Dave Freygang New CEO for Bonnier Corp

Christmas ham, grilling, gingerbread, saffron buns, lobster and beef tenderloin. Those were just a few of the search terms that brought visitors to alltommat.se, the website for Swedish food magazine Allt om Mat. And with some 2.6 million page views during Christmas and New Year, the site hit a new high. According to alltommat.se web editor Hanna E. Lindberg, it’s been wildly successful. The previous Christmas, she thought the numbers must have been a mistake when she saw there had been 2 million page views, but this year the numbers were even higher. And that was just during a single week – compared to the 1.7 million page views for the same week the year before, that’s a million more page views.

Some 80 percent of the visitors came in via Google, and during Christmas they’re looking for classic holiday food. We talked to Lindberg about what’s behind the increase.

What does traffic look like during a normal week, in comparison with the fantastic numbers from the “big food” week?

We have around 200,000 unique visitors per week, and 850,000 page views. We work constantly to increase traffic and we’ve been very successful. For example, during 2012 we’ve increased the number of unique visitors by 50 percent compared to 2011.

What have you done to get such a buzz of activity at the site?

For the past year, we’ve been working in a different way in the digital media division of Bonnier Tidskrifter. I’ve put in a lot more time researching how visitors behave on the site, working very analytically and goal-oriented with search engine optimization. It’s fun to see that working in such a structured way has shown results.

How does search engine optimization work?

Naturally, we want to end up at the top in Google’s popular search words. So we work with key words and use language that is very concrete compared with magazine writing, which is built more on emotions and the interplay with photos. Headlines on the site instead are adapted to the language we use when we do a web search.

Can you give an example?

Apple cake is called “apple cake” or “recipe for apple cake” instead of “Grandma’s Favorite Cake.” It may sound like a boring headline, but it’s very effective.

At google.se/trends you can test your own search words to see how and when a word is popular. If you write in Allt om Mat, you can see in a diagram how Google search traffic to the site increases every December.