The SEO Tools I Use to Rank Recipes
Most of my blog traffic comes from search, and it comes from doing two unglamorous things well: writing recipes people are actually searching for, and formatting each post so Google understands it. Two tools cover both.
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For deciding what to write
This is the one built specifically for food bloggers, and it changed how I pick recipes. Instead of guessing, I find low-competition keywords with real search demand, so a new post has a fighting chance to rank instead of disappearing. It also grades your draft against what’s already ranking and tells you which topics to cover.
For formatting each post
Once I know the keyword, Yoast keeps me honest on-page: the SEO title, the meta description, whether I’ve used the keyword naturally, readability, and internal links. Its redirect manager is also a quiet lifesaver whenever a URL changes, so you don’t bleed traffic to broken links.
How they work together, in practice
- RankIQ to find a keyword worth writing for and see what the top posts cover.
- Cook, shoot, and write the actual recipe — genuinely useful beats keyword-stuffed every time.
- WP Recipe Maker to build the recipe card, which adds the structured data (schema) that makes you eligible for Google’s rich recipe results.
- Yoast to tidy the on-page SEO before you hit publish.
Don’t over-tool it
You don’t need a $100/month enterprise SEO suite to rank recipes. A keyword tool built for food, a solid on-page plugin, and a recipe card doing the schema — that’s the whole engine, and it’s most of my traffic.
The rest of what I run is in the toolkit, and if you’re still setting up, start with Setting Up WordPress for a Food Blog.
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