Tips for Food Articles

Follow search trends for your food related articles.

Many of you publish food related articles on revenue share sites and your own blogs. If food is your thing, you should know a little about food related search trends. As with just about everything else online, food articles follow trends. Visitor and search trends for seasonal articles, general tips, recipes and reviews are predictable to a point. The easiest way to watch these trends is with Google Insights for Search.

1. Food searches begin to rise on Friday, generally peak on Sunday and decline on Monday. This is a general pattern I have found to be true for most food related searches. Take advantage of these trends with well-timed articles, marketing and keywords.

2. Christmas food searches begin to rise around October, according to Google Insights history. They continue to rise in November and peak in December. January through September they bottom out. Plan and post your Christmas food articles well before the searches hit high volume. You can publish Christmas food articles anytime, including December, but you will get better results if you have posted in advance and taken the time to market your articles.

3. Restaurant search trends have remained fairly steady month-to-month for the last four years. Weekly trends, however, peak on Saturdays. Have your restaurant reviews and articles posted and ready for your weekend readers.

4. Cooking articles typically peak in December and drop significantly in January. Expect cooking searches to begin rising in October.

5. Look for trends within trends. Enter any food related term into Google Insights and you will see the top related searches for a given period and location, as well as the rising searches. You can customize results for a metropolitan area. If you are writing a local food blog or stories, use this tool to find what interests your audience.



Photo By Jason Lam (02 Buffalo Nickel Wingers - potato snacks) [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Get 'Em While They're Hot? Or Not?

I've noticed, being the Food Network junkie that I am, that shortly after Throw Down with Bobby Flay or Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives with Guy Fieti, the featured restaurants seem to climb to the top 100 in Google searches. Yesterday, Bobby Flay threw down with Levain Bakery in New York. Chocolate chip cookies. Apparently, Levain makes the best, bar none.

This phenomenon is not limited to The Food Network. Case in point, Big Lou's Pizza in San Antonio, featured on Man vs. Food. Big Lou's makes big pizza, and according to loyal patrons, the best they've eaten. Big Lou's is number 10 on Google Search Trends.

You may be wondering what my point is, considering Wood Streets Journal is not a food blog. It is about searches and writing about trends. If you are going to write about hot trends, you have to get 'em while they're hot. Before they sizzle out. That applies to most of the Google Top 100. But not always all of them. As online writers, we want to write evergreen articles that will earn money year after year. The hot topic of the day, may not be even lukewarm tomorrow.

Does that mean Google Trends is not a good tool for online writers? No. I consider it an excellent starting point. It kind of gets the mind going, and when used in conjunction with other apps and tools, the value increases significantly.

Levain Bakery is listed on Google's Top 100. Quick research shows that they are famous for their chocolate chip cookies. Now that we know that, not only do we have a top search trend, we also have a couple of other ideas. Google chocolate chip cookies. When the search results come up, click on the 'Show Options' link just below the Google logo. The next screen will have a navigation bar to the left. Click on Wonder Wheel. Now you have your first wheel of search topics related to your original search. If you look to the top right of the screen you will see how many search results are listed on Google for that search term. For writing purposes, you want to find one or more with as few results as possible. As you click on each search term a new wheel will be revealed. On my third wheel, I found a good starting point, soft chocolate chip cookies from scratch. That will be my first food article for the day. Thank you Levain Bakery. You can continue clicking through wheels and come up with an entire series in a matter of minutes.

After you've come up with your theme, you'll want to do your SEO research, publish your articles and get your backlinks going.

Check out the related article links at the top right of this page for more information about SEO keywords and backlinks.

Happy Writing