SEOZoom Case Study: the growth of Cooking with Sere

Last week we welcomed Rocco Voto and his Dogsportal, and today we open our doors to Serena Cara, who shared an interesting webinar with him on methods to “create the WOW effect for your blog”. SEO consultant, Serena is the founder of Cooking with Sere, which is her personal project – indeed, as you can read on the home page – it’s her “special refuge”, a corner of serenity where she shares her passion for flavors and creativity in the kitchen. We’ll let her tell you in her own words how the features and tools of SEOZoom have supported the growth of her online project.

Cooking with Sere and growth thanks to SEOZoom analysis

The “Cooking with Sere” blog started as a personal project at the end of 2020, when I was working as an SEO specialist in a communications agency. I felt the need to have something of my own, an opportunity to “get my hands dirty” and test myself, creating a space that reflected my passions and my style. After working on a pre-existing cooking blog that I hadn’t followed for several years, I decided to embark on a new adventure, focusing on content that reflected my ideas and my style.

But having a blog isn’t enough if no one can find it. I always knew that SEO would be the tool I would use to make my project known. Thanks to a targeted strategy and the use of advanced tools such as SEOZoom, I began to understand what people were really looking for, which recipes could have the most impact, and how to optimize each piece of content so that it would have the visibility it deserved.

Over time, my blog began to climb the SERPs, ranking among the most relevant search results in the food sector. Not only in organic searches, but also in recipe snippets and video content on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram. Seeing my work recognized not only by readers, but also by algorithms, was one of the greatest satisfactions!

The first successes

Despite being a new domain, Cooking with Sere immediately achieved a good ranking on Google. With around 300 pieces of content already published, the site quickly ranked on search engines, gaining visibility in a short time.

• 01/31/2021: the keywords ranked were more than 5000.
• 30/12/2022: the keywords have become 11,498.
• 2022: the blog has reached 1 million annual views, with monthly peaks of 100,000 visits.

Difficulties and a new start

Starting from August 2023, a major update from Google caused a drastic drop in traffic. From a peak in visibility, the site saw a decrease in traffic and search engine ranking.

In October 2023, in an attempt to monetize, I introduced banner ads. However, the time users spent on the site dropped dramatically to just 9 seconds, negatively affecting user experience and SEO ranking.

In 2023, I started collaborating with companies, particularly in the household appliance sector, which allowed me to expand my network and discover new tools. It was during this period that I started to discover the air fryer, a topic that generated excellent results both on Google and on social media.

After months of continuous decline in traffic and penalties with every update from Google, I decided to stop and completely rethink the project. A change of direction was needed to give the blog a new lease of life. It wasn’t just a question of recovering visibility, but of transforming the site into a point of reference for a specific niche. I paused the project and worked on a more targeted strategy, and here SEOZoom was fundamental.

Objectives

I had a two-fold objective: to recover the positions lost on the old recipes, analyze the pages that had lost traffic and increase the traffic to the site, improving its positioning on Google. I also wanted to target the audience interested in air fryer recipes.

In particular, I worked on:

• Climbing the SERPs for keywords with a high intent to search.
• Optimizing content for results dedicated to recipes.
• Increasing visibility on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.
• Strengthening the internal linking strategy and improving the site’s authoritativeness.

SEOZoom strategy and use

To achieve these objectives, I used SEOZoom in several ways:

1. Keyword research: thanks to in-depth keyword analysis, I identified terms with a good search volume and manageable competition, focusing on specific queries related to air fryers and quick recipes.
2. Analysis of the competition: I studied the competitors in the sector to understand which content worked best and how to differentiate myself.
3. Monitoring of performance: I kept an eye on the positioning of the pages and adapted the strategy based on the data.
4. Optimizing content: I improved the structure of the posts, integrating elements such as FAQs, internal links and formatting the text to make it more readable for users and search engines.
5. Video strategy: Using the Social Opportunities tool, I analyzed the opportunities for ranking on Google not only for blog posts, but also for YouTube videos and TikTok shorts, maximizing visibility.

I also did a graphic restyling of the site: the new Cooking with Sere went online in December 2024.

Results

Thanks to this strategy, the results were not long in coming:

• Increase in organic traffic of 19.32% in 3 months (data taken from GA4).
• Increase in the total number of keywords: on 06/12/2024 the keywords positioned were 1296, on 07/03/2024 they were 5604, with a growth of 332%.
• Recipe snippets visible directly in the search results.
• Growth of the YouTube, TikTok and Instagram channels, with an increase in subscribers, views and engagement.

Conclusion

Using SEOZoom has been fundamental in transforming Cooking with Sere into a reference blog in the food sector. Thanks to the advanced analysis and monitoring tools, I was able to refine my SEO strategy, improve my positioning and intercept an increasingly wider audience.

Today, in addition to being a success story in SEO positioning, my blog is also a work tool that I can use to propose targeted collaborations with companies in the sector.