If you’ve been on YouTube looking for a video on how to make crispy fried chicken or a fast food favorite recipe, you’ve most likely come across Joshua Weissman. He is a well known professional chef with a large following on YouTube where he shares his love of food and cooking.
When looking for a recipe on Nashville Hot Fried Chicken, we were looking for a written out recipe since those are easier to follow in the kitchen. It took some searching to find it, outside of the mention in the video description. With this little search, we came across his website: https://www.joshuaweissman.com/ and thought it would be a great fit for a site breakdown.
With that said, let’s jump into this!
What is Going Right
YouTube SEO
When looking at the various YouTube videos on his channel, there are clear signs of optimization to obtain more visibility.
Paying attention to the Nashville Hot Chicken video, you’ll notice that the keyword is included in the title, description, and tagged keywords.
Other YouTube video best practices that are used are a title that’s under 60 characters to avoid truncation and a thumbnail that is eye catching and ties into the title.
Site Content
Outside of YouTube, you’ll see the video content on the website. There is a good first start of getting the videos on the website to contribute to overall content.
Alongside these videos, Joshua Weissman has the supplies used, serving size, ingredients and instructions as rich text content.
With this, there are some pages that are ranking. For example, the page “Perfect Boba Tea (2 Ways)” is ranking on the second page of Google for “boba tea” (450,000 monthly search volume).
There is a long way to go to optimize this, but with a few ranking pages, it shows that there is a relatively solid foundation to work off of.
Credibility
Joshua Weissman knows what he’s doing when he’s concocting something in the kitchen and this is known through his huge YouTube following of 4.28M subscribers. Additionally, he has 34.8K members on his subreddit.
Because of this credibility and authority in the space, there are a number of backlinks pointing to the website. This is a strong point that can be built off of to improve incoming links.
SEO Areas of Improvement
Recipe Optimization
To see how much opportunity there is based on existing content, we scraped all of the recipe titles and made sure they had the word “recipe” following. In total, there is a monthly search volume of 6,289,450 for all the recipes.
With that many searches and YouTube carousels living closer to the bottom of the page for recipe queries, it’s clearly an untapped avenue with a great return.
Optimizing the existing content could help lead towards a good chunk of those searches and increase channel subscribers.
To optimize the recipes the following could be worked on:
Test adding video transcripts copy to the page
Long-form content tends to rank better when it comes to recipes. That’s why you’ll see the long stories about peoples lives before you hit a recipe on the bottom.
To make this less intrusive to start, we’d recommend taking the new video transcript copy and adding it below the recipe. This way, the recipe can be accessed immediately.
Implement recipe schema
When you conduct a search for a recipe, the recipe snippet will live above the fold. By creating structured data for each recipe on the site, search engines like Google will be able to understand the content better. Not only that, but you’ll have an opportunity to pop up in the recipe snippet which people are more inclined to click.
Google Recipe Documentation: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/recipe
Clean up URL structure
Currently, all of the recipes live under the subfolder /post/. To create a better hierarchy for users and search engines to poke through, subfolders for categories of recipes and including the word recipe would be beneficial.
For example, the 3 Dollar Ramen But Cheaper recipe page could be changed to the following:
Old: https://www.joshuaweissman.com/post/3-dollar-ramen-but-cheaper
New: https://www.joshuaweissman.com/recipes/but-cheaper/three-dollar-ramen
In the new URL, categorizing the recipes in a subfolder and which video series they belong to gives a better understanding of what kind of content there is on the site.
Internal Linking
Internal linking could be improved to point users and search engines to other pages. Built out hub pages that link to specific recipes and in-text links are a great way to spread link equity and define that site architecture.
Hub Pages
Hub pages are a tactic that can help lay out the site structure of all the recipes and other content. Recipes could be categorized by food type and recipe type with content that provides more context.
There are existing category pages (like this), but to take things further the page could be optimized for the keyword “savory recipes” (2,400 monthly search volume).
Better internal linking through breadcrumbs and the navigation, as well as more on-page content can give the page a better chance to rank.
An example is Life, Love, and Sugar, the site ranking number one for “savory recipes”. They have content top of fold and appealing photos underneath as internal links to specific recipes.
Page Speed
Taking a look at the speed of the site, seeing a page load time of 5.1 seconds on a 4g network. That is categorized as poor when it comes to speed.
A quick method to improve page speed is deferring the loading of the YouTube video which is the heaviest asset on the page. By loading the YouTube video on a click, rather than off the bat, users won’t have to wait for the full embed. Instead, they’ll just load up a placeholder image in its place.
Wrapping Things Up
When looking through Joshua Weissman’s website, we were surprised to see the amount of opportunity for organic search. These are just a glimpse of the SEO strategy that could be built out for his site, but are definitely some of the heavy hitters for improvement.
What they have to start is a good foundation, but with some attention, can blossom into a site that caters to home cooks better than others.
