Samuel Edwards of Tenthwave Digital dives into the importance of rich snippets and structured data markup in search engines and the imperative nature of implementing markup for recipe sites with an example from Duncan Hines.

1. Baking in the Dough
A Sweet Story of Recipe Rich Snippets
Created by Samuel Edwards of Tenthwave Digital for SMX London

2. About Me
Samuel Quincy Edwards
Online Media Strategist
Tenthwave Digital
New York, New York
Fun Facts:
• First time speaking at SMX
• First time outside of the USA
• Favorite EPL team is Chelsea (SCORE!)

4. Services:

5. Some of our clients include:

6. Duncan Hines® makes cake mixes,
frostings, fruit fillings and toppings for
passionate bakers of all skill levels to
create delicious desserts. Bakers can
create hundreds of surprisingly simple
recipes or submit their own for inclusion
on www.duncanhines.com.

7. Schema Markup
for Recipes
“The goal of a recipe rich snippet is to provide users with additional information about a
specific cooking recipe…
when recipe information is marked up in web pages, search engines may use that
information to show rich snippets in results.”
-Google Webmaster Tools Support

8. Total Reviews
Aggregate Rating
Recipe Image Nutritional Info
Prep/Total Time
Recipe Type
Instructions
Saturated Fat
Summary
Calories
Carbohydrates
Sugar
Fiber
Published Date
Unsaturated Fat
Author
Serving Size
ProteinCholesterol
Cooking Method

9. But most importantly…
If you’re strategic and thorough with your
approach, implementing schema markup for
recipes will create rich snippets, boost click
through rates and improve the quality and
quantity of visitors coming to your site.

10. Google Guidelines That
Apply for Recipe Snippets
• Main topic of the page needs to be about a specific recipe.
Using recipe markup on a page containing multiple recipes
is not supported.
• If the recipe markup contains a single review, the
reviewer’s name needs to be a valid name (Person or
Organization). For example, "50% off ingredients" is not a
valid name for a reviewer.
• Recipe rich snippets will only show if at least two of the
following are marked up: Photo, Prep Time, Cook Time,
Total Time, Ingredients, Calories, Review.

11. What Users See
Recipe Author
Recipe Name
Recipe Description
Total Time
Prep Time
Serving Size
Recipe Image Aggregate Rating

12. What Crawlers See
Recipe Name
Recipe Author
Recipe Description
Recipe Image
Total Time
Prep Time
Serving Size
Item Type (Recipe)

13. What Google Displays

14. What Bing Displays

15. You may be thinking…
“Sam, that sounds great and all, but do I really
need to implement structured data markup for
all my recipes? I have so many!”

16. “Yes.”
-Sam

17. Which one of these
results is not like the
others?

18. This one.

19. Prior to implementation, Tenthwave analyzed the top 263 organic
search terms driving traffic to DuncanHines.com from Google
and we found that:
For each of the 263 queries, at least one result had some form of
rich snippet on page one, including: images, reviews, prep times
and calories.
And out of those queries, on average, 3/5 results
had implemented some form of markup.
EVERYONE IS DOING IT!

20. So we were all like…

22. And they were all like…

24. Getting Started
Step One: Using http://schema.org/Recipe we looked through the item properties that
were applicable to Duncan Hines® based on the information provided about each recipe
that users could see on site. In the end we went with the follow:

25. Step Two: We then implemented a template containing HTML markup, the schema
tags, as well as placeholders into which the server injects the actual recipe data when
rendering the recipe detail page.
Site Wide Implementation
PlaceholdersSchema Tags
HTML Markup

26. Validation
Step Three: After rendering the sample detail pages, we validated a number of user
generated recipes using the Structured Data Testing Tool to ensure all was displaying
properly. Now, we can stamp out an infinite number of recipes with the correct markup.

27. Before

28. After

29. Early Test Results
• Markup implemented mid February 2014
– Organic search traffic from Google to user
generated recipe pages increased by 12.72% from
January 2014 (prior) to March 2014 (post). YoY
increase was 16.76%.
– Quite a few highly trafficked user generated
recipes saw increases significantly higher than the
average.

30. 32% increase in traffic
from Jan to March
280% increase in traffic
from January to March
73% increase in traffic
from January to March
80% increase in traffic
from January to March

31. Observed Ranking Increases
While Google claims adding mark up doesn’t affect rankings, we
found that (all else being equal) within 2 weeks of implementing
Schema markup, 75% of the 263 terms analyzed in the initial
test had seen an improvement in search results. Of those:
196 had improved rankings
44 had unchanged rankings
23 had declined rankings
The average listing for Duncan Hines® improved by 2.42
positions.
Before: Position 11.5 (Page 2)
After: Position 9.08 (Page 1)

32. Why is that significant?

33. (or page 1 of
Bing)
Because the best place to hide a dead
body is page 2 of Google search
results.
(JUST
KIDDING!)
(but not really...)

34. But not all recipes came out of the
oven baked to perfection…

35. Misfires
After adding micro data markup we were
pleased with the majority of early results, but
noted that some recipes had seen a decline in
organic search traffic.
Curiously, we began to wonder…

37. Problem

39. The average recipe page looks something like this:
Table "Comments":
- recipe_id (references the recipe)
- user_id (references the comment author)
- message (the actual comment)
- rating (one of the following values: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, NULL; where NULL is a value
representing "No Data")
For a given recipe:
1. Get all comments that have a rating (i.e. NOT NULL)
2. Calculate average of all ratings found in step #1
3. Take information from step #2 and place it in itemprop=“ratingValue”
Solution

41. Final Notes

42. GWT IS YOUR BEST FRIEND!
Amazing MS Paint Smiley Face

43. Validate

44. Fetch and Index

45. Fix

46. Thank You!
Twitter: @Samuel_Quincy
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/pub/samuel-
edwards/4b/a34/962
Email: samuel.edwards@tenthwave.com