Creating content without the boundaries of SEO, recovering from a traffic drop, and rediscovering joy in food blogging with Dahn Boquist from Savor the Best.
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Welcome to episode 593 of The Food Blogger Pro Podcast! This week on the podcast, Bjork interviews Dahn Boquist from Savor the Best.
Recovering from a 40% Traffic Drop By Providing More Value to Readers
Dahn Boquist left her nursing career to blog full-time with her mom at Savor the Best, and the flexibility that came with that leap has been the highlight. But the journey hasn't always been a linear one. In this interview, Dahn walks Bjork through her site's growth, its decline, and its recovery, and what she learned and changed along the way to start growing again.
Dahn opens up about the March 2024 Helpful Content Update, the emotional toll of cutting two full-time team members, and why she decided to run her blog as if SEO was dead. She also talks about the importance of testing and reviewing data and how she's making sure she still enjoys running her business. This is a great listen for anyone rebuilding after a traffic hit and looking for ways to make their site more valuable to the readers who already love it.
Three episode takeaways:
What happens when you let go of SEO — After being hit by the Helpful Content Update, Dahn stopped doing keyword research and writing SEO-optimized posts altogether. She explains how SEO had been quietly dictating what she could create, and how letting go of it brought her back to the reasons she started her food blog in the first place.
How meal plans made her site more useful to readers — Dahn shares how she set up a menu planning tool on her site using WP Recipe Maker and what the process looked like. So far, 600 people have signed up, and that group spends 4x as much time on the site and views twice as many pages. Along with a stronger focus on email and Pinterest, the meal plans have helped push revenue from direct traffic up about 76% year over year (which is especially valuable as search becomes less predictable).
Her approach to email marketing — Dahn talks about why she always ends up back on Kit, how to use Google Postmaster Tools to keep an eye on deliverability, and how she has been using the Kit MCP to streamline her email process.
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