, which comes so naturally to me. Like, why did I stop myself from doing this? I can write five blog posts right now because I know what I’m talking about because it comes so naturally to me. Then if I’m trying to go after a keyword, I know maybe for some people, this is like, duh, of course you would talk about things that you’re familiar with.

But I guess for me, Maybe it started off like that, but then I jumped into the shiny object syndrome and I was like, Oh, but this has a better search volume. Let’s go for this. And let’s go for that. And so essentially, Semantic SEO is about making your content more relevant to what people are searching for online.

It’s by using the words and phrases that they use and then creating helpful content that’s super comprehensive, explaining the why and the how in great detail, because not only does that help you build trust with your audience, but it also helps search engines understand your expertise, And what you’re about.

So search engines use something called natural language processing, which is a technology that helps them understand what your content is about. And so that plus knowing the user’s intent, which I’m sure you’ve heard through keyword research. You know, knowing what your readers want and giving it to them, that is like the golden ticket to getting your, your blog post high in search results.

So the idea is to plan content around these primary topics, right, that you choose based on your niche. So whatever your niche is, if you’re, if you’re like, Oh, I’m a comfort food blogger. You need to go deeper than that. So, that’s why I say like a sub niche. Like, go deeper than just comfort food. Comfort food is way too wide.

There’s too many people in that space. You gotta go deeper. Like, pick something, a sub niche of comfort food. And then from there, it’s like, what are the topics I could speak to? And then I have the sub topics, which are essentially the recipes, right? But the idea is that you want to be strategic with the type of subtopics that you’re coming up with because they all have to internally link to each other so that you have a well structured website.

So, when you’re thinking about different primary topics and different subtopics, you have to also think, like, how can these all connect together? It is the World Wide Web, after all, right? It is a web. It all has to connect together. So you want to be smart with that. How I’m internally linking to each one of these, how they align with your niche and your EAT.

And here are the topics that I want to focus on. These are the topics that I know for sure that I could speak to with so much authority and here are the recipes underneath those topics that will help me to highlight my expertise and that will be super easy to come up with. Cause the last thing you want is to struggle with.

Oh my god, I can’t figure out what to write about or what what topic fits into this niche or then you haven’t figured it out yet It should come easy to you. It should be a topic that’s I can write A hundred posts of this because I know so much about it Sometimes I think about it like if I was asked to do a ted talk What can I speak to for a whole hour?

Right. So think about something like that. Like, what can you speak to for an entire hour on a TED talk and then break it up into primary topics, break it up into, okay, this is my niche. I can talk about Cuban food for a whole hour. I can talk about it for years because I’ve been in it for so long. And so think about from your expertise, like, what do you know so much about?

What are you so confident in that you can speak to that then will help you build this strong website with. All this well organized content that is showing your expertise that you can feel confident to talk about and that it really speaks to that authority and that trust piece, you know, so you want your blog to demonstrate the knowledge piece because that’s how you gain trust from Google and from your readers, and that’s essentially what semantic SEO is, what building topical authority means, you’re building authority on these specific topics,

And so to wrap up today’s episode, I have to say that both niching down and embracing semantic SEO were absolute game changers for my business. I feel like a lot of us are scared to niche down because we think we’re going to pigeonhole ourselves or we’re not going to be able to grow. And I can definitely speak to that because I felt the exact same way.

But it was the absolute opposite for me. So I want to encourage you guys to start thinking about your content from this approach. Like how can you start using semantic SEO in your content? Which means how can you start using regular words, regular phrases without letting key search dictate that for you, right?

Forget about keywords for two seconds, write a blog post using the same language that your readers use. And granted, we definitely have to still follow like the blog post structure, but think of your content from, how can I make this more appealing for my audience? How can I make this more understandable to not only my audience, but also search engines?

That’s, that’s the game changer right there. It’s when you approach the topics and your niche from this Easy to understand way. You’re not sounding like a robot. You’re actually conversational. You’re using regular words and phrases, not just what Keysearch it’s telling you to do. And creating content that’s valuable.

Of course, that you can speak to with so much authority, that’s comprehensive, that has a step by step photos, that your about me page is showing your expertise, that all your content is aligning with your EAT. And aligning with your niche. I think that’s the key. Think of a way for you to pivot your content, to show your expertise, to build authority, to build trust.

So you can break out of this page you plateau or avoid one to begin with because I promise this is the key to scaling your food blog. And so that’s all for today’s episode. Feel free to message me on Instagram at the Jamie Silva. I’d love to hear how this episode resonated with you. What is your biggest takeaway?

And again, thank you so much for listening. I’ll catch you on the next one.