Advanced SEO Q&A with Casey Markee

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Emily Walker: Hey there, this is Emily from the Food Blogger Pro team and you are listening to the Food Blogger Pro podcast. This week on the podcast is our last episode in our Summer Membership Spotlight in which we’ve been sharing pieces of content that are normally exclusive to Food Blogger Pro members here on the podcast. This week on the podcast, we are wrapping up our miniseries with a replay of our Advanced SEO Live Q&A with Casey Markee. We host live Q&As on our membership every month with topics ranging from SEO and keyword research to photography, updating and republishing content, AI and plugins. Really just everything you might want or need to know as a food creator. For this Q&A, Food Blogger Pro members submitted many questions all about SEO, helpful content updates, best practices, topic clusters, category pages, AI, and so much more. While this Q&A is slightly edited, it should give you a feel for what the Q&As in the membership are like, and if you like what you hear, we would love for you to join us. You can head to foodbloggerpro.com/membership to learn more about what we offer, but without further ado, I’m just going to let Bjork and Casey take it away.

Bjork Ostrom: Excited to have Casey Markee in from Media Wyse. My guess is a lot of people, everybody probably attending this, most people listening will be familiar with Casey, all that he does in the world of search because you’ve been doing this for a really long time, Casey, you’ve been at it longer than most people have in the world of not only online business and online marketing, but especially in the world of search. You’ve been in the world of search a really long time as well. Is it two decades now? How long has it been since you’ve been in the world of search?

Casey Markee: Let’s see, 2024, so this would’ve been starting my 25th year in search, 25 years, crazy timed.

Bjork Ostrom: 1999.

Casey Markee: Yeah, 1999, 1998, saw the good old days when we had Dogpile, Lycos-

Bjork Ostrom: Y2K. You could rank for the search term Y2K and you would’ve been a millionaire.

Casey Markee: Yeah, at that time it was pills. Big thing was pills, and that was good times. Pills and link schemes worked. All I had to do was throw a bunch of links at something and voila, I was the number one overnight until someone outlinked me. Then I had to go, then I had to outlink them, outlink the linker. It was good times.

Bjork Ostrom: It’s all of these little things that … part of it is your job is now, especially in the Covid world, is making sure that people understand what is best practice, what is a tactic that is actually working, and also understanding what is something that is maybe happening that you shouldn’t be doing, even if it’s working. And we’re going to be talking about a lot of those different things here today. We’ve got a lot of great questions coming in.

So as a reminder, if you have questions, submit those in the questions area. We will go ahead and try and hit as many as we can, and if you have any that you’re especially interested in hearing Casey answer, go ahead and vote for those, and those will help us know what people are interested in. We’re going to start with this one because a lot of people have been talking about AI, ChatGPT. I’ve been using ChatGPT to create coloring pages for my daughter. It’s awesome. Other people have been using ChatGPT for lots of other things, like advising SEO. So Kharitas, I think I’m saying that right, is saying, “How good is ChatGPT in advising on SEO? If it’s good, what prompts give the best advice?”

Casey Markee: Right, that’s a very good question. So the thing to understand about ChatGPT and LLMs or other large language models is they’re only as good as the inputs it receives. So the thing to understand about ChatGPT is it’s trained, just like LLMs, on multiple pieces of information. Now it has got a substantial corpus of information to work from. It’s basically open now. It’s very current. There used to be a delay in the information, but it is very current now, it’s real time in many aspects. But how it works is it’s not real AI, which I think a lot of bloggers might be confused by. It just generates human-like text in a one-word-follows-the-other model, so to speak. So it’s trained only on the knowledge it has access to, though it does again have an incredibly large corpus of data to work with. Well, ChatGPT would be great for a ton of SEO tasks involving … again, you saw Bjork mention it, you could do everything from coloring pages to keyword research to ideation, to have it write complete outlines, comparing-contrasting, grouping, you could take a list of keywords and organize it by semantic intent.

The sky’s the limit, but where a lot of bloggers get kind of hung down is how they can use it effectively, and that really involves understanding how to put together effective prompts. And a prompt is what you use to get what you want out of ChatGPT. So let me go over a simple three-step process that you might be able to use to your benefit. And the three steps involve role, task, and format. So let’s say that I wanted to do a prompt and I wanted to do something like generate a list of long-tail keywords around the keyword “banana cream pie”, and I wanted those keywords to have some kind of informative intent, which would be common if I wanted to write a complete post on banana cream pie. So I might phrase it in three specific lines, and the first line, that’s the role, and what you’re doing is you’re telling ChatGPT what role you want them to play.

So I would say, “ChatGPT, you are an experienced content writer with a deep understanding of keyword research.” That would be line number one where I’m just telling ChatGPT what role I want to play.

And you could set them up any way. Like let’s say my son was trying to write an article on Abraham Lincoln. He might go in and say, “You are an experienced historian with a deep understanding of Civil War area history. That’s how you would set the prompt up because you’re telling, you’re providing information so that ChatGPT can normalize the responses. Well, then after you’ve got that, then you go to your next line, the second line of the prompt, and that’s your contribution or what we call the task. And so if we go back to our example on banana cream pie, the task would be ”I’m going to give you a seed keyword, banana cream pie.”

So I’m going to give them that right there and I want you to give me … and then I’m going to go to my final line, which is my expectation, and that’s a format where I’m going to say, create it in a certain way. And I can create it as a list, a table, an Excel document, code, HTML. The sky’s the limit. And I might just say line number two, “I’m going to give you a seed keyword, banana cream pie,” and then my final line would be, “I want you to give me 10 longtail keywords with informative tent based on the seed keyword just as a list.” And then you’ll see that it will return and spit out that information based upon how you’ve organized your prompts.

Or you could just go in and be really … you could combine that and just say something like, “You are an expert in SEO and keyword analysis. Analyze recipe X for this keyword X and provide me a list of stemmed related keywords it contains.” So it’s really all about you having a conversation with ChatGPT based upon your end result.

And so people always ask, “Well, can we trust the outputs?” Well, just like with anything else, we test and test and test. You would never take the output from ChatGPT verbatim and paste it into your site or somewhere else. You would review it and maybe run it through Google. I always run it through a tool called Originality.ai to make sure that it doesn’t look like it was AI-generated, rewrite it accordingly. But in many cases, as long as you’re providing simple tasks, you can trust 100% the output it gives you. The more detailed you get, the more detailed your prompt needs to be to make sure that you’re not receiving what are called hallucinations, which is when the AI goes off the rails and starts giving you information that is not only 100% incorrect, but they make up facts thinking that that’s what you need to complete the query. And that does happen.

Bjork Ostrom: And it feels authoritative. It’s not like it’s like, “I don’t know if this is right.” It’s just like the response feels factual, but in actuality it’s not.

Casey Markee: Yeah, and again, and I’m all for using ChatGPT, I cover it in my audits. I provide detailed spreadsheets. As a matter of fact, I’m going to go ahead and paste over … Here are some free PDFs covering tons of ChatGPT prompts for SEO that I have bookmarked. These are very helpful for the average blogger, so take a look at those. They’re just free PDFs you can download and they’ll help you both increase the quality and veracity of your prompts, but also make sure that you’re getting what you need out of the system when you need it.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And one thing that we were chatting a little bit about before we went live was this idea of content that is entirely AI-created living within a post. So in the example you’re giving, it’s almost like a brainstorming exercise. You could also then say, “Write me a thousand-word post on this topic.” Can you talk about that line and what you’d advise creators when it comes to actually generating the written portion of a piece of content with AI?

Casey Markee: Well, Google just came out today, and again, we’re going to go back to the search liaison, Danny Sullivan. He just had a tweet today that was shared by my colleague Glenn Gabe, saying that, as a reminder, Google is against AI content, which is used to rank SEO. I want to be very clear about that because they said that they had clarified this months ago, but there’s still some, as any SEO will tell you, there’s always that gray space. Well, they’re trying to eliminate that gray space. They’re saying, we want you to use AI as a tool, but it should never be something that you use to publish complete pages, publish as your main way to get something to rank at the top of Google. That is against our guidelines, specifically our spam policies.

So how would you use AI to your benefit? Well, you would use it to rewrite existing content. One great way to use it would be … showing a client the other day how they can use it to steal. People also ask queries in Google. You go to Google, you find that people also ask queries that are there. You take those, you pop them into ChatGPT and have them rewrite it in a completely unique text, keeping the same information and word count, and then you rewrite it again so that you have that unique content that you can then put on your own site, with the hope being that you still … that people also ask Query from Google. That’s a simple way for you to use it as a rewriting tool.

Other ways, again, would be keyword research. Other ways would be putting together an outline. Maybe you wanted to do a complete guide on home pie-making. It will be able to show, based upon the corpus it has access to, what the main H2s or main subsections of that article would look like, and then you would slowly go in and start piecing together that outline based upon your own thoughts, based upon the information that ChatGPT provides, and the like. What you wouldn’t do is let ChatGPT write the whole thing.

Bjork Ostrom: So it’s like how do you be selective in using it as a tool?

Casey Markee: Exactly.

Bjork Ostrom: And it kind of can superpower what you do. Like if you’re a developer, it can be a really great sidekick or copilot, to use Microsoft’s term, to what you’re doing and superpower what you’re doing. But I have a friend, Jeff Coyle, MarketMuse, who’s also in the world of SEO, where he talks about really what it should be is it should be a multiplier on your authority, and you are an expert, you know what you’re talking about, and you use some of these tools to amplify that and allow you to create content in a more seamless way. And I think that’s a great way to think about it. It’s like, how do you use it as a multiplier for you as the creator?

Casey Markee: And you’ll see in those PDFs that I’ve uploaded that that’s covered. You’ll find ways, really novel ways for you to use ChatGPT based upon what you’re trying to do. It’s broken down business functions, marketing functions, research, education functions. There’s various ways that you can use that to, as you say, help build and reinforce your own authority.

Just remember the cardinal rule of using ChatGPT and all these other AI-powered tools. Always be polite. I always say please and thank you because I want to make sure that-

Bjork Ostrom: To ChatGPT, because when a day that, 20 years from now-

Casey Markee: When the day comes and our robot overlords take over, I want them to remember that I was polite.

Bjork Ostrom: Thank you and…

Casey Markee: When at all possible.

Bjork Ostrom: Always say thank you.

Casey Markee: That’s right.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s a great tip.

Casey Markee: Mark my words.

Bjork Ostrom: All right, so Lucy is asking, “What should we know about Google’s decision to push the removal of cookies back?” It just feels like this continues to happen. This maybe doesn’t fall in the world of SEO, but definitely in the world of Google. Do you have any thoughts on that?

Casey Markee: Yeah, Google said back on 12–14 that it would start phasing out third party cookies and they wanted to use what was called their Privacy Sandbox. They wanted to limit the amount of cross-site tracking by deprecating these third party cookies and this Privacy Sandbox was a way for them to do that. Well, it seemed all great and they started with Chrome, and they were going to go ahead and pull back the cookies across about 1% of queries and their goal was to have this done by the first half of 2024. Well, just a couple weeks ago, as a matter of fact, and I’m going to go ahead and find and share the notice, you just come to find out that this was not okay with the UK. The UK specifically was having problems with this because they weren’t sure how Google was going to approach the activity. So basically the concerns are tied to the UK’s Competition And Market Authority, the CMA. I’m going to go ahead and paste the post here.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great.

Casey Markee: But kind of as a summary here, it’s understandable. Google … it’s a lot more … we treat Google here in the United States with velvet gloves. That’s just always been the case. If Google gets both a lot that they cannot get away with in the UK and Europe in general, especially the European Union. The results that you see, if you’ve ever traveled abroad, are completely different than the results that you get here in the United States, especially with regards to intent or financial-based transactions.

And basically the concerns of the UK’s competition and markets authority is threefold. Google may continue to benefit from user activity while limiting competitors’ access to the same data, and that was their first concern. The second concern was that Google has the ability to 100% control the inclusion or the exclusion of ad tech rivals, so various ad companies on the list, and they could leverage their own ad tech services, basically Google Ads, previously AdSense, to have a benefit overall.

And then finally the third concern was that publishers and advertisers maybe less likely and effective in identifying fraudulent activity when they push this through. So long story short, they’re working over here to kind of make sure that at least before this goes full bore, that Google has addressed these specific concerns. And I’m going to go ahead and paste over the search engine land article that talks about this in a little bit more detail. I would say that the odds are very, very good that if a huge improvement is not made by the April deadline, this could be pushed back into probably the second or third quarter of 2025, so you’ll have a little bit more breathing room before we have this huge paradigm shift in the ability to lose our tracking data. And of course, that’s going to affect both our PMs and our bottom line ability to track the ads and on where our referrals are coming from specifically. I know it’s a big pain point, but there is … they’re still working on it so you have a little bit more time.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And it seems like what keeps happening is that just the can gets kicked down the road further, which is okay because it’s hard to know for sure how it’ll impact publishers, but the assumption is that one of the ways, and maybe the leading assumption is that it’ll make advertising less effective, which could then decrease RPM specifically within Chrome browser, which a lot of people use, and which is the primary one that would be impacted. So nice to have that delayed a little bit and good to have an update on it. So thanks for that.

Here’s a specific question around category pages. Vanessa’s asking, “What should a great category page include and should the SEO title have archives added to it to the end of it?” And then she goes on to say, “Yoast seems to have it set as default,” to have archives added, I guess. So talk about why category pages are important within the world of SEO in general, and then what does a great category page look like?

Casey Markee: Well, category pages are important because they’re like windows into the house that is your blog. I think you might’ve heard me say that on previous podcasts, but they’re very important as a way to showcase collections of our best content. Category pages these days have evolved into things that can rank at the top of Google for very high authority and high volume keyword phrases.

A good example would be the phrase “breakfast recipes”, which is incredibly high volume, and one of the most topped results in the world is Lauren Allen from Taste Better From Scratch. And I’m going to go ahead and paste over her example page here because it’s a great example of what a category page should look like when designed and optimized effectively.

So when we’re talking about category pages, what we’re doing is, as you said, archives has no place in a title. We’re not trying to rank for archives, we’re trying to rank for breakfast recipes, and unless you’re a big psych like Lauren is, the odds of most people on this call ranking for breakfast recipes or appetizer recipes or even dessert recipes is extremely low. But that’s why optimization comes into play. You want to make sure that you have a category page that you have full control over two elements. You have the On-page H1 and you have the Yoast title. The Yoast title and the On-page. H1 should easily match when at all possible. It’s very funny how I still keep running into themes that do not have the ability to set a custom archive headline. This has been a default design in Feast, Genesis, CultivateSites, others, for years, but even Cadence does not have that ability. If I always see everyone saying, “I’m going to move to Cadence, it’s so great.” It’s missing a huge optimization issue with the category pages. There is no archive headline.

And so for those of you who don’t understand what I’m talking about, the only way that you can change the name of your category page is to in turn change the name of the page, which in turn change the name of your breadcrumb. That’s not good. We always want the category, we always want the breadcrumb, the name of the page and the archive headline to operate independently. Just like every page on the site, we want to have full control over our headline, which is our H1.

So example, if we wanted to try to rank for breakfast recipes, I want to be able to make sure that my H1 and my Yoast title match. It’s a strong reinforcement signal. Talked about this previously, whenever you’ve done results or studies, for example, Zippy.com did one back in January of 2023, they found that when your On-page H1 and your Yoast titles didn’t match, Google changed the titles 63% of the time. That’s why we don’t get crazy-

Bjork Ostrom: To match? Or just-

Casey Markee: … to match. They chose one of them and you never had any choice of which one they were choosing.

So to do that, we have to fight the rewriting of our titles by making sure that we have a reinforcement signal. So I always recommend in our audits that the H1 and the Yoast title match, and we want to be detailed. So if you’re a relatively small or midsize blogger, we have to find out what it is about your recipes that’s unique. If you’re a gluten-free blogger, for example, every one of your category pages is going to be something like “easy gluten-free breakfast recipes” or “easy gluten-free dinner recipes” because that’s going to provide an ability for you through the longtail, to have a possibility of generating traffic, because you’re never going to generate traffic on just breakfast recipes, dinner recipes, and the like.

So take a look at this example that I pasted over from Taste Better From Scratch. You’ll notice that they have the custom titles at the top. You’ll notice that they have archive information at the top, information where we’re telling Google and users what the page is about. That’s very important. We don’t want to just have an empty page with just links to recipes.

Now, if you scroll down, you’ll also see the modular point of the page, the best recipe … the best category pages these days are ones where it’s not just a chronological list of all the posts. The best category pages these days are arranged with somatic versions of the recipes. So currently right now, everyone and their mother is looking for Valentine’s Day recipes or possibly game day recipes. So if I’m visiting an appetizer page on the site right now, I would like to have a custom block towards the top that says, “Here are my top game day recipes.” Right below that, I might have another section, “Here’s my romantic appetizers for two,” and then below that I might have all the rest of the categories or the rest of the recipes laid out accordingly.

Unfortunately, that is just not common in a lot of themes. Fortunately, I give it to Skyler, he just pushed out custom categories. So now you’re able to do that as a default in the Feast plugin for all of your categories. This is also something that you’ll see if you have a custom design site, you’ll want to add that functionality. Again, CultivateWP does it incredibly well, but it’s not something that you’re going to find by default and an Astro or a Cadence or whatever. You have to get a developer who’s able to do that for you. It’s just a very specific type of category soup that’s needed for those pages to be effective.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep, that’s great.

Casey Markee: And so take a look at the example there, and that’s pretty self-explanatory.

Bjork Ostrom: And it’s almost, I think the general mindset shift that you have to have going into it is a category page is a page itself. It’s not just like a list of all of the different posts in that category, which a lot of themes will do that. You’ll have a category page and it’s just like a list, and it’s just chronological order of everything that’s in that category. But where it’s done best is it’s almost you’re viewing it as a page itself and the page is dedicated to highlighting all of the different content that’s in that category, and has different sections, and maybe there’s a paragraph of text, a short paragraph that explains things. So a couple of great examples that you included.

Casey Markee: Exactly. Yeah, and I’ve pasted over an example from Sally’s Bacon Addiction. She has an exceptionally designed site. She ranks at the top for a lot of her category pages, and it’s not just because she’s a strong site, though that certainly helps. It’s because her category pages are correctly and fully optimized based upon user intent. As you scroll through the cupcakes recipe example I’ve given you, you can see that she has it segmented. She has top cupcakes at the top and then allows you to scroll down to see seasonally relevant components related to cupcakes. And you’re going to find that that’s a similar approach that she takes to all category pages, and it’s definitely something I would recommend if you have the ability to do on your site, you should.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great.

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We have a question here coming in around keyword research. So Mika says, “Can you recommend a keyword research tool?” And she asks about one that’s affordable. So can you talk about what keyword research is for those who maybe aren’t familiar, and then how keyword research tools fit into the equation?

Casey Markee: Sure. Well, if I’d be honest with you, if you’re on this call and you don’t know what keyword research is, I would say that that’s your first thing to do after we get off this call is to research. Go back, take a look at some of our past webinars. Go ahead and take a look at the SEO for Publishers webinar on keyword research. I’ll see if I can find a link for that. But keyword research is how we’re optimizing our site for what Google and users are looking for. Very simply put, our goal is to find not only those diamonds in the rough, keywords that have a low-competition, but a high search volume, but also keywords based upon our authority and our current content that we have an actual chance of ranking for. And that is a very fine line or tightrope to lock these days because it’s very hard to find keywords that not a thousand other people have already worked with.

It doesn’t matter if you’re using someone like RankIQ and you say, “Okay, RankIQ is telling me that I can rank for these keywords.” Well, it’s also telling a thousand other people as well that they can rank for the same keyword, and many times the tool is not removing, quote, those content briefs fast enough. And you find that you’ve got a lot of people using the same keywords and you’re wondering why you’re not having as much success as you’re supposed to have in the end.

But when we talk about keyword tools, there’s a lot out there. I tend to recommend Keywords Everywhere. It’s no longer relatively a free tool, though I think you can still get about 15 searches a month, but Keywords Everywhere is a browser add-on. You can use it through Chrome or Firefox or Safari, and what you do is you buy credits and that allows you to be able to search a combination of information. You can search the direct Google API from Google Ads, or you could go ahead and search clickstream data or you can search one or the other.

And that is a great way for you to have an access to very good data at a very small price point. For example, I think you can pay 10 bucks for 10,000 credits, which is good for several months. So if you’re starting out, Keywords Everywhere, very simple way to do keyword research.

The second tool would be KeySearch. I’ve been a big believer in KeySearch for years. Keysearch is also one of the only tools out there that has a direct access to the Google Ads API. Matter of fact, the only two that I’m aware of currently that do is KeySearch and Keywords Everywhere. It’s too expensive for everyone else based upon their volume. It doesn’t matter if you’re using Semrush or using some of these other tools out there, Hreps and the like, they don’t have access to the Google API and they’re using what’s called clickstream data, which is data that they’re getting from their own tools or from third parties, and then they run their own algorithms around that data so that you can get average traffic patterns, average volume, and what traffic you might be getting.

So that’s why when you go to Semrush and you see these huge waves in your traffic volume, those aren’t necessarily reliable because it’s not based upon your data, it’s based upon a guess, and guesses in many cases are horrible.

So again, if you’re looking to really do good keyword research, take a competent course. Many of you are probably familiar with Alika’s Cooking With Keywords. It’s still very good. She does a very good job of keeping that updated. I believe she still uses KeySearch and that and probably mentions Keywords Everywhere. Or look at one of our webinars that we’ve done. Keyword research is there is as many different approaches as there are raindrops, so in your case, you just have to find an approach that’ll work for you. The goal, of course, is to just get to use a tool and a strategy that you’re comfortable with. Just because you see someone doing something one way, doesn’t mean that you have to do it that way. You might find that a different approach works just fine for you.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And like you said, it’s a tool and the tool isn’t the answer, but it helps, much like AI, ChatGPT, it helps along the way. And you still have to create an incredible piece of content, you still have to talk about doing all the technical elements with it, but it’s a great tool that can kind of guide you along the way.

Speaking of structuring a post, somebody had a question here about video. Cherry says, “What’s the thinking behind adding video to each recipe post? I read or heard someone recently saying that after the HCU Helpful Content Update, Google is going to expect each recipe to have a video of that recipe included in the post.” And then she says, “Just curious if Casey knows anything about it.”

Casey Markee: Yeah, I’m not aware of any such statement, so I would say that I would question who swear or where you read that because I can assure you that if Google has said that, I’d know it. And I’m not aware of any such statements saying that they give any preference to recipes with video. On the contrary, video is really only good if you have quality videos to add. It’s not going to generate much traffic because Google changed how they handle videos and video thumbnails back in April of 2023. They eliminated them if they were not the predominant feature of the page.

So think about that. For you to have a video to generate any sort of traffic for you, you’d have to put that video at the top of your page, which in many cases would be an extremely poor experience for most users because they probably would not go all the way down the page, which might lower your RPMs considerably or destroy the ability of you to get that scrolling action necessary to even generate your ads in the first place.

Now, you could … we’ve experimented with some Bloggers, Feel Good Foodie comes to mind, where they tried to set up unique pages to highlight each of their individual videos. The problem was they’re thin pages that no one ever visited, there’s no traffic on them. We’re going to experiment next in adding full transcripts to them to see if they do anything. But so far, it’s been very mixed. If you have a video and you can add it to your recipe card or better yet, you have a video and you can upload it to your ad company and then they can have a pre-roll on that that they put higher in the post for you, great.

But no, there is no … and I’ve been doing this a long time. There are plenty of sites who dominate Google that have never embraced a video and that hasn’t changed. If video is something that you want to do, great, but it’s absolutely not a make or break. As a matter of fact, I don’t even recommend bloggers even consider investing in video until they’ve optimized or got to about 50,000 sessions a month and optimized for a quality ad company. Then and only then should they be thinking about video as just a way to increase their revenue because we can monetize those videos accordingly.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. So idea being, Google releases this update and it’s like, you can still rank for a video, but you’re going to only rank for a video if you’re creating content that’s video-forward. That’s kind of the primary reason you’re creating it.

Casey Markee: Yeah. The only time you’re going to see your videos anymore is if you go to the actual tab on Google that says Video.

Bjork Ostrom: Yes. Right. Versus where they used to be included more, and you’d see thumbnails with videos on a-

Casey Markee: Yeah, organic video thumbnails have been eliminated, so that was a benefit of you continuing to add that. So whether it’s post-HCU or pre-HCU, that has a change. We’re not getting any video thumbnails and the search results these days, or carousels.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. Cool. Thanks for the update on that. Here’s a question that I thought was kind of interesting. So this is from Maddie. She says, “I understand the importance of SEO, but it kills my motivation in creating recipes. Sometimes I don’t wish SEO to dictate what I want to bake or cook, and I just really want to create what inspires me. Do you have any specific strategies or thoughts on how to go through this or how to process that?”

Casey Markee: And that’s a tough situation to be in because when people come to me, they’re trying to do one thing: monetize. So the literal 90% of my business is either bloggers who are trying to monetize and qualify for an ad company or bloggers who have already monetized and they’re trying to significantly increase their bottom line. And to do that, that means that we have to cater to our audiences. We always have to determine, you might love to write lasagna recipes, but if your audience doesn’t like lasagna, then honestly you’re going to have to make the decision, “I’m going to be a hobby blogger for a long time.”

You have to determine whether or not this is a hobby or a business for you, and by doing that, you have to change your mindset. If you’re okay understanding that publishing things that you just want to publish is going to limit your reach and it might take you longer to build, that’s fine. Nothing wrong with that. It’s your site. You should totally feel the freedom to do that. But if you’re asking yourself, is there, can I do that and still make money? I think the downside of that is yes, but it’s going to be through social, Pinterest and email. It’s never going to be through organic search. And I think that’s the bare bones way to look at it.

Bjork Ostrom: And it almost is … one of the things we’ve been talking a lot about, I had a conversation with David Lebovitz on this, is it’s like, if your monetization in this space is going to be through ads and/or affiliate, the way that you’re going to get that is through some that traffic coming somewhere. And like you said, it can come from email, it can come from social, it can come from direct, but the easiest way, it’s still really hard, but the most popular way is maybe a better way to say it, is through search. If you’ve realized that search isn’t for you, then you probably needed to change either your monetization metric, and you could go pure social. You’re just going to create content on Instagram, TikTok, on Twitter, but what you’re going to do is direct everybody to a Substack newsletter, which is monetized.

Casey Markee: Exactly, which is becoming very popular. I get it. If you don’t want to blog, Substack is the way to go. I have known, David’s one of them, but there are plenty of others who have just started where they literally do nothing but Substack. The problem is it’s just like Google, what should happen? What if something happens with Substack?

Bjork Ostrom: There’s always a platform risk.

Casey Markee: Always a platform risk. So when we’re talking about this with SEO, it’s all about literally putting your bait in many different ponds, and that’s what it is whether your goal is to … You know, if someone comes to me and they’ve generated all their traffic from Pinterest and social, it’s a huge opportunity. I salivate because I know that I can make significant changes to their site and their content approach, and we could double or triple their traffic very quickly because Google is such a wide open pond that they’ve never really put resources towards, but that requires us to change kind of how they approach that. And in doing so, they might lose a couple percentages from the other holes as well. That’s like taking a Pinterest-first approach.

You can’t take a Pinterest-first approach to all of your content and be successful on Google, just not going to happen, because people stuffing their pages with long pins and other things, that’s an outdated practice, especially with the amount of people who pin from the app these days. We just don’t do things like that. There’s a very specific approach to putting together a recipe post specifically that will do well in Google, and it’s not the same as you would approach your content and Pinterest.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. And one other thought that I’d have really quickly for Maddie is potentially shifting the SEO focus. As an example, maybe you come up with 20 different recipes that you’d be really inspired to create, and then you do keyword research on those 20 recipes to say, here’s where I think the best opportunity would be, as opposed to only doing keyword research and then only creating the recipes that you see the keyword research opportunity in.

So I think there is that opportunity to shift when the focus is, knowing that … I’d be interested in your thoughts on this … if you lead with keyword research, you probably will find more opportunities to get more search traffic, versus if you approach it while looking at the recipes that you feel inspired by, there might not be the same opportunities, but you can still be strategic about thinking about search.

Casey Markee: And I’m all for that. I mean, there’s just some bloggers who, they have very specific recipes that, they’ve told me, I’m never going to rank for this, but I like this recipe. It was handed down to me. Maybe there’s an heirloom approach to it. Maybe it’s a legacy recipe. I’m going to publish it and have it on my site. I don’t see any issues with that. That’s common.

I think where bloggers get into trouble is making 9 out of 10 recipes like that. And as long as you’re not doing that, I think there’s room for success and truth to both camps there.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. Cool. We’ll keep moving along here. This question says, “I’m building topic clusters. What would having multiple iterations or flavors of a recipe, for example, homemade ice cream, that is then tied back to a roundup post count? Is the roundup considered a pillar if it offers all the best tips and tricks for the topic?” So thoughts on this one?

Casey Markee: Yeah, I think when we’re talking about topic clusters, it’s very seldom that I hear a roundup being considered a quality pillar because they’re not usually quality in their construction. A quality roundup these days might have a very clear introduction. It might have you selling the user right at the top, here’s my top recommendation. Then it’ll have you listing your other recommendations, then it might have maybe an FAQ or some expert tips towards the bottom. But the days of just publishing a post with 80 of your top recipes, that’s just not an effective way to approach things these days. No one wants to wade through that amount of options.

So I think the better option would be for you to consider maybe a uniform post where, you know, a detailed guide on ice cream that then links out to all these individual recipes and reinforces those. So you put together a very detailed guide, that would be your pillar content, and you could use ChatGPT to go in and look at an outline for that.

If I was going to put together a detailed outline on ice cream and I wanted to answer the most common questions, blah, blah, blah, what would it be? And then it’ll give you pretty good information that you could then refine and publish it your intent. But I find that that is going to be a little bit more successful for you.

And that kind of leads me into … and I definitely want to make sure that we talk about this: internal linking. I cannot tell you how important internal linking … if we don’t remember anything today, remember this internal linking is one of the greatest things that you can do on your site to rank more effectively and faster. The problem is that people screw up internal linking all the time. We had an audit today and they’re a very successful blogger, but they had gotten some bad advice and they were going through their entire site and linking things like steak and dessert and turnip and corn and tomato.

Folks, that is the worst thing you can do for internal linking. When we link internally, we link by what we want to rank for. Please remember that. We want to try to be very somatic in our choices, very deliberate. If I want to rank for Salisbury steak, I need to go through and link Salisbury steak or Salisbury steak recipe or best Salisbury steak recipe, or “This recipe goes great with my Salisbury steak.” Those are the kind of things we link. We don’t go in and just link Salisbury and steak and think that that’s going to help us in the long run. That’s not how Google works. Google’s going to be looking at the topical reinforcement that we’ve done internally, following that, and that’s going to help us considerably.

So if you’re linking internally, and for example, Link Whisper are unfortunately terrible about this, it’ll give you many recommendations that are horrible … really focus on not necessarily the recommendations that Link Whisper gives you, but on being very specific, be very deliberate. If I’m trying to improve my ranking for a recipe, use our ChatGPT prompts, go over there, find 10 longtail keywords related to my recipe and start going through my site and linking by means of those 10 related longtail phrases. That’s going to provide more enforcement internally than you going through and linking random words just because.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, so point being, internal linking is important. So you have a page on your site and you want to make sure that every page somehow is connected to another page. We don’t want it to be orphaned where it doesn’t have any links coming in. When we are linking, the words that we select to be the link are important, and what those words say and that … can you talk about why that is? That signals to Google to some degree.

Casey Markee: Right, and it also makes perfect sense to the user. Why would a user click on something that just says steak? It doesn’t qualify them. There’s nothing there. Steak? What kind of steak? I want to know, from an accessibility and from a user standpoint, where I’m going. So the more detailed your link, the better. Linking steak would be like linking “click here”. There’s no real value to users.

So if we go back to our ice cream pillar example, you should be going internally and linking to our new ice cream pillar by means of “homemade ice cream information,” “everything you’d ever want to know about ice cream,” “chocolate ice cream recipe example.” Whatever. Whatever those keyword phrases are, they need to be detailed, they need to make sense, and they need to be linked directly into our pillar to reinforce that internally.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great. How about process shots? So Cherry says, “What are your thoughts on process shots? Are they still absolutely necessary in every recipe, even if it’s super simple? And then also, does every recipe post still have to be 800–1,000 words, or can we be more concise now After Helpful Content Update?

Casey Markee: Well, respectfully, not every recipe ever needed to be 800 to a thousand words before the Helpful Content Update. Word count is not now, nor has it ever been a ranking factor. There’s plenty of situations where you can go and look at the top results, and they’re not 1,000 words. They’re not 2,000 words. They might be shorter.

We always want to take a look at what Google is ranking and then emulate that. If you tend to find that the top five results tend to be longer recipes, then it makes sense that we might want to try to emulate that word count as close as we can, but we just want a more detailed and more useful recipe. Now, to me, it’s all about usability. Anyone who’s had an audit with me will know that I’m really big on being useful to the user, and to me, there is nothing more high quality than having process shots.

To me, I really want to optimize for toddlers and drunk adults. You’ve heard me say that as well. We want to really dumb things down as much as possible. If you’ve got eight or less process shots, then I really want you to start embracing columns, column blocks. They look fantastic on mobile devices. You have a column and a text block right next to each other. You have two. You have one side by side, and these stack incredibly well on mobile. But if you’ve got more than 10 process shots, which is very common, especially if you have incredibly detailed Indian recipes or pastries or fridge cuisine, it’s very commonly used for photo collages and I’m all for that. You would use a 1200 pixel wide four-photo collage. You would number those. You would number the individual steps.

And that way, you don’t have a recipe that has 20 photos. Instead, we can have a recipe that has 20 individual process shots, but it’s communicated in five collages, which is much more manageable for the user, much easier on the eyes scrolling, and it’s also going to prevent the page from being so big, we run into rendering issues with Google or paid speed issues as well.

Bjork Ostrom: And I think it’s a great reminder that a lot of what we’re doing is we’re trying to create content under best practices for Google, but a lot of what the best practices from Google come from are user experience considerations for people. And so it’s the art and science of saying like, okay, we have this hard data, and sometimes it’s actual metrics that we can use, but we also need to think about what are we doing? And what we’re doing is creating content for people.

Casey Markee: And again, it’s so funny, when I have these audits, I don’t necessarily give these recommendations because I personally like them. That’s not the case at all. We give the recommendations based on hard data. We’ve been doing usertesting.com surveys since 2018, which is almost about the point where you and I had our first sit-down, and since 2018 we’ve been doing these usertesting.com surveys all over the United States and Canada. At this point now we’re into the six figures of people we’ve interviewed, and it’s always different.

That’s how process shots came to be. That’s how the Jump To Recipe button became to be a standard. That’s what users wanted. So if you’re coming to a site and you haven’t surveyed your audience, that’s the only data that I would take as an argument when you have an audit with me that you shouldn’t be using process shots because we have the data saying that’s what users want. Just like having a labeled photo of the ingredients, people, they just love it. They love walking through the store and just pulling stuff off of the shelf. I don’t know. Call it the dumbing down of America if you want, but they love it. And so when people ask if that’s what we should do, I say absolutely, because that’s what the competitor’s doing and that’s what the testing shows. We don’t make this up. Hey, if the data said no one gives a crap about a labeled ingredient shot, I wouldn’t be recommending that in the audits.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. And again, comes back to that user experience. That’s all what we’re trying to do is create a good user experience for people, and the best way to know what that is to ask.

Casey Markee: And please, we say this all the time, and I’m always surprised about they don’t do it. It takes no time at all for you guys to run a user testing.com survey of your audience. Just… the tool escapes me, but there’s a free site there that allows you to do that. You can do free heat mapping, you can install plugins. Take a look and see how people are interacting with your recipes. You can film a thousand sessions a day very easily. That’s a great amount of data. How are users interacting across very specific page types?

Set up your own survey. Survey Monkey. Use Survey Monkey to set up a very simple 10 to 12-question survey and have people send that out to your email list. What do you like about my site? What would you like to see? What about these features? What about these features? And then take that data and refine it based upon your existing audience.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, that’s great. One more question coming in here that we’ll hit. We won’t have time to get to all of them, but this is a question about recipe schema and FAQ schema. So Christina’s asking, “Is using Yoast FAQ, frequently asked questions, in a recipe blog post creating competing schema with the recipe schema?”

Casey Markee: No.

Bjork Ostrom: And then she goes on to say, “I’m hearing some experienced bloggers going away from the FAQ block in favor of a handful of H2s or H3s that answer questions. Do you have a recommendation?”

Casey Markee: Yeah, that sounds like a personal preference. There is no conflict between the schemas at all, ever.

As a matter of fact, I always recommend using the FAQ blocks in all my audits because they look better and we can collapse them. If you install a Yoast FAQ block, then you can install a simple accordion plugin and collapse those, which improve readability considerably on scrolling. And more than that, it also allows us a bigger chance that we are going to be able to capture those people who also ask queries from Google. So I have no problem with it. Anyone who would say that an FAQ is going to place you at a competitive disadvantage has no idea what they’re talking about. I mean, I have literally seen it all, and I have audited some of the top food blogs in the world and they’re using FAQ schema just fine.

Bjork Ostrom: That’s great.

Casey Markee: So if you don’t want to use it, great, but don’t do it because some blogger told you that it has a conflict because that’s not true at all.

Bjork Ostrom: Yep. We’re coming to the end here. Casey, you have mentioned a couple times you do audits. You also do a ton of these live Q&As, podcasts. You show up in all different places around the internet. In terms of your business, you have Comic Con, your side hustle, which maybe there are some people who would come and visit you at the next Comic Con.

Casey Markee: Yeah. It’s going to be good times.

Bjork Ostrom: But a lot of what you do in your day-to-day is auditing sites, providing feedback, showing opportunities. And I know that you’re usually booked out pretty far, but can you talk about how people could connect with you if they’re interested in that, what that might look like, where people can find you?

And then while you’re sharing, Casey, would be interested to hear from anybody who’s tuning in live just to hear one takeaway, one thing that you learned, one thing that was new or one thing that was interesting in the conversation today with some of the answers that Casey shared. So people can be sharing that and thinking about that, and then Casey, if you can talk about where you’re most active online and how people could connect you to you if they’re interested in doing an audit.

Casey Markee: Sure. Well, the goal is to try to do as many of these free resources as possible, because I think for the average blogger, this is going to help you considerably, especially to separate the facts from the innuendo and kind of break bad practices. The FAQ is a good one. That’s ridiculous. You’re going to be fine using an FAQ block. If you don’t want to use it, that’s going to be a personal opinion. Certainly not going to hurt you.

But the goal of my audits is just to provide a learned eye towards what you’re doing and what you’re doing wrong. And what we’re going to do is provide a forensic review of how I or Google would view your site algorithmically. That’s it. Our goal is to show you, based upon a technical, and a content, and a UX review, what it is you’re doing, what is that we can improve, and how Google might view your site through the lens programmatically as an unbiased third party, or in many cases, a biased third party. You can see my information. If you go to mediawyse.com, I’ll put the link in here, or maybe I’ll have Emily paste that over.

Bjork Ostrom: Emily already dropped it in there.

Casey Markee: Yeah. You can go to my Contact Me page for … there’s a form there. It shows you kind of when we’re onboarding and the like. But most people, unless you have at least around a hundred posts, you shouldn’t have an audit. There’s plenty of information out there that I provide plenty of information. If you email me, I’ll provide a couple quick things you could work on and I’ll include a list of my podcasts and interviews so you can take a look at those. I know it’s tough out there. It’s never been more competitive to be a food blogger. If you’ve been doing this for a long time and you’ve like, man, I’ve taken this course and I’ve taken this course and I can’t get over the hump, audits might be worth it for you.

I know that Arsen, Top Hat Rank, they provide coaching now and they have also a similar audit to mine. No wait for that, so that’s something I would also recommend if you don’t want to wait five months to work with me. But SEO is all about the little things, and that’s the goal of an audit. Not everyone needs an audit, but very seldom does someone have an audit and wish they didn’t do it.

So on that note, that’s all I would say.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah. Casey, thanks so much for coming on. Some interesting takeaways here from people as they’re coming in. Sandy mentioned working on category pages is something that she needs to focus on. Christina talks about the anchor text. She always thought I needed to use the same wording for each one, like the original key phrase I’m trying to rank for.

Casey Markee: Yeah, totally, very common. But yeah, we want to vary that. Like I said, just top in, putting your focus keyword into ChatGPT, put it into Google. Look at the related results under there. If you put it into Google and you look at the autocomplete that’s going below you, that’s a great way for you to pull 7 to 10 examples of related or complementary anchor text that you can start building some real internal links to as well.

Bjork Ostrom: Yeah, Alison mentioned, “Going to work on formatting process shots into columns. Thanks for the tip.” Graham and Christina also talked about the schema question and that not being an issue to have two types of schema. So lots of stuff that people are learning and appreciate your insights, your expertise, and your knowledge and your willingness to share it and help the community here. So really appreciate it. As always, good to see you and thanks everybody else for joining in.

Casey Markee: Thanks everyone. Pleasure was mine. Thank you.

Bjork Ostrom: And we’ll see everybody around. Thank you.

Casey Markee: Take care.

Emily Walker: Hello, Emily here from the Food Blogger Pro team. I wanted to pop in today and thank you for tuning into this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We are so grateful for you for listening. Before we sign off, I wanted to talk a little bit about the Food Blogger Pro Forum in case you didn’t know how it works.

If you are a Food Blogger Pro member, you get access to our amazing forum. It’s one of my favorite places on Food Blogger Pro. I spend a lot of time there myself, and on the forum we have tons of different topics for you to explore. We have a building traffic section, a photography section. We have an essential tools section. We chat about generating income and essential plugins, all sorts of areas for you to ask questions and chat with your fellow Food Blogger Pro members.

It’s a great place to connect with fellow members, troubleshoot any issues you’re having, and brainstorm together. Our industry experts are always popping into the forum to help with their questions. Casey Markee and Andrew Wilder are always popping in, and so is Danielle Liss, our legal expert. It’s a really great place to get access to these experts and have them help you with your concerns.

The forum is also just a fantastic place to find a community in this food blogging space as you’re working to grow your site and your business. If you’re ready to join Food Blogger Pro and get access to our wonderful forum, head to foodbloggerpro.com/join to learn more about our membership. We really hope you enjoyed this episode and can’t wait to see you next week for another great episode. Have an amazing week.