Q4 Food Blog Challenge Day 2 – Go Through Posts
On to day 2 of our 7 day Q4 food blog challenge. I hope you are ready to do some digging into your posts today! Yesterday was a declutter from stress and mess to start with a clean slate today.
Don’t let me scare you, this won’t be agonizing but it is more work. Today is going through your posts to find the best ones for Q4. Not really hard but depending on the size of your site, it may take some digging.
In case you still need the workbook for the challenge – 7 day Q4 blog challenge.
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Going through the posts
This challenge is to find content that is great for Q4 but maybe it didn’t do quite as well as you hoped last year. Ones you know you can update to do better. We are not recommending anybody update great high ranking content, don’t worry about that unless it loses rankings.
I recommend using Google Search Console for this challenge. You want to make sure you are not touching high performing posts!
Best posts for each month
Before I hit Search Console, I like to write down recipes that I have on my blog that I think are perfect for each month. October is anything pumpkin, apple, fall – tho that starts before October too. If you have any Halloween posts, they need to be on your list (unless they are in the top 3 for a big keyword.)
November, think Thanksgiving. This is huge and if you have anything that would be good for Thanksgiving, it needs to be on your list! Many desserts are big here now too. Turkey, mashed potatoes or stuffing? Yup great time to work on it if it’s not in the top 3 spots.
December, think anything and everything Christmas or other holidays in December like Hanukah or Kwanzaa. Christmas can be huge tho and even if you don’t celebrate it, you can have recipes that go great for it! Do you have any cookie recipes or maybe a ham recipe? You do not have to mention Christmas here, just having a great optimized cookie recipe may do very well. People do not search for Christmas chocolate chip cookies as often as they would chocolate chip cookies (an example, not an easy keyword.)
Check stats
Now check in Search Console to see the rankings for that month. If they ranked high for key search terms and brought a lot of traffic, you don’t want to redo it yet. Unless you see a drop in rankings. Keep track of the high ranking ones for social media sharing, but you are not updating them.
Gather up the ones that you think have the best potential with some updating for each month and write them all down. Look at ones that brought traffic (unless they are too new) but do not rank in the top 3 for any good keywords. Even better are the ones that rank around 11-20. A good update can boost it to page 1!
Do you struggle with finding the right keywords to target? Aleka’s Cooking With Keywords is the best course for keyword research. She is amazing and it is just for food bloggers! Her course really opened my eyes to how I was searching for keywords. Please note that I am affiliated with Cooking With Keywords, but also a very happy student (only her students can be affiliates!)
Wrap up
Today you went through and decided what posts you think would be great for each month in Q4. Try to stick with no more than 8 for each month (unless you have an assistant, or you know you can do more than 8 a month.) Updating more than 8 posts a month may be a bit much for some of us and we are not looking for burnout.
Keep your list by you tomorrow for the next challenge – going through your list to determine how much needs to be updated and when it was last updated.
