Gurman.sk | Recipe book that you always have at hand

Project Presentation

Gurman.sk is an online recipe book where you can find delicious recipes and kitchen tips. The content is not only added by us but also by the users themselves, allowing everyone to share their recipes with others or save them for future use. The business plan that Gurman is currently based on is content monetization through banner advertising (mainly programmatic advertising).

Project History

The history of Gurman and its domain dates back to 2010. Even then, over 2,000 recipes were published on Gurman.sk.

Gurman has been part of the media house Zoznam.sk's portfolio since around 2017. At that time, Gurman was still in its old design, as you can see in the image above. During this period, the website had approximately 50,000 active users per month.

Subsequently, in 2021, it underwent a complete redesign, migration of content, and the entire database to the WordPress editorial system:

The redesign at that time was not well executed; Gurman lost its positions in search engines and new content stopped being added. It was also unfortunate that the original recipe authors could not be retained. This led to a decline in traffic to 15,000 users per month, a trend that continued until 2022.

Website Development Under My Product Leadership

This project was entrusted to me at the turn of 2022 and 2023, at which time the traffic was around 20,000 active users per month, who made approximately 40,000 page views.

Content

The first significant change we had to make on Gurman was CONTENT. A major weakness of Gurman up to that point was the low-quality content primarily created by users. That is, our readers who can add recipes themselves. The content was mostly from 2012, when the standards on the Slovak internet were, let's say, lower. Since new content was hardly added between 2017 and 2022, we had little to work with. More than 70% recipes lacked images and ingredients, and often it was spam. We literally had 2-3 sentence recipes on how to prepare 'cereal with milk'.

As a result, our part-time workers faced a laborious task - Sorting Recipes. We saved recipes with good positions in search engines and good traffic, added images from photo banks, supplemented ingredients, and in some cases, we even reworked the titles. Recipes that we could not save were deleted and redirected via 301 redirect according to context. From the original 3,200 recipes, we were left with approximately 1,400 recipes.

Why did we do this?

– to increase the crawl budget for other subpages

– to remove spam content so that we could also recommend quality recipes to users on the website. Whether it's the relevance of recommendations in widgets like 'Similar Recipes' or 'Recommended Recipes', and so on.

– to eliminate duplicate content

Alongside 'sorting old recipes', we certainly did not hesitate and began creating our own content. For a relatively low budget, we hired 2 authors who started creating their own photo recipes and articles. However, we paid attention to the newly added content, especially to the one we were paying for. It had to meet certain standards, such as authentic photographs of the recipe and its process. Since then, we have been regularly creating our own quality content, which brings us the majority of traffic. Later, we also added video recipes to our content portfolio.

Social Media

Up to this point, nothing had been added to our socials; we literally had only a few hundred followers. Socials are, in my opinion, an inseparable element of an online recipe book like Gurman.sk.

Did you know? – A study by the British 'The Independent' on a sample of 2,000 adults showed that 71 % people use social media (Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, or Twitter) for cooking inspiration instead of traditional cookbooks.

Ignoring this source of traffic would be a shame.

Therefore, alongside building content on the website, we also started building socials. We unified the design of our Facebook and Instagram and created a unified linkin.bio subpage. At first, we tried a budget-friendly approach and began adding at least links to articles and recipes as posts and stories. Later, as website traffic increased, we tested video creation, to see if it would make sense. We started with short reels on Instagram, where the entire recipe was presented in about 40 seconds, but in a way that largely referred to the actual recipes on the website. Whether we did not directly state the ingredients, process, and so on in the reel. Of course, mainly for monetization, we can only monetize the user when they come to our website. Even if they don't come, we are at least building the Gurman.sk brand.

So, did it make sense?

Yes, definitely yes 🤑. When we hit the right trend, some reels reached nearly a million users combined on IG and FB:

After the 'successes' on Instagram and Facebook, we naturally ventured into TikTok as well. It took us 3 weeks to reach our first 1,000 followers on TikTok 😁.

At the time of writing this article, our FB, IG, and TikTok together have approximately 23 000 followers.

We are also preparing to add another social network – Pinterest.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Another important aspect that had long been neglected on Gurman.sk was search engine optimization. We decided to work on it and alongside building new quality content, we focused mainly on – On Page SEO.

On Page SEO

In WordPress, we use premium plugins that provide our authors with various SEO recommendations, ensuring that the content is properly optimized. Recommendations regarding the correct keywords for recipes, ideal text length, internal and external links on the website, the number of relevant keywords, and various others.

Another optimization mainly concerned Google Discover, as it is one of the largest sources of traffic. No one really knows how Discover works; we have experienced various anomalies on X websites where Discover dropped to a complete 0 for no reason. However, we are trying to meet Google's requirements mainly through optimization Core Web Vitals, which I believe have at least an indirect impact. We focused mainly on recommendations for CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift). We addressed this by predefining ad space that loads first. In addition, we optimized several other things, such as displaying images in modern formats like .webp and .avif, image sizes, delaying the loading of unnecessary JavaScripts, and so on.

Another optimization included structured data from Schema.org. We added as many attributes as we could extract from our content to schema type:recipe. Additionally, we divided the content into 2 schema types:
– Articles (type:article)
– Recipes (type:recipe)

This was mainly because, from my experience, articles tend to perform much better as trending content in Google Discover compared to recipes.

Off page SEO

In addition, our activities also include – Off Page SEO, primarily link building. I do not mean the support of the media house Zoznam.sk as a whole, nor do I mean any bulk or excessive link purchasing. We focus on strong and thoughtful link exchanges through a three-way linking (3-way) method. This way, Google cannot identify whether we purchased the links or if they are organic, so we do not give it reasons for penalization. Under normal circumstances, links are exchanged from site A -> B and back from site B -> A (which is easily detectable by Google and can appear unnatural). We add a site C to this pattern as follows:

1. Site A (Gurmán.sk) links to site C
2. Site B links to site A

UX, UI and CMS

Although Gurmán underwent a redesign in 2021, from my perspective, it was not entirely successful. The navbar was too simple without the option to add submenus, the content management system lacked many features, and from my point of view, the design was not entirely user-friendly. We also added additional parameters to the recipes, such as intolerances and world cuisines, which needed to be incorporated into the layouts. Therefore, we decided to gradually redesign one layout of Gurmán at a time. However, we will keep the brand as it is, without changing colors or the uniqueness of the brand; it is more about the layout of the website and usability for users. We also retained the WordPress CMS, which suits us for building our own theme.

Currently, we have implemented a new navbar:

New article:

And several other subpages, such as categories, intolerances, and so on...

In addition, we paid more attention to the layout of ad spaces, ensuring that it is not completely invasive but still profitable.

Results

All the points mentioned above would be irrelevant if we did not achieve results from monetization. Below, I provide the traffic results from Google Analytics 4, for the period since this project was entrusted to me:

All numbers can also be transparently viewed on the IAB/E-gemius measurement: https://e.gemius.com/sk/rankings/14345/717810

Historical maximum: In December 2024, the project achieved record traffic 336,000 real users and nearly 780,000 page views (PV) in one month.

The result of the efforts mentioned above is x-fold increase in traffic = x-fold increase in revenue from content monetization (programmatic advertising). Gurmán.sk is no longer unprofitable. This website has become a project that is sustainable and profitable in the long term – which was my main goal as a product manager.