How a Family-Friendly Food Blog Grew Traffic by 162% YoY
https://houseofnasheats.com/
Stats
529.8K to 1.4M Monthly Visits
Industry
Food & Drink
Niche
Food Blog
Reporting Date
November 2023
With over 600 million blogs on the internet, finding your audience is key to making your mark.
Today, we're looking at House of Nash Eats, which combines food, family, and travel to captivate over 1 million readers a month.
But this wasn't always the case.
This food blog's 7-year journey has reached new heights in 2023, and we're telling you exactly what propelled its recent growth.
Plus, you'll pick up tips and strategies to grow your blog.
Let's get started.
In This Article
About House of Nash Eats
Amy Nash, a former litigation attorney, started House of Nash Eats in June 2016.
In her early posts, Amy is candid about her food blogging journey. She viewed House of Nash Eats as a hobby and wanted a place to share her family's favorite recipes.
She also provided a behind-the-scenes look at food blogging and its challenges.
Instead of keeping growth strategies behind lock and key, Amy openly shared her blogging tips and resources.
She published monthly traffic and income reports, documenting her blog's growth while supporting other bloggers on a similar journey.
Amy won encouragement early on.
The comment section is full of bloggers thanking Amy for her transparency. They also expressed their eagerness to watch her grow.
If only they (and Amy herself) could have known where she'd be today, with 1.4 million monthly visits!
Amy's down-to-earth approach has been pivotal in her gaining a loyal following.
The blogging resource is no longer live, but Amy continues to share recipes based on her family's busy schedule and travels.
As we analyze the website in November 2023, we see how Amy's reach extends beyond the website. The following metrics showcase her social media presence:
- Pinterest Followers: 99.3K
- Facebook Followers: 38K
- Instagram Followers: 35.8K
- YouTube Subscribers: 8.9K
Historical Performance
House of Nash Eats didn’t reach this level of popularity overnight.
As we saw, 7 years of work went into growing this blog.
And while some traffic spikes occurred from 2019 to 2021, nothing has come close to the site’s performance in November 2023.
House of Nash Eats keyword rankings further highlight this impressive growth.
So, how did Amy finally break the 1-million milestone? And what can website owners learn from her success story?
You’re about to find out.
The Catalyst: How House of Nash Eats Reached 1.4M Monthly Visits
Houseofnasheats.com grew its organic traffic by performing the following:
- Writing in-depth, comprehensive recipes
- Implementing schema markup to win SERP features
- Acquiring more backlinks
Let’s explore these strategies to see how they affect the blog’s organic traffic.
1. Writing In-Depth, Comprehensive Recipes
Naturally, recipes are at the core of House of Nash Eats’ content.
These in-depth articles give users everything they need to bring a recipe to fruition.
Let’s look at one for an example; we’ll use this recipe for cranberry cheesecake.
From the get-go, users can skip the article and Jump to Recipe.
This user-friendly feature jumps to the recipe card at the bottom of the page.
But for users who prefer to read the article, Amy’s writing style ensures an engaging experience.
For this recipe, she kicks it off by assuring readers she has a trick to avoid the tricky water baths cheesecakes are notorious for.
Then, she scintillates her audience with mouth-watering photos of the dessert ahead. (Check out her strategic internal links below, too!)
She then proceeds to write about the following:
- What you’ll need (ingredients and tips)
- How-to steps (tutorial with photos)
- Recipe FAQs (relevant questions to the recipe, like “Why did my cheesecake crack?”)
- Tips for success (any details to perfect the recipe)
- How to store it (fridge vs freezer options)
- More Christmas dessert recipes (with links)
- Recipe card (as we saw earlier with the jump to recipe button)
Why this matters:
Capturing your audience’s attention and speaking their language is key to boosting user engagement metrics. These act like signals to Google that your content is relevant to their query.
And the more relevant users and search engines find your content, the more likely your page will rank in search results.
House of Nash Eats has experienced incredible growth in keyword rankings over the past year.
November 2023 sets a record high with 436K ranking keywords.
How to boost engagement on your site:
This article details how to improve user engagement on your website.
Here’s an overview of the steps:
- Write really good content.
- Target the right audience.
- Ensure your website is fast and error-free.
- Get user feedback.
- Implement exit-intent popups.
- Add a live chat.
- Include related internal links.
- Use multimedia.
Tools for boosting user engagement and rankings:
You can streamline content optimizations and improve user engagement with the help of an SEO plugin.
All in One SEO (AIOSEO) makes it easy to understand what needs improving in your content to maximize its reach.
The TruSEO On-Page Analysis tool performs various SEO checks to generate helpful checklists that tell you exactly where your content meets or misses the mark.
If an item doesn’t pass, you’ll get an actionable insight with an easy-to-follow recommendation.
Here’s an example of the Readability Checklist:
Now, let’s look at how House of Nash Eats uses technical SEO to ensure its content stands out on the SERP.
2. Implementing Schema Markup to Win SERP Features
Clicks are how you get users to visit the content you worked so hard to create.
And to get clicks, you need to stand out on the SERP.
Schema markup is an element of technical SEO that helps you achieve this.
Schema markup is structured data that lives within the backend of your website. It helps search engines understand the content of your page, which it can then use to generate a rich result on the SERP.
Here’s an example of two rich results from House of Nash Eats for the same query:
The first organic result showcases various schema types, including:
- Recipe
- Rating
- Image
- Breadcrumb
The second example is the recipe schema in Google’s carousel.
In general, House of Nash Eats is generous with its implementation of schema markup. They use it on every page we checked, and it’s paying off in 2023.
During the time of analysis, this website ranked for 49.4K keywords with SERP features.
Featured snippets are the other type of rich result that has recently increased.
Featured snippets appear at the top of SERP before organic results and under ads (when present.)
This is what they look like on the SERP:
Featured snippets aim to answer the user’s query directly on the SERP.
Below, we see how much growth House of Nash Eats has experienced with winning featured snippets.
Why this matters:
Using schema markup to win SERP features is key to unlocking more clicks and traffic.
Featured snippets boast an impressive 35% clickthrough rate (CTR), and rich results secure 58% of all clicks.
Note: Implementing schema markup does not guarantee a SERP feature but increases your chances.
How to implement schema markup on your site:
There are several ways to implement structured data on your site manually.
This tutorial shows three methods for adding schema markup to WordPress without a plugin.
Each method involves a few steps and requires you to obtain and copy code snippets into the appropriate fields.
Tools for implementing schema markup:
AIOSEO’s Schema Generator can implement schema markup for you, so you never have to touch code.
Select the schema type you want, and we’ll format it properly for search engines.
You can choose from an array of schema types, including:
Here is a preview of the Schema Catalog in AIOSEO:
Next, let’s look at how backlinks are playing into House of Nash Eats recent growth.
3. Acquiring More Backlinks
The late summer and fall months of 2023 have seen an influx of backlinks.
There are a few things to note about House of Nash Eats’ backlink profile:
- They have a strong follow-to-nofollow ratio.
A follow link tells search engines to follow the link and crawl the other website. This passes “SEO juice” to the linked website, making it more valuable than a nofollow link.
Note: While there’s no golden ratio, you generally want to aim for more follow links than no follow links.
- Anchor text is natural and relevant.
Anchor text is the clickable text of a link.
Not to get too meta, but the above blue hyperlink’s anchor text is “anchor text.”
Effective anchor text tells search engines and users what the linked page is about and can improve keyword rankings.
It’s important to keep anchor text natural and not only influence rankings. For example, if every backlink to House of Nash Eats said “best food blog,” it may look suspicious.
Instead, House of Nash Eats has a good mix of natural and relevant anchors for its content.
Here are their top anchors:
Why this matters:
Backlinks are among the top two ranking factors.
They act like votes of confidence for your website, vouching for your credibility and trustworthiness.
How to do link building on your site:
Quality over quantity is fundamental to successful backlinking. A few backlinks from reputable sites are worth more than thousands from spam or link schemes.
For a step-by-step tutorial, this guide shows you how to get backlinks.
It’s also important to note that an effective link-building strategy goes beyond backlinks. You should also optimize for the following types of links:
- Internal links (from one page on your site to another page on your site)
- Outbound links (from your site to another external site)
This link-building guide shares steps to optimize for each.
Tools for link building:
AIOSEO’s Link Assistant can help you find internal linking opportunities quickly. With link suggestions that populate directly in the WordPress editor, it’s as simple as clicking Add Link.
Standout SEO Wins
Before we conclude, there’s an additional SEO technique worth highlighting at houseofnasheats.com:
1. They use image SEO to win image rich results.
House of Nash Eats excels at optimizing images to win image rich results and rank in Google image search.
To do so, they implement a few image SEO best practices:
- Using descriptive file names (see blue text in screenshot below)
- Writing SEO-friendly alt text (see black text in screenshot below)
- Setting image schema
- Customizing Twitter cards
The image below shows some of these optimizations for a French fruit tart recipe.
Note: This screenshot was taken from the All in One SEO Analyzer. This free Chrome Extension allows you to perform a competitor analysis or check your site’s optimizations quickly.
In the latter half of 2023, House of Nash Eats has won significantly more rich snippets with images. They rank for 190K keywords in November.
Tool: Eliminate the manual work of image optimizations with AIOSEO’s Image SEO feature. You can use smart tags to automate optimizations like alt text and title tags in a single click.
You can also use the Schema Catalog to implement image schema on your blog.
It’s as simple as uploading your image in the schema setting and answering a few easy questions. We’ll take care of the rest.
Takeaways
In our analysis of houseofnasheats.com, we’ve discovered how Amy’s commitment to high-quality content and her audience’s engagement has proven fundamental to her success.
2023 has been the site’s most exciting year yet, and we look forward to watching this food blog in its next era of growth.
Now, let’s recap which strategies you can replicate on your website to reach the same success and which strategies to reconsider.
Top 3 Strategies to Emulate
- Craft in-depth, comprehensive content. Amy provides readers with detailed, user-friendly content that's easy to digest. Consider how to optimize your content to provide a thorough take on the topic without overwhelming your audience. Breaking up text with appropriate subheadings, using multimedia, and including FAQs are a few ways to achieve this.
- Use schema markup to win SERP features. Schema markup has been instrumental in enhancing the visibility of House of Nash Eats. By optimizing for rich results and featured snippets, you can attract more clicks and users to your site.
- Obtain more backlinks to establish authority. Gaining more backlinks helps boost the discoverability of your content. Aim to cultivate a strong backlink profile from credible sites and use natural anchor text.
Bottom 3 Strategies to Reconsider
- Double-check noindex directives. Some of House of Nash Eats’ travel pages have noindex directives. This tells search engines not to rank or serve the page in search results. Even though they’re not food-related, allowing indexing of these pages could help the site broaden its reach and boost brand awareness. With that said, there is a time and place for noindex tags. AIOSEO’s Robot Editor allows you to set noindex directives easily when the situation calls for it.
- Missing meta descriptions. Every indexable page should have a unique meta description. While not a direct ranking factor, meta descriptions boost clicks and traffic. You can use an AI meta description generator to write them automatically for you.
- Exceeding metadata character limits. When metadata exceeds the space on the SERP, it gets truncated. This can lead to an unsightly search listing that doesn’t meet your intent. Run metadata through a SERP snippet tool before publishing to avoid this issue.
Steal Our SEO Winning Strategy: A Checklist for Your Website
Are you ready to take your blog’s traffic to the next level?
This exclusive SEO Checklist has the steps to get you there.
Download A Free SEO Checklist
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Grow Your Blog’s Rankings and Traffic With AIOSEO
Growing a blog in a saturated market can be intimidating, but you don’t have to go at it alone.
Consider AIOSEO your ally to forge a stronger online presence and stand out on the SERP.
AIOSEO is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market. With over 3 million users and thousands of 5-star reviews, you’ll be in good company as you take on the competition. You’ll get a comprehensive suite of tools to optimize your content for maximum reach and strong SEO.
Here are a few of our favorite features:
- TruSEO On-Page Analysis: Get an in-depth and easy-to-understand analysis of your content optimizations. We’ll let you know where you’re hitting it in the ballpark and give you actionable tips to make your content a home run.
- Rich Snippets Schema: AIOSEO offers various schema types to help you claim more real estate on the SERP with rich results. It’s as simple as choosing the schema you want; then, we’ll format it for search engines.
- Link Assistant: Apply internal linking best practices that boost content discovery. Link Assistant gives you easy linking suggestions and reports that keep your site connected and free from orphan pages.
- Image SEO: Turn on automatic image alt text and title attributes with a single click. You’ll save time from manual entries while helping users and search engines understand your images.
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- AI Title & Description Generator: This innovative tool makes crafting metadata faster than ever. It uses AI to generate distinct and highly clickable metadata for any page on your website.
