Yemek.com & Zeo Agency: SEO Success Story

How Yemek.com achieved explosive organic traffic growth through structured content and technical optimization.

Speakers: Batuhan Apaydın, Ezgi Gülsen Yaylı, Yiğit Konur

15 May 2018

Video Transcript

⏱ 6 min read• 1,005 words

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— Yemek.com launched in September 2014. It's a content site for everything food. Mouthwatering recipes, fun listicles, inspiring videos. You'll find a post like "How to clean your fridge." You'll also find the trendiest kitchen designs. Plus the year's food trends. And tea blends to keep you healthy all winter.

— At ZEO, we've worked with companies of all shapes and cultures. Startups just getting off the ground. Big internet players like Yemeksepeti, Hepsiburada, and Markafoni. Even large corporations like Doğan Grubu, Doğuş, and Sabancı Holding. All told, we support over 100 brands across a wide portfolio of projects. From experience, I can say this easily. SEO is a team sport, plain and simple. It doesn't matter how experienced or hardworking the agency is. If you can't build real synergy with the client. They won't get the full value of your consulting.

That's where this team shines. Batuhan, Ufuk, the IT folks, everyone on the Yemek.com and Yemeksepeti.com side. They're genuinely results-driven people who care about the work.

— The Yemek.com team is 11 people right now. Content, video, sales, and marketing. We also get support from Yemeksepeti's IT, HR, finance, legal, and marketing teams. Average age is 26. Very young, full of character, and seriously hardworking. They want to achieve things personally. But they also know this only works if they work together. At Yemeksepeti and Yemek.com, we believe they should be happy at work. Not just productive. ZEO shares those same principles and approach. So our onboarding went really fast. At Yemek.com, we look for a few things in partners. Speaking the same language. Sharing similar goals and ambitions.

— We started working with Yemek.com back in 2015. At that point, Yemek.com was going through a big infrastructure change. Some things were shifting on the software side too. That meant the address and URL structures would change completely. So we sat down with ZEO's dev team. We asked what kind of custom solution we could build here. The answer: crawl every existing page on Yemek.com with our own crawler. Then we kept a full list of those URLs in one place. Next we dug into the server logs. We pinpointed exactly which addresses and URLs Google had crawled. Google could come back to those addresses anytime. And with the new infrastructure, they had to redirect to the right places.

Once we pulled all the URLs. We mapped out where each one should point on the new site. After that, we had to run some tests on the staging server. We needed to know if our hypotheses actually held up. For those tests, we sent requests for only about 100 URLs to the staging server. We checked each one to see if it really redirected to the right place. That process gave us some great insights. Some pages did redirect with a 301. But they weren't landing on the right pages.

Sometimes we hit 500 server errors. Other times, pages just stayed stuck on 404. We worked closely with the dev team and fixed all of it fast.

— Recipes are a space shaped by seasonal shifts in their core metrics. Those shifts actually drive the trends. So our strategy is built on changes in monthly search volume. That's how we catch the trend. We built this keyword pool at the very start of the project. We keep growing it by tracking what's current in the recipe space. That lets us run a live strategy, updated monthly. It follows how the industry shifts and grows.

— ZEO's main contribution to Yemek.com was the big-picture view on SEO. The Yemek.com team knows how to produce SEO-driven content. But which content with search potential should we invest in? Where's the competition lower? How do we win rankings? We get constant support from ZEO on all of that. For example, we have a pool of hundreds, even thousands of recipes. ZEO built it for us. Working together on that pool, we can develop seasonal tactics. Last summer, "peach jam" searches drove us a ton of traffic.

But in the fall, peaches are gone. Which recipes do we prep instead? Which recipe searches can we climb? We decide all of that together.

— We created what we call Techniques Content. Very broad pieces that answer every question on a topic. They cover all the information around it. You might remember this logic from the classic boiled egg example. It's famous in the SEO world. Yemek.com has a fast, talented content team. Every piece of work like this we've done together got great results. And it keeps getting them. To give you examples: pasta sauces, cake baking, cookie recipe tips, chicken dishes. We published really detailed, long-form content on all of it.

— We build special tactics for Ramadan and Eid al-Adha. Same for New Year's and Valentine's Day. We also pull traffic from way beyond recipes. How to marinate meat. How to brew tea. Foods that help you poop. Edible mushroom types. We rank at the top on Google for all of it.

— Good performance alone won't pull users to the site. Lately, CTR matters as much as position data. Improving how you look on the search results page is the only real way to lift click-through rate. So we work on that constantly. First we reworked the title tags on our category pages. Those pages are some of our most valuable. Better titles gave us a ranking boost. We also saw click-through rates climb on already well-positioned pages.

— In 2016, our first year with ZEO, Google traffic jumped 195% over 2015. The Yemek.com team deserves credit for that. They ship consistent, quality content built for users and Google at once. ZEO's weekly and monthly reports and recommendations played a big part too. Content improvements. Title optimizations. Seasonal recipe pools. Builds tied to specific holidays and seasons. SEO strategy and tactics shaped around competitors. With ZEO, we moved fast and stayed proactive across all of it. In 2017, our goal is to keep that growth going.

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