UrbanNest
In 2018 Lerato Mkhize decided she was done keeping her family recipes locked up in a dusty notebook. She started UrbanNest — not as some big business idea but because she couldn’t stand the thought of South African dishes slowly disappearing from people’s kitchens. Bobotie, bunny chow, malva pudding… these weren’t just recipes, they were pieces of home.
What started as a simple blog for friends and family snowballed. Turns out when you talk about food the way you’d talk about it around a kitchen table — messy, personal, unapologetically nostalgic — people stick around.
Lerato’s mission has always been personal: keep South African food culture alive and loud. Today 37,000+ people show up on Urbannestcuisine every month to read her recipes, pick up cooking tips and get a taste of the stories behind the dishes.
The timing couldn’t be better — South Africa’s food and beverage market hit R150 billion in 2024 and the rest of the world is finally catching on that African flavours are not just “exotic” — they’re essential. For Lerato it’s never been about chasing trends. UrbanNest is her love letter to heritage.
Then came the call to us at EcoSEO. Lerato had the flavour nailed down but the reach? That was stuck.
Lead Time: 4 Months
Sector: Culinary & Lifestyle
Target Type: Culinary & Lifestyle
Demographic: Food enthusiasts, aged 25–50, interested in South African culture and cuisine
Website Goal:Inspire Culinary Exploration, Build a Community, Drive Traffic and Monetization, Promote Food Culture
Services: Technical SEO, Optimising Schema Markup, Building Backlinks, Optimizing Images
366%
Increase in Organic Traffic
The Challenge
After 6 years of pouring herself into UrbanNest Lerato had built a fiercely loyal community. But loyalty doesn’t equal visibility.
Her blog was pulling in around 18,700 organic visits a month — not bad for a passion project but nowhere near the audience her content deserved.
Worse? She wasn’t showing up where it really mattered: Google’s first page for searches like “traditional South African recipes”.
We dug in and found the follow SEO roadblocks:
- Keywords Needed - She was practically invisible for the big South African cuisine keywords.
- No schema markup — which meant Google couldn’t “see” her recipes in a way that would make them stand out.
- Backlinks Needed - Hardly any heavyweight backlinks to prove her site’s authority.
- Missing Alt Tags: Images that were beautiful but under-optimised, missing a whole wave of traffic from Google Image search. June 2024. She gave us the brief. “Make UrbanNest visible again!.”
Enhancing SERP Presence with Recipe Schema
Cooking Up a Presence Google Couldn’t Ignore.
We started with a deep dive — the unglamorous kind where you sit in front of Semrush until your coffee goes cold.
We wanted to know exactly where UrbanNest was showing up in search, and more importantly, where it wasn’t.
That’s when we spotted it: the blog had killer recipes for dishes like bobotie, but no recipe schema. It’s like having a five-star restaurant with no sign out front. Google had no extra info to make Lerato’s recipes pop in the results.
So we rolled up our sleeves and tagged everything — ingredients, prep time, cook time, ratings — the works. Suddenly, UrbanNest wasn’t just a blue link. It was showing star ratings, timing info, and all those little details that make you click “just to see.”
I think Google clearly like it. (Click wise I mean). Site ranking saw an immediate improvement. 12,400 new keywords were triggering by using rich snippets, and we noticed an improvement of the click-through rate (over 22%.) People weren’t just finding UrbanNest, they were choosing it.
Crafting Authentic Content for User Queries
Speaking the Audience’s Language (Literally)
We’re big believers in this: if you want traffic, stop talking at people and start answering what they’re actually asking.
So we mined Google Search Console for the real gold — questions people were typing in, like “how to make authentic bunny chow.” We spotted patterns in those “People Also Ask” sections, and then rewrote key posts to speak directly to those curiosities.
Of course, we didn’t mess with Lerato’s magic. Her storytelling — the part that makes you feel like you’re in her kitchen — stayed front and center. We just layered in clear FAQ sections answering questions like “What spices are used in South African cuisine?” in plain, warm language.
The result? People lingered. Time-on-page for those updated posts shot up 30%. Turns out, when you give someone exactly what they came for, they stick around for dessert.
Driving Visual Traffic with Image Optimization
Turning Pictures into Traffic Magnets. If you’ve seen UrbanNest’s photos, you know they’re the kind that make you want to lick your screen. The trouble? They weren’t pulling their weight in Google Image search.
We fixed that by giving every image a little extra love: keyword-rich alt text (the kind that actually describes what’s in the frame), smaller file sizes so they loaded in a snap, and a shiny new image sitemap for Google to gobble up.
It worked. Image search traffic went from 3% of total visits to 15%. That’s not just more eyes on the food — that’s a whole new audience arriving through their stomachs.
Building Authority with Targeted Backlinks
Building Clout in the Right Places.
A food blog can’t live on good recipes alone — it needs friends in high places. We used Ahrefs to sniff out where Lerato’s competitors were getting their backlinks, then went after the same kind of high-quality connections.
Guest posts on local food blogs? Check. Features on global culinary sites? Check. Collaborations with South African food brands? Absolutely.
Forty-two solid backlinks later, UrbanNest’s domain authority climbed from 28 to 39. That bump made it a whole lot easier to rank for competitive terms like “traditional South African recipes.” And just like that, the blog wasn’t just beloved — it was respected.
The Results
Four months. That’s all it took for UrbanNest to go from a beloved niche blog to a big player in the South African food scene online.
Here’s the SEO Improvement stats:
- Organic Traffic: We went from 18.7K to 87.2K. That’s a 366% increase — the kind of growth you can feel in your inbox when the recipe requests start rolling in.
- Keyword Rankings: From barely scraping by to owning 29.8K keywords, with 1.8K of them in the top three spots.
- Rich Snippets: 12.4K keywords now trigger those lovely recipe snippets — stars, prep times, the works — so you can’t scroll past UrbanNest.
- Backlinks: Domain authority went from 28 to 39 after we got 42 quality backlinks. Think of it as going from the local coffee shop to a must-visit in the city guide.
- Image Search: Once a tiny 3% of traffic, image search now pulls in 15% of total traffic. Those food photos are finally doing their job.
And the star of the show? Lerato’s “Traditional Bobotie with Yellow Rice”. Thanks to a smart FAQ section and image polish, it’s getting 5,600 visits a month — enough to fill a small stadium with hungry readers.
We didn’t just do SEO magic. We combined technical muscle with authentic storytelling. We didn’t just chase rankings; we made sure the soul of the blog stayed intact.
Now UrbanNest isn’t just a food blog. It’s a global table where people from Cape Town to California come to taste South African tradition — one click, one story, one recipe at a time.
Technical Tools:
Semrush, Ahrefs, Google Search Console, Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper, TinyPNG, Google Analytics
SEO Services
Semrush, Ahrefs, Google Search Console, Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper, TinyPNG, Google Analytics
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