Keyword research for a meal-planning app at launch

The situation

Mealvana was in the early stages of launching its subscription app. The website covered the essentials: home, about, recipes, meal plans and member login. Recipes were developed with a professional cook and photographed well. The business wanted people to spend more time on the recipe and meal plan pages, and to be found in organic search.

What I found

I studied the industry, competitor websites and search data from Google Keyword Planner and other keyword tools. Then I audited the recipe and meal plan pages: page titles, headlines, descriptions, metadata, image file names, image descriptions and alt text.

The pages had a lot going for them. Recipes included photos, macros, ingredients and close-up video of the chef’s hands, without slowing the page down, and there were no third-party ads. But descriptions, file names and metadata repeated the same patterns across many pages, which limited how much of the search landscape they could reach.

The work

I worked with the team to rewrite those elements with fresh phrasing and keywords chosen for the business, and delivered:

1. A researched list of relevant keywords and phrases

2. Average monthly search volume for each

3. Keyword difficulty, to show which terms were realistic to rank for

4. Long-tail keywords for niche content

5. A competitor keyword analysis showing gaps to fill

The outcome

Mealvana came away with a keyword foundation for its content strategy and a clear list of page-level fixes for its recipe and meal plan pages.