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How a Family-Run Chinese Food Blog Grew Traffic by 502% YoY

https://www.madewithlau.com/
SEO case study of Made With Lau.

Stats

175.2K to 1.1M Monthly Visits

Industry

Food & Drink

Niche

Food Blog

Reporting Date

October 2024

Made With Lau is a popular Chinese food blog showcasing the culinary expertise and cherished family recipes of Chung Sun Lau. Spearheaded by his son, Randy Lau, the website made significant strides in 2024 from its debut in 2020, reaching 1M organic visits in October.

Chart of Made With Lau's 2-year organic traffic with spike in October 2024.

This SEO case study explores the strategies behind Made with Lau's organic success, transforming this family-run business into a household name.

The Catalyst: How Made With Lau Achieved 1M Monthly Visits

1. New Recipes, Recognitions, & Rankings

In the past year, Made With Lau has refreshed its website and introduced over 50 new recipes to its repertoire.

They have a consistent publishing schedule, releasing new video recipes every Friday.

This steady stream of fresh content has not only engaged existing followers but also attracted a new wave of food enthusiasts eager to explore authentic Cantonese cuisine.

Search engines rewarded these efforts with an influx of new rankings, bringing their organic keywords to 265.8K in October 2024.

Growth chart of Made With Lau's organic keyword rankings.

The platform's commitment to engaging, high-quality content has also garnered recognition from the digital culinary world.

In 2024, Made With Lau won two James Beard Media Awards, solidifying its position as a respected culinary content creator.

These accolades could also have boosted the website's organic traffic, bringing more visibility to Made With Lau than ever.

Why this matters:

By producing high-quality content at regular weekly intervals, Made With Lau has provided users and search engines with a steady flow of fresh content.

Search engines love fresh content because it indicates a website is active and regularly maintained.

Combined with industry recognition, Made With Lau has become a trusted authority on Cantonese home cooking.

Their growth is organic yet strategic, proving that consistent efforts pay off with SEO and your audience.

How to identify new content opportunities:

Every successful content strategy starts with keyword research.

Keyword research is the process of identifying the words and phrases your audience uses in search engines.

By understanding these terms, you’ll learn how to optimize your content to rank in relevant search results.

You’ll also learn the interests and needs of your audience, allowing you to tailor your content to their preferences.

This tutorial provides an in-depth explanation of how to do keyword research.

For a quick preview, you’ll follow these steps:

  1. Select an SEO tool.
  2. Enter a keyword.
  3. Find keywords that are easy to rank for.
  4. Determine the keyword’s search intent.
  5. Check the monthly search volume.

Tools for keyword research:

All in One SEO (AIOSEO) users can perform keyword research directly in WordPress by connecting to their Semrush account.

Once you’ve linked your accounts and set a focus keyword in the post or page you’re working on, click Get Additional Keyphrases.

Get additional keyphrases button in WordPress.

The plugin will fetch keywords from Semrush and serve them in the editor.

From here, you can click Add Keyphrase for any term you want.

Additional keyphrases from Semrush in WordPress.

After you optimize your page for the new keyword, TruSEO will analyze your optimizations and provide real-time feedback.

2. Fresh Recipe & Review Snippets in SERPs

There’s no question that Made With Lau has content quality and on-page SEO down pat.

But they also display a deep understanding of the importance of technical SEO.

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website's technical elements for search engine performance. These elements can include site speed, mobile friendliness, crawling, and indexing.

For Made With Lau, schema markup has become one of its fundamental technical SEO best practices.

Schema markup is a type of structured data that lives within a web page's HTML. It communicates important details about your page to search engines in a way that’s easy for them to understand.

Here’s an example of what it looks like in the source code of one of Made With Lau’s recipes:

Schema markup in HTML source code of one of Made With Lau's recipes.

There are several schema types, but food bloggers, including Made With Lau, often use the following:

  • Recipe
  • AggregateRating
  • HowToStep

Since a video accompanies all of Made With Lau’s recipes, they also use VideoObject schema.

In addition to helping search engines understand your page, schema markup can also be used to generate rich snippets in the SERPs.

Rich snippets are enhanced search listings that display more information than standard results.

In the image below, we have a recipe snippet that displays the cooking time and recipe rating. (It also shows an image of the finished dish.)

Recipe snippet in Google for a chicken congee recipe.

Recipe snippets are great for getting user attention in SERPs.

Made With Lau’s optimizations have also earned several spots in Google’s recipe carousel, which have high clickthrough rates (CTRs).

Google recipe carousel for the query congee recipe.

Overall, Made With Lau has seen an impressive spike in both review and recipe snippets.

In October, they had 100.1K rankings with review snippets. (This is more than double their rankings just a year prior.)

Made With Lau review snippets per month.

And for recipe snippets, Made With Lau went from 0 rankings in October 2023 to 8.4K by the same month in 2024.

Made With Lau recipe snippets per month.

These growth metrics prove the efficacy of Made With Lau’s technical optimizations.

Why this matters:

By implementing schema markup, Made With Lau has significantly enhanced its presence in search results.

SEO statistics suggest that rich snippets get 58% of all clicks, making them valuable assets for your website's traffic.

How to implement schema markup:

You can add schema markup to your WordPress site manually or with a plugin.

If you choose the manual route, this tutorial shows you how to implement schema markup without a plugin. The tutorial gives you three different methods, each requiring you to obtain code snippets. You’ll paste these snippets into the appropriate fields in WordPress.

For a streamlined, code-free route, we recommend using a schema markup plugin.

Let’s look at which one we recommend next.

Tools for schema markup:

The AIOSEO Schema Generator is one of the easiest schema plugins to use.

After locating your desired schema (if you have a food blog like Made With Lau, this would be recipe), just click the plus (+) button.

AIOSEO schema generator with recipe schema highlighted.

Based on your selection, the plugin may prompt you to add information about your page.

For example, for recipe schema, you can add the following elements:

  • Ingredients
  • Dish type
  • Nutritional information
  • Instructions
  • Ratings and reviews
  • And more

Once you’ve saved your details, AIOSEO will format the structured data properly for search engines.

3. FAQs Land in Google’s People Also Ask

Made With Lau includes FAQs at the bottom of each recipe to help users access quick answers to popular questions.

In the example below, we see how users can expand these questions to reveal the answer. (Take note of the copy in the red box for our next point.)

FAQs about wonton noodle soup on a Made With Lau page.

In addition to being user-friendly, FAQs pair nicely with Google’s People Also Ask (PAA) feature.

This box provides users with questions related to their initial query.

In the screenshot below, we see how the earlier copy from Made With Lau appears in the PAA box about a wonton soup recipe.

Google people also ask box with a result about wonton soup from Made With Lau.

FAQs work well in this section of the SERP because it uses a question-answer format.

FAQs are also typically short, making it easy for search engines to pull and display answers in SERPs.

Now, my one grievance with Made With Lau’s implementation of FAQs is that they didn’t include FAQ schema markup. I’d like to see them use FAQ schema alongside their other standard schema types (recipe, review, etc.)

Despite this oversight, search engines still rewarded them with more than triple the PAA results over the prior year. (October 2024 ranked for 6.7K keywords in the PAA box.)

Made With Lau's people also ask rankings per month.

Why this matters:

By incorporating FAQs into their recipes, Made With Lau has tapped into the power of Google's PAA feature. This has resulted in increased organic visibility and a higher CTR for their content.

It's also important to note that even though the blog doesn't currently have FAQ schema, its FAQs are clear enough for search engines to understand.

Combined with strong on-page SEO signals, it doesn't appear to hurt their rankings. (Although, I'd wonder if they could get even more rankings with the implementation of FAQ schema.)

How to write FAQs:

Writing FAQs is relatively straightforward.

First, you’ll want to perform keyword research for a question-based phrase. Look for modifiers like “who,” “what,” “why,” etc.

Once you have a question keyword relevant to your topic, craft an accurate and concise answer. Pay attention to length because while you want it to be clear and detailed, search engines prefer a shorter response in SERPs.

Find the right balance for answering the question and optimizing for the PAA box.

Last but not least, don’t forget to add FAQ schema!

Tools for FAQs:

With AIOSEO FAQ blocks, you don’t even have to think about schema markup.

Just select the FAQ block from the editor, write your FAQs as you would normally, and AIOSEO will implement FAQ schema automatically behind the scenes.

AIOSEO FAQ block in the WordPress editor.

4. Search Engines Reward High-Quality Content

For this last growth strategy, there’s no specific one-and-done task.

Instead, it’s a culmination of SEO best practices that Made With Lau used to unlock a new SERP feature: Things to Know.

The Things to Know SERP feature presents users with subtopics related to their query.

Google Things to Know section about general tso chicken.

Users can expand any of these subtopics to access relevant content.

Made With Lau appears in the Google Things to Know box with a general tso chicken recipe.

For Made With Lau, July 2024 was the first time they ever ranked for this type of SERP feature.

By October, they’re now at over 1.1K rankings.

Made With Lau's rankings in Google Things to Know per month.

As for how they got them, here are a few optimizations Made With Lau uses to rank in Things to Know:

  • Aligned content with search intent
  • Optimized content readability
  • Used on-page SEO to communicate the main topic with search engines
  • Organized the content structure for easy navigation
  • Included technical optimizations to improve site performance

Why this matters:

Ranking in the Things to Know SERP feature is a testament to Made With Lau's commitment to producing high-quality, relevant content.

By consistently creating in-depth recipes that address user intent, they’ve earned increased visibility and organic traffic.

How to optimize for readability:

Readability measures how easy it is for users to read and understand your content.

This principle plays an important role in the user experience, which translates to user signals and how search engines assess your content.

Some ways to improve your readability score include:

  • Using simple language
  • Writing short sentences and paragraphs
  • Organizing content with clear subheadings
  • Breaking up text with images and videos
  • Using transition words

Tools for readability:

While readability may sound subjective, certain tools measure it and provide real-time feedback for improving it.

Take AIOSEO’s TruSEO tool, for example.

This feature analyzes your content’s readability and gives suggestions for improving your score.

You’ll get a Readability Checklist that makes these recommendations easy to view and implement.

TruSEO readability checklist in WordPress.

Standout SEO Wins

Before we conclude our SEO case study of Made With Lau, there’s a final growth strategy I’d like to highlight:

Built a Thriving & Supportive YouTube Community

Randy and Chung Sun Lau are refreshing video content creators.

I'll admit that when I was researching for this case study, I was blown away by their authenticity.

Between b-roll shots of the Lau family enjoying a meal, Randy adding English narrative notes over his father's Chinese commentary, and just the overall production of the videos, you really feel like you're entering the Lau home — and family.

It even made me want to try a recipe, and I don't even like cooking.

That's how contagious they are. (And the food looks seriously good.)

This family-style approach gives you all the fuzzy feelings and has practical tips for executing Lau’s recipes to perfection.

Today, Made With Lau has over 1.6M YouTube subscribers, proving that a large community feels the same.

Made With Lau YouTube channel.

This strategy goes beyond SEO and taps into building a brand.

Made With Lau has carved a unique space within the digital culinary world by being authentically themselves and sharing their family’s love of Cantonese food and cooking.

Their audience resonates with this style and has become a loyal following eager to support Made With Lau.

Tool: While every brand and video strategy will look different, it’s important to keep SEO in mind when publishing new video content. Video SEO will ensure the right users find your videos. AIOSEO can help you create video sitemaps that notify Google when you add new videos to your website. (It can also help you rank in the video carousel in Google search results.)

Takeaways

In our analysis of Made With Lau, we've uncovered several key strategies that have contributed to its explosive growth.

By consistently delivering high-quality content, optimizing for search engines, and building a strong community, Made With Lau has established itself as a leading authority in the world of homemade Cantonese cooking.

Now, let’s review how you can emulate some of these strategies on your website and others to consider.

Top 3 Strategies to Emulate

  1. Prioritize high-quality content above all else. You may have already heard the expression, “Write for users first, search engines second,” but it’s true. Keep your audience at the forefront of your content creation process; it will never steer you wrong. Search engines are sophisticated enough to identify when users find content genuinely helpful. By focusing on creating valuable content and complimenting it with on-page SEO, you’ll naturally improve your search engine rankings.
  2. Leverage schema markup to enhance your online visibility. Search engines can use schema markup to generate rich snippets and rank your content in SERP features like People Also Ask or Things to Know. Be mindful to select the most appropriate schema type for your content for the best results. For example, food blogs will benefit from recipe schema while a SaaS company would benefit from software schema.
  3. Include FAQs for a positive user experience. FAQs can help users find answers quickly and easily, improving their overall experience on your website. Additionally, FAQs can help your website rank in Google's People Also Ask box, which has high clickthrough rates. Websites appearing in this section of the SERP are also viewed as more trustworthy by users, building your brand reputation.

Bottom 3 Strategies to Reconsider

  1. Missing canonical tags on indexable pages. Canonical tags help search engines identify the primary version of a page when multiple URLs contain the same or similar content. You can also use self-referencing canonicals when there is only one version of a page to ensure no room for misinterpretation. A handful of Made With Lau's pages are missing canonical tags, which could impact rankings. On your WordPress site, you can easily set and manage canonical URLs in the AIOSEO settings.
  2. Duplicating meta descriptions across content. Meta descriptions appear on the SERP below your SEO title. They act like a preview of your content, enticing users to click and visit your website. Like canonical tags, every indexable page of your site should have its own, unique meta description. When you duplicate them across multiple pages, it can confuse search engines and diminish their efficacy with users on the SERP. Running low on creative inspiration? You can use a meta description generator to write them for you.
  3. Forgetting to include H1 tags. H1s are the main title of your page. Unlike SEO titles that appear in SERPs, the H1 appears on the web page itself. While most of Made With Lau's pages have an H1, a handful use H2s. From a user perspective, it's not an issue because it's still easy to view the title of the page. However, H1s play an important role with search engines, helping them understand the main topic of a page. If you use AIOSEO, the TruSEO tool will let you know when you've forgotten your focus keyword in the H1.

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author avatar
Gabriela Jhean SEO Specialist
Gabriela is a creative and results-driven SEO specialist dedicated to helping small businesses stand out online. She contributes in-depth SEO case studies at AIOSEO Trends to reveal the winning strategies of top-ranking websites. In her downtime, Gabriela enjoys treasure hunting for antique jewelry.