Rankings drop

[neooptic]

Hi! Since the new Penguin rollout, we've seen rankings drop for http://www.leanonturkey.co.uk/ for the terms 'turkey recipes' (UK) and 'low fat recipes' (UK) from #4 and #15 respectively. This may be down to very strong competition, but I'm also concerned over the on-page content, which may not be detailed enough. Any tips would be much appreciated!

[DougRoberts]

First of all, don't make any rash assumptions. Ranking can fluctuate for a while especially following such updates. You don't mention how far you've fallen but I'm currently seeing you ranking at #9 for Turkey Recipes, which given the competition is pretty good! I wouldn't panic just yet.

That's not to say that there aren't things you can do to improve you position.

For a start, you're up against lots of very authoritative domains and big brands such as Jamie Oliver, BBC Good Food, Betty Crocker (US) and Channel 4. So not only are you having to battle for rankings (especially for the more generic keywords) but getting the click-through from the SERPs is going to be a challenge as people tend to be drawn to the names/brands they trust.

As a result, you'll want to make sure that the individual recipe pages are pulling their weight. Lots of recipes getting a few visits is going to be better than a generic keywords sending you very little. Look at which recipes are attracting traffic and which aren't and adjust your content appropriately.

These are lots of different factors such as freshness, seasonality etc. Recipes with pumpkin go nuts around halloween! So while I get that Turkey is the focus - don't forget your other ingredients!

You could definitely improve the on-page optimisation and increase the amount of descriptive text about the recipes. Just the method and the list of ingredients isn't going to help you capture long-tail keywords.

One recipe page I looked at consisted of just 165 words. (The html was ~150k!)

Schema markup for recipes can work well. Google has specific search options for recipes enabling you to filter by ingredients, cooking time and calories.

Look at how you can encourage ratings and comments. Lots of your competitions recipes have these!

From a user experience point of view it may also be worth looking at implementing a faceted search to enable people to search your recipes on your site by ingredients etc rather than just pretty bland top level categories.

I'd also consider a responsive design (are people are more likely to have a smartphone/tablet in the kitchen than a laptop or desktop). It would be worth looking at your traffic to see how much of it is coming from mobile.

Hope this helps.

[Raydon]

May I suggest revisiting keyword research and ensure that nothing has change.

Often times kw1+kw2+kw3 could be good for traffic and search in 2009.... if you did you research then for example,

and by 2013 kw2+variant kw1+kw3 maybe the more popular choice for searches...

Check and ensure you have utilized all image SEO capacity and if you have external image / videos make sure they are also optimized to maximum possible extent (backlinks proper, CC in videos, link in descriptions, etc)

after all, one of the main factors in search ranking is traffic, and if you have lost steady traffic for long enough you can get moved around.

I just checked one of your random recipe pages and the main image was named recipes_44.jpg with no alt tag and absolutely no worthy or accurately relevant keywords on the title of the image.

definitely max out on on-site SEO, make sure your titles are relevant, lean and mean

I can't stress A THOROUGH revisit to keyword research enough! Use a myriad of tools to achieve a nice comprehensive list of target keywords for each and every page as well as for the home page and more generic, more primary keywords of interest. See which is more popular now and check the google adwords trends column as well as google trends for past few months and next few months forecast, use google adwords kw tool for current and accurate popularity estimation.

and in the end, double make sure your content gets an easy reading score and is genuine and worthy, these keywords must be used and planted super organically, not for machines, but for humans.

so find out what are people searching more for, "lean turkey" or "low fat turkey" or "healthy turkey" + recipe or +recipes... this all makes quite a bit of differences especially in high end of competition for the very top ranks. and sometimes, you just can't have it both ways and best is to pick one with more popularity over the other or for other business reasons known to you (older generation of clients preferred for example? they may use a more old fashioned term to look for this stuff, although less popular, but acceptable for whatever fictional reason we assumed exists here for that market)