The challenge

My client is a recipe box company operating in a highly competitive industry, with three clear market leaders.

With an established customer base and a developing brand identity, they were no longer a scrappy startup, with good traction. But like many new businesses, were overly reliant on paid traffic.

Competitor brands were able to outspend on paid, as well as have already strong organic search performance. My client was targeting a slightly different audience segment, but at the time, they weren’t reaching those customers through search.

The recently refreshed ecommerce website, while aligned to the brand and functional, had very little content beyond product listings, particularly from a commercial traffic perspective. Blog posts were recipe-focussed and posted sporadically. As a result, the vast majority of their traffic was branded: people who already engaged on paid search or social. The opportunity to capture new customers in the upper parts of the funnel was entirely missing. The task was simple — to change that.

The work

Working with the internal team who would support with content editing, and overall content design, approximately two commercial landing pages and two supporting blog posts per month were created, alongside other ad-hoc activity supporting wider campaigns such as new product launches, and seasonality where required.

The landing pages were multi-facetted, requiring enough topical depth to be ranked by search engines, which meant genuine expertise — references to the heritage of a cuisine, the techniques involved, the quality of specific ingredients. But they also had to feel premium and persuasive, justifying a higher price point to a discerning audience who had plenty of alternatives.

Keyword research gives us half of the story, but this needed strong copy that would cut through a challenging, and discerning market.

My client had strong brand foundations to work with: a well-defined tone of voice, clear brand guidelines, and articulate USPs. Combined with my own genuine interest in food and cooking, this made it possible to write with real authority, meaning the content felt like it came from somewhere authentic, not like it had been written for a search engine. In a world where AI content is the easy way out, it was worth applying the extra effort here.

Each page tread a careful line: substantial enough to give the SEO backbone, scannable and persuasive for the reader, and premium in tone throughout. They were commercial pages in function but almost editorial in feel — adding genuine value to what would otherwise be a product listing page that says ‘buy our stuff’.

The blog content operated differently. These were lighter, more conversational pieces designed to capture earlier-stage intent — someone researching date night ideas rather than actively searching for a recipe box. The best of them were genuinely useful as standalone content: listicles, guides, and round-ups that stood on their own merit, with subtle and natural references to the client’s offering where appropriate. The goal was to build trust and relevance with the right audience, not to push a hard sell.

Achievements

New landing pages began driving traffic almost immediately after they were launched, demonstrating the strength of the underlying keyword strategy and the quality of the content.