Episode 179: Updating Old Blog Content to Stay in the Game with Victoria Kabakian

Intro:

Welcome to Eat Blog Talk, where food bloggers come to get their fill of the latest tips, tricks, and insights into the world of food blogging. If you feel that hunger for information, we’ll provide you with the tools you need to add value to your blog. And we’ll also ensure you’re taking care of yourself, because food blogging is a demanding job. Now, please welcome your host, Megan Porta.

Megan Porta:

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Hey, food bloggers. Welcome to Eat Blog Talk. This podcast is for you, food bloggers, wanting value in clarity to help you find greater success in your business. Today I am super grateful to get a bit of time with Victoria Kabakian from Mission Food Adventure. We are going to have a chat about updating old blog posts to compete with the current nature of food blogging and all the changing algorithms. Victoria has been blogging for about 12 years. Starting out on Blogger for about 11 years before moving over to WordPress just one year ago. In that time she has grown her blog traffic over 1200% year over year, as she has adapted, learned about SEO and optimized her posts. That is incredible, Victoria, and I’m super excited to chat with you about this, but first we all want to hear your fun fact.

Victoria Kabakian:

Hi, nice to meet you, Megan. I’m really happy to be here. My fun fact is that I used to work in television and I worked on popular award-winning shows like the Simpsons, Dexter and Nurse Jackie.

Megan:

Okay. So you have met a lot of famous people?

Victoria:

Yes.

Megan:

I’m trying to think of Dexter’s actor name. What is his name?

Victoria:

Michael C. Hall.

Megan:

So is he nice? He seems like he’s so nice.

Victoria:

He’s nice.

Megan:

Aw, that’s so cool. What was your favorite show to work on?

Victoria:

My favorite show to work on was probably actually Nurse Jackie, which was the last one I worked on. It was in New York city and it was a lot of fun.

Megan:

What did you do? What did you work as?

Victoria:

When I started out, I was a production assistant and for example, at the Simpsons I worked with the writers on the show, and then years later I worked in accounting, which is pretty boring, but I worked on TV shows. So it had fun elements, I suppose.

Megan:

Yeah. You can do anything as long as you can say you’re working on TV shows. That makes it cool. I love that. That’s so fun. Let’s talk about updating posts because you have been through a lot of updating, I imagine, having started blogging 12 years ago. That was probably what, 2008?

Victoria:

2009.

Megan:

That’s a lot. You’re not alone with that. I am going through this process now right along with you. I know there are so many other bloggers who are going through it as well, because a lot of us did start a long time ago. So let’s start talking through some things that other bloggers can keep in mind as they move through this process of cleaning a ton of content. So what would you say would be your first tip for getting started with this?

Victoria:

My first tip is definitely be willing to let go and self audit. I know a lot of bloggers feel very attached to every single thing that they’ve ever written, myself included. But I would say it’s not only therapeutic to go through and delete some of your content that’s just really not great or really doesn’t fit into your blog anymore, but it will also help Google better recognize the purpose of your blog and it will help the rest of your content really shine. So I think that’s really, really important.

Megan:

It’s like decluttering your house or decluttering anything. Mental space opens up when you can let go of some things that really don’t serve you anymore. I feel like, for me personally, when I can get to that point where I’m not so attached to it, that I just feel lighter. That content was weighing me down or something. Do you agree with that?

Victoria:

Absolutely. I know Casey Markee has talked about this in the past and he compares it to weeding your garden. I think that’s a really great analogy. When I first started going through my blog posts and deciding to clean it up, it was at the time, right before I moved everything from Blogger to WordPress. So I was doing it to really ease the transition and just have less stuff to copy over. But it really helped me also, in addition to just cleaning up the content to begin with, it was refreshing not to have as many posts to have to update after the fact. So it kind of benefited me by not only cleaning up the clutter, but giving me less work later as I was going through and trying to polish things up.

Megan:

It can be a process, especially if you’ve got hundreds. I know there are some bloggers that have even thousands of blog posts, which is insane, but it is a process and it is not always the most glamorous thing. I do it every day. I’ve just made a commitment in 2021 to go in and update at least one blog post a day. By the end of the year, my goal is to have everything, nothing’s ever going to be perfect, but having everything to a point where it’s okay because I do have a lot of garbage on my site right now. But it’s not exciting. So what advice do you have for me and other people going through this about just keeping with it and not giving up on it?

Victoria:

That’s definitely the hardest part is that a lot of it can be super boring. I think the best way to kind of look at that is trying to balance it all out where you know that there’s going to be really boring tasks. But you don’t really have a choice. If you want to compete, you have to do some of these things. For example, last year I didn’t have any alt text on any of my images because I just had no idea what I was doing for so long. I ended up having nearly 10,000 images on my blog without alt text. I went to the blog fixer and I bought they’re alt text fix which was really great. I definitely recommend it if you’re in the same boat. What it does is it basically finds all of your images that are either missing alt text or the all text meets certain parameters that you’ve selected ahead of time. Then you can go through and type in new alt text and it will update it on the back end. So it’s a huge time saver compared to going in manually into every single post and adding alt texts. But it took me three months of spacing out that process, along with other things I was working on, to get through all of those images. So it can be boring, but it’s really, really important to do these things.

Megan:

That is a lot of images. It’s like a number that most of us can’t even fathom, right? Like 10,000 images. Oh my goodness.

Victoria:

It was like 9,000 something or other, but it felt like a million.

Megan:

When it gets to a certain point, it might as well just be a million, but the blog fixer, I’m glad you brought that up because they really can help with a lot of things that we in our minds see as being super overwhelming. How could I ever tackle that. There are a lot of things that they can actually do in a matter of minutes. So consider that if you are in that boat. Then you mentioned Victoria, just keeping with it because it is worth it. So if you have the goal of making more money or getting more traffic or both, you will see more traction if you can clean up your stuff because Google really does prioritize blogs who are cleaned up. So if money is on your radar or more money or money period, then definitely keep with it. When did you start seeing traction from Google specifically once you started doing cleanup?

Victoria:

I think the first uptick I really noticed at first was from Facebook actually, because I was not really utilizing any of my social media, even though I had been on social media for many years. As I started to see those upticks, I would say definitely through the spring, Google started building up pretty fast. So over the span of a couple of months that I was really cleaning up my content and adding recipe cards where they didn’t exist before, I really noticed pretty rapidly actually. My goal last year right around the new year was I wanted to qualify for Mediavine by the end of the year, which would have been this past December. I actually qualified for Mediavine, the beginning of March at the 25,000 threshold.

Megan:

That is amazing. Congratulations. That’s awesome.

Victoria:

Thank you so much. I think once I weeded out the content and I started making like just smart decisions on the little things I could start to do, like adding the recipe cards and just putting in headings and things where they didn’t exist before, it was just enough traction for me to start to see some results. Then I continued the process beyond that.

Megan:

So did you tackle one big thing at a time or did you dig into different things and made progress that way? When I switched from Squarespace to WordPress, my number one priority for me was recipe cards. I was like, I’m not doing anything else until I get all of these recipe cards converted. So I kind of went about it that way, but how did you do it?

Victoria:

For me it was kind of the same. My big thing after I officially moved over to WordPress was recipe cards because I didn’t have any at all on Blogger. It took me probably a couple of months. I brought over 400 posts, that was after I deleted almost half on my content. So I had over 400 posts to make recipe cards for, and that was my top, top, top priority before I started really focusing on anything SEO related or anything else. I think that really helped too, because without recipe cards, you’re not going to be in the recipe carousels things. I had no idea before.

Megan:

With Squarespace, I created my own recipe card. It wasn’t the same, the markup wasn’t the same as what you can access through WordPress. So I think it’s because the schema markup was not possible doing it my own way. So that’s really ultimately what it came down to for me and why I switched over because I just knew that I can never compete. So I knew that I had to get that schema markup and I loved Squarespace. It’s such a beautiful platform, but if you really do want to grow massively and have a ton of traffic and make money, maybe this will change, but you’ve got to be on WordPress right now. I hate to say that because I stuck with Squarespace for a really long time, hoping that they would create us a recipe card that was actually worthwhile, but it just never happened. So I really feel like that recipe card is a biggie.

Victoria:

I agree. It’s definitely the schema. It’s not just the visual appearance of having it and making it easily printable. It’s what we don’t even see that is what’s helping you be successful on Google.

Megan:

There are things under the surface that we would never know about. Especially if we’re not super technically minded that are very important. Just my 2 cents there. Then how did you move through your other projects and decide which ones were priority after that?

Victoria:

After that point, I wouldn’t call it like an official content calendar. But I started figuring out the ones that really needed new pictures because some of them were over 10 years old and just really, really bad. Then I started planning out when I was going to be making some of these recipes again so I could then rewrite those posts and that’s the longest process just because I don’t have time. I work another full-time job. I’m sure a lot of bloggers are in the same boat where they don’t get to blog full time. So they have to carve out the time whenever they can. At this point in time, I can really only do my blog cooking over the weekend because I use natural light for my photos. I just can’t do it after work.

Megan:

You have to kind of play around like it’s a giant puzzle and fit things in when you can. You mentioned a content calendar, but I found creating a spreadsheet with all of my content was really helpful. I still use this every single day. I’ll scroll through and find something that’s old, but decent photos. Then there’s a category with like old, but really bad photos. Then everything’s good. I look through here all the time. What can I improve today? I find that having something like that is essential, especially if you have a ton of posts like you and I do. Do you agree with that?

Victoria:

Yes, I do. Actually, I’m so glad you brought that up because as I was answering, I was visualizing my Trello boards, but it didn’t occur to me to say, yeah, I use Trello. But I’ve been using Trello in lieu of spreadsheets. I do use spreadsheets for certain items, but with Trello you can use it for free. There’s a paid version, but I just use the free version and you can create different boards. I create a card for every single recipe on my blog, and then I can add a checklist to each card. Then as I work on a post to update various things, I check them off and then I can move them through the process of things that maybe I’ve added to the recipe card, but I need to rewrite them or take new photos or posts that are complete or somewhere in between. So I find that is very visual and it helps me to see how many posts are in each bucket. It’s just easy to kind of see like how far I’ve gotten through each of those posts with updates.

Megan:

Trello’s great. I love hearing that you utilize some of those features, like the checklist that is super helpful, especially if you’re doing the same things to each post and you want to make sure that you do that. That leads me to what you do to each post and now, more than ever before, there’s such a huge focus on the user, what your user wants from you. Don’t overload it with anecdotes about your childhood and going from like journaling style to user experience style, and what’s actually valuable to people. So how do you go through your posts and structure them.

Victoria:

That was a really big lesson to learn after being a hobby food blogger for so many years. But it’s true. I don’t think that most readers really care that much about the stories. In some cases, I think that you can add a little anecdote or a little background about maybe where this recipe originated from. But what I find that really helps me stay on track is I’ve been using Gutenberg blocks and I’ve created a recipe template as a reusable block. Well, I’ve grouped the blocks and just labeled it as a recipe template, and have my headings in there. I have image blocks where I plan to put images and I just laid it out in the way that I think is just really streamlined and straightforward without too much of that kind of extra stuff that I used to maybe write a lot about in the past. Whenever I’m updating a post or writing a new post, I just drop in that reusable block. Then I convert it to a regular block and I ungroup it. So then I can move things around as needed or add additional blocks. That really helps me stay focused and organized. I don’t have to think really hard about what I should put next? I’ve been really trying to stick with that general format.

Megan:

Okay. Can you talk through what you have? You probably have a little description of your recipe and then a photo, and then what comes after that?

Victoria:

I have a little intro blurb, my featured image and then about two to four paragraphs of some sort of an introduction, why this recipe works. I do a lot of global recipes. So a lot of times I’ll talk about the origin of that dish. Then I will do ingredient notes. I’ll add an ingredient photo. I do bullet points where I pick out a few of the ingredients that I want to talk a little bit more about. Then I do a heading for how to make it. I don’t keyword stuff the name of the recipe or anything into the subheadings, because that’s apparently a big no-no. Years ago, a lot of people were told to do that, but now we’re being told not to. Then I talk about how to make the recipe. I paraphrase a bit from the recipe card. I’ll include step-by-step photos if I have them. I follow that up with expert tips and frequently asked questions. Then I do other recipes that you may be interested in, related recipes. I have a call to action block, then I have my recipe card and that’s it.

Megan:

This is great. I love hearing how other people structure. I also like going to Google and just searching a random keyword that I might rank for and seeing what other people do in comparison. I feel like people who stay current have that same general structure with little tweaks. Moving the how to maybe toward the top, things like that. But that was really interesting to hear you talk through that. So in your call to action, are you calling people to comment or rate your recipe? What do you ask them?

Victoria:

Yeah, so my call to action block, I actually use Gutenberg to give it a color. So it pops, which I think is definitely a nice touch. Ghen I ask them to either rank the recipe in the recipe card or leave a comment. I also include links to my social media profiles.

Megan:

Okay. I’m actually on your blog right now, just looking through. So the ingredient photos, that’s interesting. I noticed that a lot of bloggers are starting to do that. I’ve never done ingredient shots, and I’m wondering if I should start doing that. Do you get feedback on those?

Victoria:

I haven’t gotten feedback from readers so far, but I really think that it can help to stay competitive with bloggers who are doing it. It can be a bit of a pain, I’ll be honest. Because sometimes I just want to get started cooking the recipe. Instead of sitting there arranging the ingredients next to the window to take photos, I had an audit with Casey last fall and it was one of the things he really suggested. He suggested labeling it with the ingredients. That’s not something that I personally wanted to do because I just like the way it looks without putting text over it. But I think that if you’re really trying to compete with other bloggers, especially for some keywords that might be more challenging, every little thing that you can do to give the reader something extra that maybe the others aren’t doing, whether it’s an ingredient photo or step-by-step photos or video, if you have the ability to, I think every little piece can kind of give you an advantage.

Megan:

I agree. If it doesn’t take you too much time and you don’t mind doing it, things like that can really help. Casey always uses that term tiebreaker. It can be a tiebreaker and put you just ahead of another person who’s doing the exact same thing you are. That term tiebreaker resonates really well with me. If we’re neck to neck and I do one thing, that’s going to put me ahead, then I’m going to do it. Your call to action box is really nice looking. I actually took a screenshot of it to remind me because I don’t do that. I love that you have a color that just makes it stand out. You have this nice yellow color. So I’m not going to copy you, but I just wanted to remind myself to do something like that for my own recipes. It just looks really nice. I think that’s a way to remind people because our readers who love us don’t mind doing that sort of thing, but they need to be reminded. So it’s not annoying, I don’t think to see that sort of thing as a user. I think it’s totally acceptable to remind people, Hey, leave me a rating if you really love this recipe and you’ve made it. Or leave a review or a comment or whatever. So I love that you do that.

Victoria:

Thank you. I used one of my brands colors, and I just found a lighter version of one of the colors. So if you have brand colors, you can find different color wheels and whatnot online and find various shades lighter and darker. If you don’t want it to be super dark, so you have good contrast and it’s ADA compliant.

Megan:

Yeah, that’s a great tip. I love that. So you’re not just like randomly picking out something from the color wheel, put a little bit of thought into it. I love all your process shots too. They look really nice. Your posts look really clean and have a nice flow to them. So that’s kind of fun to look through that. So outside of post structure are there other things you keep in mind as far as keeping the user at the forefront of your mind?

Victoria:

Yes, I would say one thing is if you cannot yet qualify for Mediavine or Adthrive or one of those really huge and well-paying advertising networks, I would recommend not jumping right in and taking on one of like Adsense or some of the others, because they can really slow down your site and they really don’t pay as much. I took all my Adsense off my blog once I moved to WordPress and I just waited until I could qualify for Mediavine because I feel like the site speed really makes a big difference. That’s one tip. I know that that’s very personal, some people really want to make income, even if it’s really small, but I think it’s worth waiting. I also feel like pop-ups, a lot of people use pop-ups for their email sign-ups. I have a pop-up too. I have it set to only pop up, I think every seven days or something like that. I think only when people are exiting my site so it’s not super intrusive. I know that with Google, if they are crawling your site and you have a pop-up right away it’s, it’s really bad. Google is not going to like that. So I would really think about how you feel when you go on somebody else’s site. What are the things that you find that might be a little frustrating or might make you not want to spend as much time on that site and then reflect that on your own blog.

Megan:

Yeah, that’s a really good point because we all like to browse through other people’s content and I find things annoying too, about my own content once in a while. That was not a good experience, so I need to change that. So just keeping all of that in mind. I absolutely love the recommendation to hold out for those powerhouse ad networks because the quality of ads too, on things like Adsense are so low. They have, those ads are like gross medical issues. There’ll be like a closeup of some skin disease. I do not want to look at that when I’m going to a blog to look at food, especially. So the user experience too is not always great, as you mentioned, Victoria. So really holding out, I think that’s really great advice. It’s hard because we want that money, but I was on Adsense for a little while I think in the early years, I don’t remember making a ton of money there. It was like $50 a month or something. So I think it’s worth just setting that aside and holding out.

Victoria:

I agree. I would definitely say focus on your content. If you have tons of old content focused on improving it, it will make a difference. I just last week updated a blog post that was ranking somewhere in the sixties on Google and now it’s in the top 10. I just completely rewrote it, I did all new photos. It can happen. You just have to actually go through and do the work and do some keyword research and see what you can do. That’s another thing I’d like to touch upon is keyword research. Something that I never, ever, ever was aware of. It’s tough when you have hundreds of blog posts that you haven’t researched and you already have the recipe and it’s something that you’ll maybe never be able to rank on, but you have to try and find other keywords that you can rank for that might be maybe a long tail keyword of the same general subject, or maybe kind of tweak the recipe to fit another keyword that you know you can rank for. I’d say that’s probably the hardest part about updating old content, because you’re not just finding new things to write about. You have to make the old stuff work. But there are some gems in there. I use key search. I think it’s really well-priced and very easy to use. I highly recommend it. I’ve been using it for about a year now and I don’t know if I would ever get rid of it. But it has helped me dig deeper into some of my keywords and say, I’m never going to rank for this, but there are some other versions of this type of a recipe that I really have a good chance at ranking for. Let me revisit this, adjust the recipe, rewrite the post and boom, ranking on page one. You would be surprised that you can really make some really great changes and just skyrocket some of these old posts just by tweaking your angle.

Megan:

Yeah. That’s also very great advice. I have a few recipes on my site that I used to rank really, really well for. I’m talking about the top three spots on Google and over time they dropped and they kept dropping and dropping. So I’ve had to go in and revise my keyword because they kept falling. I have to do something. So if something did work in the past, that doesn’t mean it’s always going to work either. Things change and more competition comes into the scene. So just keeping an eye on where things are at and adjusting as needed, but that’s great advice, Victoria. So talk to us about just sticking with it because it can be really overwhelming to dig into this, especially for older bloggers who have been doing it forever and have tons of content. You have held out and you’ve just not given up and you keep going. So give us some encouragement along those lines.

Victoria:

It’s definitely a marathon. It’s not a sprint. Whether you are a brand new blogger or an OJ blogger, like I am it’s, it’s not gonna change overnight. I think you just have to be passionate about it and be willing to adapt, understand that algorithms, whether it’s Google algorithms or Instagram or Pinterest, they’re going to change and we have no control over it. But the best we can do is just continue to forge ahead, do the quote unquote best practices as best as we can. Things like not loading keywords into all of our headings. Focusing on good user experience. The best you can do is just kind of focus on the things that you can control. If you have a full-time job like I do, you’re going to have to just carve out time, but just make sure that you focus on the things that you feel are a priority. Every blog is different and there’s no perfect recipe if you will, for every blog. So you just have to kind of see who your audience is, what resonates with them, what is your personal style? It doesn’t have to be the exact same template that somebody else is using. When you start to see some of those wins come through, even if they’re little wins, it really helps you kind of feel that energy to keep going with it. So I think that it helps.

Megan:

All those little wins can really push us through a lot, can’t they? Even just seeing one post that maybe was on page six, go to page two or three is huge. It seems really little but that is encouragement. That can really just give you extra motivation to keep going. So I love that you mentioned that. That’s all such great advice. I have another question for you. If you could go back to your past self, before you started updating your posts, your content, what piece of advice would you give yourself?

Victoria:

The one thing I wish I had done so much sooner was move over to WordPress. Seriously. I can’t believe I stayed on Blogger for so long and don’t get me wrong. Blogger is fine. I do know some people who are on Mediavine who use bloggers, but I think that you need to be super creative to try and get Blogger to do half of what you could do with WordPress. I really wish that I had migrated over years ago. It would have been a game changer.

Megan:

Oh my gosh. I’m so with you. I beat myself up all the time for that. What was I holding out for? I feel like I was running into this really strong wind and I did not need to be doing that. The moment I moved to WordPress, I turned around and the wind was pushing me. It was like night and day, some changes that I saw. So I’m with you. But hindsight is 2020, right, Victoria. What is your number one takeaway for food bloggers on the topic of updating old content?

Victoria:

My number one takeaway for updating old content is to be patient. Especially if you have a lot of old posts like I did. I think about 500 posts that I migrated over after I deleted over 400 of them. So there were still very, very many to update. I think patience and organization really helps. Whether you want to use a spreadsheet to keep track of all of your posts and have different columns for different types of information, or if you want to use something like Trello or any other kind of project management software, whatever you feel comfortable with for helping you stay organized is really important to come up with. It’s a good way to do that and get started with it and stick with it. Just be patient. I know for a fact that I’m not going to be able to edit all of my blog posts probably for at least a couple of years, just because there’s so many, and there’s only so much I can do with new photos in a given week. I just know that. So I have to live with that because that’s just how it is for me. Other people may have less posts or more time to commit to it. You can’t compare yourself with other people. I mean, you have to, to try and rank successfully to some degree, but you just can’t look at another blogger and say, I have to mimic exactly what they’re doing in order to be successful.

Megan:

I love that. Each person’s journey is unique and you have to embrace that. Patience and organization, great tips there, Victoria. Thank you so much for all of this. This has been valuable for me. I’m going to actually go back to your blog post and just look through again, how you organize your posts. I think it’s really clean and sharp. So thank you for sharing all of this value today. It’s been amazing.

Victoria:

Thank you Megan, for having me, it was really fun chatting.

Megan:

Before you go, do you have a favorite quote or additional words of inspiration for food bloggers,

Victoria:

I have a favorite quote. I think it actually is kind of in line with what I’ve shared today. It’s by Oscar Wilde and the quote is, “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken.” That is the mantra I live by in general, in my life. I really think that it could apply to bloggers too. Rather than trying to mimic what other people do in the world. Just be yourself. You’re pretty great. You do you.

Megan:

Love it. That is such a good way to end. Thank you for sharing that, Victoria. We will put together a show notes page for you, so if anyone wants to go look at those, you can find that at eatblogtalk.com/missionfoodadventure. Victoria, tell everyone where they can find you online.

Victoria:

You can find my blog at mission-food.com. I’m also on Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter. My handle is @missionfood. You can find me in all the major social media accounts.

Megan:

Awesome. Well, everyone go check Victoria’s stuff out. Thanks again for being here, Victoria. Thank you for listening today, food bloggers. I will see you next time.

Outro:

We’re glad you could join us on this episode of Eat Blog Talk. For more resources based on today’s discussion, as well as show notes and an opportunity to be on a future episode of the show, be sure to head to eatblogtalk.com. If you feel that hunger for information, we’ll be here to feed you on Eat Blog Talk.