Baking in the Dough

A Sweet Story of Recipe Rich Snippets

Created by Samuel Edwards of Tenthwave Digital for SMX London

About Me

Samuel Quincy EdwardsOnline Media StrategistTenthwave DigitalNew York, New York

Fun Facts:• First time speaking at SMX• First time outside of the USA• Favorite EPL team is Chelsea

(SCORE!)

Services:

Some of our clients include:

Duncan Hines® makes cake mixes, frostings, fruit fillings and toppings

for passionate bakers of all skill levels to create delicious desserts.

Bakers can create hundreds of surprisingly simple recipes or

submit their own for inclusion on www.duncanhines.com.

Schema Markupfor Recipes

“The goal of a recipe rich snippet is to provide users with additional information about a specific cooking recipe…

when recipe information is marked up in web pages, search engines may use that information to show rich snippets in results.”

-Google Webmaster Tools Support

Total Reviews

Aggregate Rating

Recipe Image

Nutritional Info

Prep/Total Time

Recipe Type

Instructions

Saturated Fat

Summary

Calories

Carbohydrates

Sugar

Fiber

Published Date

Unsaturated Fat

Author

Serving Size

ProteinCholesterol

Cooking Method

But most importantly…

If you’re strategic and thorough with your approach, implementing schema markup for recipes will create rich snippets, boost click through rates and improve the quality and quantity of visitors coming to your site.

Google Guidelines That Apply for Recipe Snippets• Main topic of the page needs to be about a specific

recipe. Using recipe markup on a page containing multiple recipes is not supported.

• If the recipe markup contains a single review, the reviewer’s name needs to be a valid name (Person or Organization). For example, "50% off ingredients" is not a valid name for a reviewer.

• Recipe rich snippets will only show if at least two of the following are marked up: Photo, Prep Time, Cook Time, Total Time, Ingredients, Calories, Review.

What Users See

Recipe Author

Recipe Name

Recipe Description

Total Time

Prep Time

Serving Size

Recipe Image

Aggregate Rating

What Crawlers See

Recipe Name

Recipe Author

Recipe Description

Recipe Image

Total TimePrep Time

Serving Size

Item Type (Recipe)

What Google Displays

What Bing Displays

You may be thinking…

“Sam, that sounds great and all, but do I really need to implement structured data markup for all my recipes? I have so many!”

“Yes.”

-Sam

Which one of these results is not like

the others?

This one.

Prior to implementation, Tenthwave analyzed the top 263 organic search terms driving traffic to DuncanHines.com from Google and we found that:

For each of the 263 queries, at least one result had some form of rich snippet on page one, including: images, reviews, prep times and calories.

And out of those queries, on average, 3/5 resultshad implemented some form of markup.

EVERYONE IS DOING IT!

So we were all like…

And they were all like…

Getting Started

Step One: Using http://schema.org/Recipe we looked through the item properties that were applicable to Duncan Hines® based on the information provided about each recipe that users could see on site. In the end we went with the follow:

Step Two: We then implemented a template containing HTML markup, the schema tags, as well as placeholders into which the server injects the actual recipe data when rendering the recipe detail page.

Site Wide Implementation

Placeholders Schema Tags

HTML Markup

Validation

Step Three: After rendering the sample detail pages, we validated a number of user generated recipes using the Structured Data Testing Tool to ensure all was displaying properly. Now, we can stamp out an infinite number of recipes with the correct markup.

Before

After

Early Test Results

• Markup implemented mid February 2014– Organic search traffic from Google to user

generated recipe pages increased by 12.72% from January 2014 (prior) to March 2014 (post). YoY increase was 16.76%.

– Quite a few highly trafficked user generated recipes saw increases significantly higher than the average.

32% increase in traffic from Jan to March

280% increase in traffic from January to March

73% increase in traffic from January to March

80% increase in traffic from January to March

Observed Ranking IncreasesWhile Google claims adding mark up doesn’t affect rankings, we found that (all else being equal) within 2 weeks of implementing Schema markup, 75% of the 263 terms analyzed in the initial test had seen an improvement in search results. Of those:

196 had improved rankings44 had unchanged rankings23 had declined rankings

The average listing for Duncan Hines® improved by 2.42 positions.

Before: Position 11.5 (Page 2)After: Position 9.08 (Page 1)

Why is that significant?

(or page 1 of Bing)

Because the best place to hide a dead body is page 2 of Google

search results.(JUST KIDDING!)

(but not really...)

But not all recipes came out of the oven baked to perfection…

Misfires

After adding micro data markup we were pleased with the majority of early results, but noted that some recipes had seen a decline in organic search traffic.

Curiously, we began to wonder…

Problem

The average recipe page looks something like this:

Table "Comments":- recipe_id (references the recipe)- user_id (references the comment author)- message (the actual comment)- rating (one of the following values: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, NULL; where NULL is a value representing "No Data")

For a given recipe:

1. Get all comments that have a rating (i.e. NOT NULL)2. Calculate average of all ratings found in step #13. Take information from step #2 and place it in itemprop=“ratingValue”

Solution

Final Notes

GWT IS YOUR BEST FRIEND!

Amazing MS Paint Smiley Face

Validate

Fetch and Index

Fix Errors

Thank You!

Twitter: @Samuel_Quincy

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pub/samuel-edwards/4b/a34/962

Email: samuel.edwards@tenthwave.com