Our tutorials and recommendations are geared towards building a 100% recipe-focused content site.
User experience
The majority of search engine traffic lands on specific pages looking for a specific recipe. The most relevant content/links from that recipe are towards other recipes that are:
- variations of that recipe
- side dishes, drinks or appetizers for that recipe
A reader who comes to your site for a recipe has an intent to fill and your job is to fulfill that intent.
When you go to a barbecue restaurant, you don't see them selling pens and sneakers.
Similarly, if you land on a car website looking for a Toyota Rav4, you don't care to see listings for boats, planes, or where the site owner went on vacation last week.
Google knows this and wants to send people to sites that specialize in a specific topic so that the user gets the possible experience.
In the long run, a site 100% dedicated to recipes will outperform a site with mixed topics.
Niching
Even just running a recipe site is too vague in todays hyper-competitive market. You should niche down and focus on a specific niche with recipes, such as:
- vegan / vegetarian
- indian
- keto
- barbecue
- gluten-free
- etc
This helps with audience building and turning visitors into fans that come back over time.
How to run a mixed topic site
Simple: don't.
Your family cares about your personal life, but strangers on the internet looking for recipes don't.
There's absolutely legitimate reasons to write about non-recipe things - this can help keep you interested and provide a creative outlet. But if you want to post about travel or decor, start a separate site for it that won't negatively impact your recipe site.
Time management
Running a recipe site is a full time job for thousands of bloggers.
The fact is that most people have 40 productive hours in a week - 80 if you're hyper-focused (and even this leads to burn-out).
Spending anything less than 100% of your time and energy singularly focused on recipes will simply mean spinning your wheels and getting nowhere.
When to ignore this
If you're running your site as a hobby, or you're a mega-successful blogger with keyword research dialed in, thousands of backlinks, and subscribers that come back to you for your bubbly personality, then mixed content sites will work fine.
When you're just starting out, you haven't earned the privilege of doing whatever you want and should be focused on building your base - 150 (keyword-researched) recipes + 150 backlinks.
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