Episode 354: How to Generate 350k+ Page Views per Month Quickly – Using SEO to Build Organic Traffic with Kay Ratford

EBT354 – Kay Ratford

Kay Ratford: Hi, this is Kay from Flawless Food and you are listening to Eat Blog Talk. 

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And I think just that transparency and willingness to be open and sharing for the pure benefit of somebody else’s success has been a big surprise to me. For me, that’s a big part of who I am too, as I’m very much interested in helping other people succeed, but it’s been very equal. There’s just a very equal amount of giving and taking, sharing and sharing for others’ success, and other people are so willing to share what has worked for them purely to help other people succeed.

Megan Porta: Hello food bloggers. Welcome to Eat Blog Talk, the podcast for food bloggers looking for the value and confidence that will move the needle forward in your business. This episode is sponsored by Rank IQ. I am your host, Megan Porta, and you are listening to episode number 354. I have Kay Ratford with me today. She is going to talk to us about using SEO to build organic traffic quickly. Kay is one of the bloggers behind Flawless Food. She and Luke are a UK based recipe blog that has been around for two and a half years and has grown to over 400,000 page views per month, of which 250K is organic traffic. Luke and Kay are a busy couple, juggling the blog with another full-time job while homeschooling two children. Kay, it is such a pleasure to have you here today. Thank you so much for joining me. 

Kay Ratford: Oh, thank you. I’m very excited to be here. 

Megan Porta: Before we get into SEO and building traffic, do you have a fun fact to share with us? 

Kay Ratford: Yeah, I do. So this time next year, in two days time, me and Luke are gonna be getting married.

Megan Porta: Oh, congratulations. That’s exciting. Where will you be getting married?

Kay Ratford: We’re getting married in the royal countryside of Essex in a it’s actually a former royal residence of a French king actually. We are looking forward to that. Something to look forward to.

Megan Porta: That sounds amazing. Wow. Cool. I am super excited to talk about this today because we all want that traffic, right? We all wanna grow our traffic. That’s one of the main goals for many food bloggers who run their blogs as a business. So you and Luke have figured out a way to get some really good organic traffic to your site and in a really quick timeframe. So how did you get to the point where you realized that this was the route you needed to focus on? Just talk us through your blogging journey real quick. 

Kay Ratford: Yeah. Okay. So when we first started we originally weren’t going down the blogging route. We originally started off doing sponsored work for brands because I’ve got another full-time job that I still do. They were giving us some sponsored work for one of the brands. So that was the original job, was to do sponsored work. Then it was through learning about that and speaking to some other bloggers that we realized that you could actually earn money from running a food blog. It was do you know Nikki at Kitchen Sanctuary?

Megan Porta: Okay. Yeah. 

Kay Ratford: She’s got a second blog called Living the Blog where she writes all about her journey. Me and Luke sat reading that one for ages. That’s when reality hit that this is actually a potential job rather than just doing brand work. You can actually do your own recipes and earn money from it. We were quite excited. Doing that. So after reading Nikki’s Living the Blog posts,, so that was August, 2019, and it was in November, 2019 that we decided to actually make a blog and we signed up at Food Blogger Pro to become a member at Food Blogger Pro. We got lots of advice from them. We had a little Wix site that we had created, so we obviously got rid of that and made it into a WordPress site. Got all the recipe car plugins and everything that we needed. But we didn’t have any dates or anything in mind. We didn’t know how long it was gonna take to reach our goals, but we just soaked up any information we could get from obviously your podcast helped us a lot. We’ve also listened to the Blogging Millionaire. Food Blogger Pro podcast. So yeah, we listen to all of them and get as much information as we can. We’re also a member of the Food Blogger Central Facebook group, so we found that quite helpful. We don’t post much in there, but generally if you’ve got a question, you just type it into the search and someone else has probably had the problem that you have. So we just tend to search. I think I’ve touched a few things on there, but yeah, generally I just use the search and I find the information that I need to find out. Then there’s Casey Marky, who’s also in that group. I find his information really good and I always look for his answers, because I think he knows what he’s talking about, well, he does know what he’s talking about. Then, yes, we started off just cooking what we enjoyed cooking and our recipes that the kids enjoy and the family enjoy. We love traveling. So we also used to replicate food that we would have abroad and then make it with ingredients you could find from UK supermarkets. But we soon realized, it didn’t take us long to realize that if something’s not being searched, then there’s no point writing about it. Some of our earlier recipes, which we were doing more for what we wanted rather than what people wanted. I think that was a big turning point for us. 

Megan Porta: Yes. No, I love how you just kinda dove in and decided that you needed to absorb all of the information. You’ve gone to all the right sources, it sounds like. Listen to the right people and the right info, and then you dove into this SEO to build your organic traffic very quickly. So talk more about your recipes. So you came to the realization that you need to make recipes that people are actually searching for. So how do you do that? 

Kay Ratford: I do a lot of keyboard research. I really enjoy doing it, but the main two things is to obviously find a recipe that people are actually searching for, and secondly, to make sure that we can actually rank for the recipe that they’re searching for. To do that, I’ve played around over the years with different keyword research tools. I’ve used Keywords Everywhere, which is a free one. I’ve used SEMRush. AHRefs, Surfer SEO, and RankIQ. They’re all brilliant. I would recommend any of them, but personally, for me I really enjoy using SEMRush. I spent a lot of time following their training videos in the Academy section, and that’s what taught me most of what I know. There’s a few extra bits that I’ve learned as I go along, but yeah, the academy section of the SEMRush Training Guides has really helped me.

Megan Porta: Is that something that you have to be a paid user to access?

Kay Ratford: I think you have to be a paid user on SEMRush, but you don’t pay any extra on top of that. Don’t quote me on that. 

Megan Porta: So aside from the academy, what else do you love about SCM Rush and what does it help you do to get you to those right words? 

Kay Ratford: So I’ll have a rough idea of recipes that we’ve created or recipes we’ve tried in a restaurant or abroad and we’re we go, Oh, we could make that, we could do this. Then I will take whatever the recipe is and I’ll type it into the SEMRush keyword research. From there, I just jump around all over the place. It’s like a rabbit hole. You’re just trying to find things that I can rank for and that people are actually searching for because what I call the recipe might not be what other people call the recipe and what people are searching for.

So on SEMRush, there’s, first of all, I check that it’s informational intent that they’re asking for, and that would be the recipe information they’re looking for rather than commercial or there’s different intents that people are searching for. So make sure that it’s informational because that tells me that people are looking for information on how to make the recipe. Then from then I will look at the global volume of how many people are searching for that recipe. I look at the global, but because we are based in the UK, we do tend to look mostly for the UK traffic because we find it easier for us to rank for. American, Canadian, Australian volumes. I will look at it too, because especially in America, you get a lot better RPM than what we can get in the UK, but we tend to rank better for the UK recipes or the UK search intent.

So yeah I will look at all of them. But yeah, generally I will just go with the whole picture and see whether I can rank for it because underneath the volume is the keyword difficulty. For me, this is the most important part to look at because there’s a number. It’s a percentage, it gives you from one to a hundred. That basically tells you whether you will rank and it is possible for you to rank. So for me that number is very important because if it’s too high, I won’t even bother trying because I know that I won’t get up there. 

Megan Porta: On occasion though, like I will notice that I’m ranking really well for something that I shouldn’t be ranking for. Do you ever find that, and then how do you handle that? Do you try to align other topics? 

Kay Ratford: Yeah, definitely. We tend to do ro really well for roast dinners and curries as well. So we tend to find, like you just said, anything with curry or roast in the keyword, we will tend to do well for, because they all link in together. But yeah, there will be the occasional one where I think, Wow, where’s that come from? But I will make sure that I can also rank for other similar things because when we do a cook day we won’t just do one recipe. We will do about five recipes at once. 

Megan Porta: Oh, nice. Yeah.

Kay Ratford: If there’s one that will come up and say I think, Oh, how am I gonna rank? Why is that coming up? Then I will tend to look at other things similar to that recipe. Then some of them might be really high and I think, no, that’s not gonna happen then. So yeah, I think that’s how I’ll deal with that. 

Megan Porta: Okay. So what else with the word research and once you’re in the tool, is there anything else that you would point out about using that tool or just keyword research in general?

Kay Ratford: Yeah, so I think for me, when I’m looking at the volume, I would look at it at least a thousand, 1K for the volume and then the difficulty, I would always go below 50 as low as I can. But never, ever over 50. That’s what I will try and rank for. Sometimes you have to go a little bit longer with your keywords and add a few extra words.. We got slow roast lamb because we couldn’t rank for roast lamb, so we just added slow roast lamb and then we can rank for it. So yeah, we do things like that. Then I’ll save them from SEMRush. You can save them into your keyword manager. It’s a list where you can save all your keywords. I think I’ve currently got about 2000 keywords in there.

Megan Porta: Oh, wow. 

Kay Ratford: Because I just love doing it. I’d rather sit there finding keywords than watch tv, to be honest. So for me, when I’m not doing anything, I just really enjoy going in and trying to find new recipes and new ideas that I can cook. I do have ideas of what I wanna make or we go somewhere and try something and I go, I wanna make that. But ultimately it comes down to the keyword research for me, whether we actually do make it. 

Megan Porta: Do you do any I can’t think of like categories, batching. So do you make a certain type of recipe in batches and do keyword research on those, or do you just go all over the place with what you’re making?

Kay Ratford: When we have our cook day, we will do about five. We tend to aim for about five posts in one sitting and they will all be linked to each other. So for example, the last batch that we worked on, which we’re currently writing, was a seafood platter, like a cooked seafood platter. So within that we had to cook the longostines. So we’ve done a blog post about how to cook Langoustines and all about Langoustines. We also included a dressed crab, so that blog will come out as well. A dressed crab. We also made a Marie Rose sauce, a tartar sauce, a seafood boil sauce, and that was all on the platter, which will be another blog post. Then we also,because we had the Marie Rose sauce that we created, we made up another batch, and then we made a classic prawn cocktail. So that was seven posts in one day that we created. So yeah, they will all link together. When we are posting them, I aim to do one post a week. So every week they will all be linked in with each other. By the time all seven of them are out, they’re all going into each other. 

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Megan Porta: Okay. That’s awesome. I love that you batch and you think through it beforehand. Do you put one new post up a week? Is that what you said? 

Kay Ratford: Yeah, so I aim for one. We always get one new post up every week. We do one new one, and then we also update one old post with new pictures, or I just go back to an old one where the writing might not be so good, or I’ll find other keywords which I didn’t add before, which I could now add in. I add extra backlinks from new recipes that I’ve created, update pictures, add videos, add the step by step pictures. So I always have something to do for others. Recently I’ve been changing all the sizes because Google wants them bigger now on the featured image. So yeah I think we finished doing that now. But yeah, slowly we had to go through all of them making them 1,200 square for the featured image.

Megan Porta: Yeah, there is always something to do.

Kay Ratford: Yes. It doesn’t end.

Megan Porta: There’s never an end. So your blog is fairly new, but you still feel like you can go through and update old content because I know some newish bloggers who feel like, should I go back and update content? Even though it’s not technically old, it’s a year, two years old. But you feel it’s worthwhile to go through it anyway even if it’s not that old? 

Kay Ratford: Oh, definitely. Yeah. No, there’s some of our posts that they do really well and then they come down a little bit and just by adding a little bit of extra. For example, like frequently asked questions, I’ll add that in the bottom. If the post is doing well, I wouldn’t change too much in the actual post because it’s doing well anyway. But just by adding a few frequently asked questions, I find that just gives it another little boost back up again. I’ll always use legitimate questions I’ve actually had from people about the recipe because if people are asking it, I obviously haven’t included it in the post. But I don’t like to change too much throughout the post because if it’s doing well already, then it’s not a good idea to change it.

Megan Porta: It’s amazing how much of a difference a few words or sentences can make to improve the post. I’ve noticed, I will take words from Keysearch, from the LSI report that you can download for each keyword and I’ll incorporate those into my posts if it’s natural. I don’t do keyword stuffing or anything, but if it makes sense, I’ll put it in there and just doing that can give my post a huge boost. So I think just giving a little bit of attention can go a really long way. 

Kay Ratford: No, I totally agree. Like you just said, that’s what I use SurferSEO to help me with a few terms to add. Like say, if it doesn’t fit, if I haven’t used the ingredient or it doesn’t fit, I won’t use it. I think some people, when they use these programs, they take it as gospel that they have to make their score 100%. That’s not always the best way to go about it. I will only include it if it’s something I’ve used. Sometimes I might write something in as a substitute. You could use this instead of this. But yeah, I think it’s key not to stuff with all of the keywords that you can find on Surfer or SEMRush.You have to just use the ones which are needed. 

Megan Porta: I agree with that. It sounds so unnatural when you try to force it. So I’m curious about your niche and if you had to describe your niche in a few sentences, how would you describe it?

Kay Ratford: This is a hard one because when we first started, everyone was saying, you, you must have a niche. You must knuckle down and choose what it is you want to do and have that set niche. For us, we couldn’t decide because we love all food. There’s not much we don’t like. But we do love traveling and we do love trying new foods and different foods from different countries. So we started off as recipes from all over the world, but that wasn’t a tight enough niche. I think we’ve gone more down just comfort recipes and sometimes they can be from all over the world still. But we do find that the British foods, where maybe where we are British, we find they do well, the old fashioned sort of British recipes that we’ve created have done really well and a lot of curries, British Indian restaurant curries, so they’re similar to what you would get from a restaurant rather than what you would get from India. So yeah, that tends to do really well for us. Then, like I said, roast dinners, they’re very popular in England all year round, even in this crazy hot weather we’ve got at the moment. 

Megan Porta: So for the traffic that’s really taken off and grown your site to hundreds of thousands of page views a month. What would be your top content? I’m just curious because I love hearing what takes off for each individual site, if that makes sense. I’m just curious what those top pieces of content are for you guys. 

Kay Ratford: So I’m just opening my analytics now so I can give you the actual current top posts. Our top one at the moment is, this for the last month, is easy flapjacks. Flapjacks in England are different from flapjacks in America, so I’m not sure if you’re aware of them. 

Megan Porta: Flapjacks are like pancakes, right?

Kay Ratford: So in England, flapjacks are golden syrup and oats. 

Megan Porta: What? 

Kay Ratford: So they’re completely different. Even when you’re in England and you search for flapjacks, you won’t get pancakes come up because obviously Google knows that you’re in England and it’ll only show you flapjacks. But yeah, in England, our biggest traffic is coming from flapjacks. 

Megan Porta: Interesting. Okay.

Kay Ratford: We got 46,000 in the last month just on that one recipe. 

Megan Porta: That is amazing. That’s so great. 

Kay Ratford: Yeah. Our second top is we’ve got an Italian star rice salad, which is rice with salad and vegetables chopped up and all mixed together. That does really well. I think that’s been on our blog for two years now. It’s one of our early ones, but it’s always done very well in the summer because it’s great for barbecues and yeah, it’s just a nice, refreshing, lighter dish, which I’ve just told you we do comfort dishes and that’s not a comfort dish. Oh, air fryer recipes. We do quite well for air fryer recipes. We’ve got our sausages, air fryer bacon, air fryer roast potatoes. They all do well. We’ve got a Gambas Pil Pil, which is garlic and chili with prawns or shrimps, as you would like to call them. 

Megan Porta: Okay, cool. 

Kay Ratford: So yeah, it’s a big mix match.

Megan Porta: I think that’s good because that gives you topics to choose from. I feel like for a really niche site, you’re a little constricted with what you can talk about and write about and make, but if you have more of an array of topics and you have more to choose from, which is great for you, right?

Kay Ratford: Yeah. Like I said, I’ve got about 2000 keywords that we can rank for right now.

Megan Porta: Yeah. That’s a lot.

Kay Ratford: I need to get cooking. I’m never gonna make 2000 recipes. But yeah, we never run out of ideas. There’s always something to do.

Megan Porta: Yeah. Then do you ever go over your two recipes? So one updating old and one new a week. Do you ever go over that? 

Kay Ratford: I’d love to. I really would. But I get too distracted.

Megan Porta: Yes. You have a busy life. Don’t we all? We’re all busy. 

Kay Ratford: Yeah I still have my full-time job. Luke works at this full time, and then I homeschool my two children as well. So life does get in the way. I would love to be able to write more, but the children’s education’s very important to me and I wouldn’t wanna let them down. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. Okay. Is there anything else we should know about just building traffic through organic means? Focusing on seo.

Kay Ratford: I’m not too sure. I think photography is very important, having nice photos. I used to be a photographer, so for me it comes very natural for me to be able to take good photos. But having a good picture in Google is very important to get the clicks. 

Megan Porta: Yeah. So you said you were a photographer. Did you take any extra courses once you got into food blogging to excel your photography skills? Or did it come naturally?

Kay Ratford: So I was a newborn and a child and family photographer. I had my studio and when I got divorced in 2015 and when we sold the marital home, the studio got sold with it. I had to make the decision to not continue with my photography anymore. So I kept all my equipment and Yeah, I got straight back into it. Working with food is so much easier; it doesn’t move. 

Megan Porta: I had a similar path as you. I used to do portrait photography as well, and weddings. Oh my gosh. So stressful. They were so fun, but when I started taking pictures of food, I was like, Whoa, this is so easy. They don’t talk back. They don’t complain. 

Kay Ratford: They don’t move. 

Megan Porta: They don’t move. 

Kay Ratford: You can set it where you want it and it stays there. You don’t have to ask it to smile. It’s so much easier with photography. I suppose I was lucky that I had that skill already. 

Megan Porta: Yeah, that does give you a leg up, I feel like, because so many people come into this space not having a photography background or skills and have to start at square one with that. So yes, definitely. That is a huge point in your favor. All right, so we’ve covered a lot, Kay. Thank you for all of this. Just to recap, choosing what recipes you can actually rank for, that you enjoy cooking, but that people are searching for. Doing your keyword research, whether it’s in SEMRush or RankIQ or Keysearch, or I think you mentioned Keywords Everywhere as well.

Kay Ratford: Yeah, I still have keywords everywhere on the site when I, if I’m just using Google, it comes up on the side. I still have that there. So yeah, it does help that Keywords Everywhere still, even though I have the SEMRush paid account. I still use that still as well. I’ve got a RankIQ and an account as well. I have my fingers in all the pies. I just use a little bit of everything. I like it. 

Megan Porta: I think it’s smart to have a few different things and not to lean heavily on just one tool because they all offer something unique. RankIQ has a very different personality than SEMRush and Keywords Everywhere is just a simple dip in, see what’s going on. You can always use Google. That’s free. There’s something that I like about each one of those. I think that’s smart. 

Kay Ratford: That’s why I’ve got a subscription to all of them.

Megan Porta: Yeah. I think it’s really smart to do that. I think SEMRush is a pretty hefty investment, but if you really like it, like you do, then it’s worthwhile.

Kay Ratford: I definitely think it’s worthwhile. Yeah. Before that, I was using Keywords Everywhere and just generally using Google, and a big turning point for me was putting the money into SEMRush to really knuckle down and get the keywords data. Cause I think SEMRush only shows you organic traffic. That’s really what I wanted because with organic, you can go out, we can go on holiday for a week and we don’t have to do anything. Whereas for me and Luke, social media is something we don’t get on well, So Luke does some of the social media. We do pay someone to do some of the social media for us because we just really don’t enjoy it. So for us, it’s not something that we’re aiming for. We’d rather spend our time and invest in keyword research and SEO than anything else.

Megan Porta: Great. Then also just updating old content even if your blog is newer, definitely invest time in going through that old content, improving little bits here and there.

Kay Ratford: So I use Clariti to see how the charts are going. If they’re starting to go down, then I will rewrite and to help boost it back up again. Obviously some recipes are seasonal, so you, some of them you do just leave. But if it’s not a seasonal recipe and it tends to be going down, then I will just give it a little boost with a little rewrite.

Megan Porta: Yes. Glad you mentioned Clariti. I think that is a very useful tool for just keeping everything organized and knowing what you’re working on, right? Like you can do projects and organize based on separate projects. Cool. Is there anything we’ve forgotten before we start saying goodbye, Kay? 

Kay Ratford: No, I don’t think so. I think that’s everything. 

Megan Porta: Thank you for being here. This was super fun. I loved hearing how you guys work through your process and how you focus on SEO to build that amazing traffic. So thank you for sharing everything today. 

Kay Ratford: Oh, thank you so much for having me. 

Megan Porta: Before we go, do you have either a favorite quote or words of inspiration to leave us with?

Kay Ratford: Yep. So my quote is from Margaret Thatcher and one of her famous sayings is, “I do not know anyone who has gotten to the top without hard work. That is the recipe. It would not always get you to the top, but should get you pretty near.” And for me, that is so true. It even includes the word recipe, so it can’t get even more curious. So yeah, so that’s my quote. And I think there’s a few times where you’ll get hit by a Google update or, we’ve had a few moments where we think, Oh no, is everything gonna come crashing down? But we just don’t give up. You’ve got to keep going on and keep working hard at it basically. I think we spent six months building it up where we weren’t earning anything to build it up to Mediavines level. Yeah, for us, those six months were very scary and you are wondering if it’s just gonna be a big waste of time, but it isn’t. We got there and just kept working hard. You’ll make your way to the top. 

Megan Porta: Love it. Thank you so much. Why don’t you tell everyone where they can find you online, on your site and social media, et cetera. 

Kay Ratford: So our website is flawlessfood.co.Uk and you can find us on all social media accounts at Flawless Food UK. 

Megan Porta: Okay. Everyone go check them out and say hello, and thank you again, Kay, for being here. Tell Luke we missed him. Tell him hello.

Kay Ratford: He’s gone fishing. He’s left me to it.

Megan Porta: Oh, that’s great. Hopefully he’s getting some good catches today. So thanks for being here and thank you so much for listening today, food bloggers. I will see you in the next episode. 

Outro: Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Eat Blog Talk. If you enjoyed this episode, I’d be so grateful if you posted it to your social media feed and stories. I will see you next time.