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I wanted to keep a track of my food blog adventure with all the details so I thought I'd create this new section of Dad What Cooks to document it.
This is the introduction to the food blog journey so far of Dad What Cooks. I cover what I have done up to now in high level detail and try and help you understand what tools bloggers might need to learn how to make recipe blog posts SEO friendly.
Contents
Introduction
This is a new section to the Dad What Cooks website in that it does not relate to food or cooking, BBQ or bread. It is my journey of the blog so far and how I have ended up getting to where I am now. There are points to ponder and plenty to write about.
Following a reignited interest in BBQ cooking over the summer of 2019 I wanted to keep the recipes I'd cooked in one place. Being the tech nerd that I am a simple notebook would not be sufficient, so DadWhatCooks.com was born at the end of 2019.
Hosted with some shared hosting and a free WordPress theme I kicked off my adventure into the world of food blogging. By the way, this was the second attempt at starting a food blog. My first site - cookitslow.com was a slow cooker themed recipe blog after I'd told my wife that it was easy to create a food blog and anyone could do it. How wrong was I? If I knew then what I know now I can safely say:
Food blogging is one of the most competitive and time demanding forms of blogging.
I stand by this quote and even though I know this (having created 3 posts on cookitslow.com and running out of slow cooker recipes), I decided to venture into blogging about something I knew more about. BBQ.
BBQ was the sauce
I knew some stuff about BBQ cooking, I'd really got into it and how good was 2019, great summer, Christmas dinner cooked on the BBQ. Plenty going on and life is good right? However we didn't know what was coming around the corner in 2020.
Locked down in 2020, the world and their granny started making bread and I was no exception. However I found the whole process very theraputic and further beyond lockdown I have since carried on with the bread making and love every minute of it. I hav ethe baking bug.
DadWhatCooks.com became all about BBQ, Bread and food.
Picking that niche
The key to a good blog I have learned so far is to niche down just enough to be able to define your target audience and subjects. Not so far down that it's too specific, but not to broad that you get no visits.
4 years on and I have only really narrowed down my niche and target audience to the following:
Dads who are new to cooking who also like the idea of BBQ or baking bread.
Niches: Cooking for new dads, BBQ recipes, Bread recipes
Why do I know these are my niches - because I can write endlessly about all the subjects. Am I a new dad? No - but I've been a new dad and I know what some of the perils and pitfalls are.
Am I a baker? No, but I love to bake and want to help others do the same while sharing my learning curve.
Am I a BBQ pit master? No, but I can cook on a BBQ and not burn the food. Getting to this point takes time and again I want to share that journey.
I think its a viable blog and I'm prepared to carry on giving it a go. How much do bloggers earn when doing this kind of stuff? Enough for me to give it a try.
The Blog Timeline
I thought it would be a good idea to show the timeline of the key milestones in my blog from the start to 2024 starting from my first post up to the point of writing this post.
2020 - Initial blog. A few recipes for BBQ dishes added.
2021 - Revamp to make it look more food blog like so I utilised the WP Astra theme and invested in Astra Pro plugin to give me some more features and options.
2022 - My day job changed and I started in new role which was more web related. I used my Dad What Cooks site to help me learn new systems and technologies we were using in the business. I invested some time and checked out some marketing tools & integration platforms such as Mailchimp for a mailing list. I also implemented Google Analytics 4 and Google Tag Manager to manage integrations into my site.
In 2022 I had a change of host and moved to a dedicated WordPress host called CloudNext. This really helped improve basic hosting speed and security elements. Although more costly than my previous host, I felt if I was going to do this seriously I would need some good foundations to build on.
2023 Perils
2023 was a good year with the site gaining traction and I was becoming better at a routine and getting more bread recipes going on the site. I also found I was able to look at adding a new category due to the bread recipes getting a wider assortment. The category Breads of the World was added.
The site was disastrously affected by Aug 2023 Google update. Everything was going really well up until this point and all my traffic took a nose dive.
All my traffic dropped off after it was steadily climbing. I didn't know what to do because I'd not changed anything. Only afterwards I researched and found the reason being the Google Helpful Content Update (HCU).
Quit while I'm 'ahead'?
I needed to do something or pack it all in. I could cut my losses now or keep on going. Remember, this is costing me money every month and I've not made a penny from the blog up to this point. It's decision time in November 2023. I need to decide whether to invest in the blog or give up.
I made use of my personal training budget and opted in to the Cooking With Keywords course which is a food blog focussed SEO course. I'd heard plenty of good things about it and felt I was at the point to take the course and see where I was going wrong. I needed to get the blog and the posts up to the best they could be.
Additionally I invested in the theme and some additional SEO tools to give me the best fighting chance of getting something back. So I went for:
These in addition to my faster hosting skyrocketed my Google Page speed insights score from a measly 55 - 60 to an astounding 98.
Now we were heading in the right direction. With extended reworks of posts and getting the keywords right I started to see traffic improve. The investment paid off and my traffic started to come back.
2024 to now
I keep on going with the posting and the keyword research. 2024 was a steep learning curve for me and my blogging skills. I still have a lot to learn and need to keep ahead of the trends.
AI has become a big part of the blogging world too and not necessarily for the better in my opinion. I consider myself lucky to just be playing at this game as a hobby. I'm conscious there are people out there who have this as their full time blog and I can't imagine how much stress the changes of the landscape are causing them. That said, I still think there is a big market out there and I want a piece, so I continue on and never say never when it comes to doing this full time?
I needed to diversify my traffic sources and not rely on Google for getting people to dadwhatcooks.com. I knew Pinterest users were for the taking and so I put more focus on imagery and getting the look of my pictures up to scratch.
I invested in Canva and Shortpixel to get quality but small images. Creating pins and utilising the pin schedule would allow me to set things up in the evenings and weekends while it posted them for my during the week.
Consistency seemed to be the key here and looking at 2024 on a Google Analytics chart you can see where Pinterest was working (until they had an algorithm update and it died off too). I thought I'd cracked it, only to be kicked back to the curb my the SEO gods.
Blog Advertising
I investigated some channels to add some advertisements on my blog. I was interested in Journey by Mediavine which had some minimum requirements for traffic before they would accept me. I installed their Grow plugin and waited. I was told the site did not qualify which was really disheartening.
Ezoic for food bloggers
An alternative to use which I looked at was Ezoic. I'd heard really mixed reviews about them from all sides and therefore wanted to experience this myself. I get the attraction for food blogs why there is so much advertising and this is down to the nature of a food blog.
People come for a recipe and that's it. There is no transaction and no way to provide information for a cost. Maybe you could sell an eBook of recipes but essentially food blogs provide free recipes so need to claw back revenue from somewhere. After all, most people who are not me don't do this for free/fun?!
I set up with Ezoic to be turned away quite quickly. I think I'd not configured some parts correctly such as the ads.txt file and the name server changes. So my initial application was denied. What was worse was that I'd have to wait 3 months to reapply. This seems a long time but maybe I was just too quick after the setup.
Rolling on 3 months I re-applied and was accepted. I was delighted - for a little while - until I realised just how my SEO core vitals were affected after moving to Ezoic nameservers. I'd dropped from a tidy 99 out of 100 down to 60 ish. This was poor and really impacted my site performance. While I get that advertising does this, it seemed too much for me so I pulled out and reverted my site back to no ads.
Journey
A nice little surprise early Christmas present dropped in my inbox. I'd been accepted onto Journey and with this 2024 was worth all the head and heartache. This was my goal for this year and while it's early days I hope this will give me some motivation (and funding) to keep going with it.
Let's see what the next few months does for me on this.
So what now?
I continue on with focussing on my blog. I have written some pillar content which are "ultimate guide" style posts linking to my other content. I have spent some more time on backlinking and raising my website domain authority. From this I have been found in Google again for some things and those have blossomed into new adventures (the last being an invite to a podcast to talk about my blog).
I'm not being beaten. Someone said blogging was hard and they were not wrong. Maybe financially this is a money pit and it costs me every month on hosting and Canva and things like that BUT... I look at it through a different lens. That monthly cost is the price I am paying to learn new skills, up with the world of blogging and it's my hobby (for now). Other hobbies cost money so why not this.
I enjoy cooking. I enjoy blogging. DadWhatCooks.com is the sanctuary where this all comes together. Roll on 2025.
2025 Update - March
We're in March 2025 and I can see that the gods of Google have gone against me again. More algorithm updates have decimated my traffic and I'm close to giving it all up. However a post on the Food Bloggers Central Facebook group gave me a bit of inspiration.
I am only able to add about 1 or 2 posts a month on the blog (food blogging is hard) and it takes up a lot of time. However this person advised that they were the same but made an effort to update previous posts too. So this is my next focus. Updating old content and reworking it to make it useful and helpful to any visitors, that's the goal now.
Latest news - 2025
Take a look at my Q4 2025 update for more information on how the year closed out.
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2 responses to “My food blog journey so far...”
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I enjoyed reading about your food blogging journey. Your passion for cooking and storytelling is evident throughout making this a truly inspiring read. I look forward to receiving more delicious recipes and insights from you in the future
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Thank you for your kind comments.
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