Recipe Research Checklist

As a food blogger, recipe research as well as keyword research can help you create a more successful blog post. Check out my tips below!

I've gone into more detail about each area of my checklist in the following post. Checklist items start with a black bullet point. The free downloadable PDF is at the bottom of this post.

Don't forget to check out my other checklists! Take a look at the Publishing a Recipe Checklist that has more than 30 items on it! The After Publishing Checklist has some amazing content on what to do to help that post get some immediate traffic.

Keywords

Keywords are incredibly important when it comes to writing new blog posts. The web is saturated with amazing food bloggers who have a recipe for just about everything.

Spending time to find keywords that you have potential to rank for in Google is worth the extra effort before writing a post.

Cooking with Keywords

Cooking with Keywords is a course that I took that goes into great detail on how to pick keywords. In addition, you will learn how to research to create a more thorough blog post to help you rank for the desired keyword.

I definitely recommend this course to beginners and even some seasoned bloggers who want to learn in-depth keyword research tools.

RankIQ

If you haven't looked into RankIQ, now may be the time to start. The subscription saves you a lot of time by giving you keywords that have low competition and sometimes very high traffic.

You can also use RankIQ to update old posts. Many of the articles I've written using RankIQ are bringing me my best traffic.

Keyword Research

Keep in mind that this list may not be the perfect fit for you and your blog. But it gives you an idea of what you may want to include while researching a recipe.

• Find your recipe keyword(s).
  • Using Cooking with Keywords and/or RankIQ can help you find your target keyword
• Attention Grabber (if applicable)
  • Easy, Best, Gourmet etc.
• Keyword Variations/Related Keywords
  • These are keywords related to your target keyword. Using a program such as Keysearch can give you keyword variations you may want to include in your post. (Cooking with Keywords goes into more detail about this.)
  • Using Keysearch I see a lot of variations for this example: Raspberry and White Chocolate Cheesecake

Additional Research Items

The following are a few things to consider while researching your recipe.

• Recipe Ingredients
  • Make a shopping list for the ingredients for the recipe. Don't forget to include garnish or anything included in the background.
• Image Inspiration
  • Look through Google images and see what pictures "pop" for your keyword. That can give inspiration to make your own version (No, I'm not encouraging you to copy someone else's creativity).
• Photography Background and Props
  • List the backdrops and props you plan on using for the images.
• Video Plan
  • Creating a simple video plan of what clips you need can make the recipe day go smoother.
• Social Media Extras
  • What extra images or video clips do you need for reels etc.

Free Printable Recipe Research Checklist

Just as a reminder, these are just suggestions for you to create your own customized list to help you save time during the research stage of a blog post. The PDF below will have the simplified version of this blog post.

Feel free to come back and review everything that was mentioned and let me know if I missed anything on this checklist!

Thanks for stopping by and here is the Recipe Research Checklist as promised!