How Savor the Best is giving readers more reasons to come back

More than a decade ago, Dahn Boquist and her mom, Pat, started Savor the Best because they wanted something they could work on together.

They both loved cooking and baking. A website gave them a place to preserve the recipes they were already making for their families and share them with other people. They weren’t thinking about audience profiles, content strategies, or building a business.

“We were simply sharing recipes we loved and learning as we went,” Dahn says. “Over time, the site grew into something much bigger than either of us expected.”

Today, Savor the Best includes more than 1,700 pieces of content spanning simple weeknight dinners, special occasion meals, desserts, grilling, sous vide, sourdough, and ancient grains like einkorn. It is more eclectic than most food sites, and that is intentional.

“We weren’t trying to fit a specific content strategy or build recipes around an ideal customer profile,” Dahn says. “We were sharing the food we were excited about and trusting that readers with similar interests would find us.”

For years, consistently creating useful content and taking care of the site gave Dahn a reasonable sense of how the business would grow. Google’s Helpful Content updates changed that.

“It’s been the most challenging and uncertain period I’ve seen since we started,” she says.

Over the next 18 months, Savor the Best’s traffic fell about 40%. Dahn and her mom had to make difficult decisions, including letting go of team members who had become an important part of the business. Revenue held up better as RPMs increased, but long-term planning became far less predictable.

That experience pushed Dahn to focus more on the parts of the business she could control. She didn’t abandon search or force herself to chase every new platform. Instead, she began giving readers more reasons to return directly to Savor the Best by making the site more useful after the first visit, strengthening relationships with readers, and taking better care of the content she and her mom had already built.

“I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about diversification and building stronger direct relationships with readers,” Dahn says. “The challenge is that knowing you need to diversify and successfully doing it are two different things.”

Here’s how she is approaching it.

Dahn’s strategies

1. Give readers more reasons to come back

Google remains one of the primary ways people discover Savor the Best. Dahn isn’t walking away from search, but she no longer wants a search result to be the beginning and end of the relationship.

“I’ve become more interested in creating reasons for readers to return directly to the site instead of relying entirely on search,” she says.

That has led her to invest in the experience surrounding Savor the Best’s recipes.

Readers who create a free account can save recipes, organize collections, build customizable meal plans, and generate shopping lists. Savor the Best also sells digital cookbooks through its online shop.

Most of these offerings did not begin as pieces of a formal diversification plan. They grew out of a simpler question: How can we help readers get more value from the recipes we already have?

“The cookbook was a natural extension of the recipes,” Dahn says. “The meal plans and members area came from wanting to help readers do more than just make a recipe.”

A single recipe may answer what someone wants to cook tonight. Dahn wants Savor the Best to help with the decisions that come before and after that recipe, from finding ideas to planning a week of meals and putting together the shopping list.

“My hope is that those tools make the site more useful beyond a single visit and give readers a reason to come back regularly.”

2. Diversify without trying to be everywhere

Diversification is easy to recommend and much harder to execute, especially with a small team and a site the size of Savor the Best.

Dahn has experimented with social media and continues to put effort into it, but she is candid about the fit.

“Some creators seem to have an instinct for growing on social platforms, and I’ve found that much harder,” she says. “The reality is that I enjoy creating recipes and working on the website far more than creating content for social media.”

Rather than trying to turn herself into a full-time social creator, Dahn is concentrating on the channels that feel more aligned with how she works.

Email has become increasingly important because it gives her a direct way to reach readers who have asked to hear from her. Pinterest also remains one of Savor the Best’s stronger sources of traffic.

Video and social media are still part of the mix, but Dahn is looking for an approach she can maintain without pulling too much time away from the recipes and website experience at the center of the business.

That distinction matters. A channel may offer reach, but it still has to be sustainable for the person responsible for creating the work.

For Dahn, diversification doesn’t mean being everywhere. It means building a sustainable mix of ways for people to discover Savor the Best and stay connected to it without pulling her away from the work she does best.

Revenue attributed to direct traffic is up about 76% year over year, a sign of momentum as search becomes less predictable. After seeing how quickly one channel can reshape the business, Dahn is working to make sure no single channel gets to decide what comes next.

3. Look beyond the biggest traffic numbers

Building stronger reader relationships was only one part of Dahn’s response. She also began looking more carefully at the content already on the site. A post didn’t have to be one of Savor the Best’s biggest traffic drivers to be useful to the people who found it.

At one point, an SEO consultant told Dahn that Savor the Best had become too large for two people to manage. Part of his advice was to consider cutting a significant amount of content.

On paper, the recommendation made sense. Maintaining more than a decade of recipes is an enormous job, and many of those posts weren’t bringing in substantial traffic or revenue.

But Dahn hesitated. Some of the recipes mattered to her and her mom, even if they weren’t top performers. More importantly, she wasn’t convinced that traffic alone captured everything a post contributed to the site.

“Over time, I’ve realized that not every post’s value can be measured by traffic alone. Some recipes support other content, some serve loyal readers, and they all quietly contribute to the overall strength of the site.”

That was difficult to act on when Dahn was primarily working from Google Search Console. The largest traffic drivers were easy to see; the smaller posts, keywords, and relationships between them were much harder to evaluate.

Clariti gave her visibility across the full Savor the Best library. Once those smaller signals were easier to see, Dahn began finding lower-volume keywords that were bringing in more traffic than she expected and supporting much larger topics across the site.

“What surprised me was how much value those smaller keywords were contributing. I started seeing keywords with search volumes of only a couple hundred searches a month bringing in more traffic than I would have expected. I began to see how those smaller keywords supported larger topics and helped strengthen entire content clusters.”

That changed pruning from a question of which posts attracted the least traffic into a more informed decision about what each piece of content was contributing. A lower-traffic recipe might still rank well for a specific query, support a broader topic, or serve readers who would otherwise have fewer reasons to visit.

“It also reinforced my decision not to aggressively prune content. There were posts that might not have looked important if I was only judging them by traffic alone, but Clariti helped me see that many of them were ranking well.”

With more than 1,700 pieces of content, the stakes were larger than any one post. Dahn needed a way to see what the library was doing as a whole before deciding what to cut. Clariti gave her that view.

4. Decide what is worth doing next

With a site as large as Savor the Best, Dahn will never run out of possible work.

There are recipes to update, technical issues to fix, new opportunities to investigate, and existing posts that need to be protected. The challenge isn’t finding something to do. It’s deciding which opportunity deserves the limited time available.

“With a site this size, I have to triage constantly,” Dahn says. “There are more opportunities than I could ever tackle, so the challenge is figuring out what deserves attention first.”

Clariti helps her organize projects, document changes, track progress, and identify content that may need attention. Instead of piecing together information from different tools or looking only at the most obvious traffic winners, she can evaluate opportunities in the context of the entire site.

Right now, much of Dahn’s focus is on updating and maintaining existing content. But she doesn’t follow a rigid weekly system, and that is intentional.

“I’ve learned that if I try to follow a rigid plan too closely, I burn out pretty quickly,” she says. “One of the things I’ve always liked about this business is the flexibility it gives me, so I try to leave room for that.”

That flexibility doesn’t mean working without priorities. It means using the information available to choose what deserves attention without turning every week into a fixed production schedule.

The goal isn’t to generate a longer list.

“For me, the goal isn’t finding more things to do,” Dahn says. “It’s figuring out which things are worth doing next.”

What keeps her going

The business surrounding Savor the Best has changed significantly since Dahn and her mom published their first recipes. Search is harder to predict. Diversification takes time. A content library built over more than a decade requires constant care.

But the reason Dahn does the work is much the same.

She still loves the process of making something from scratch, whether that means learning a new technique, improving a familiar recipe, or figuring out how a grain behaves differently from the flour most people know.

“I’ve become really interested in ancient grains like einkorn because they bring so much flavor and character to baking,” she says. “They behave differently than modern wheat, so they require a different approach, but that’s part of what I enjoy.”

That curiosity is the thread running through Savor the Best. Some recipes are quick and practical. Others require time and patience. Together, they reflect what Dahn and her mom have actually cooked, tested, baked, and served to their own families.

It is also why Dahn is careful about chasing strategies that could pull the business too far away from what made it meaningful in the first place.

“The biggest lesson I’ve learned is that it’s very difficult to build something that lasts if you’re constantly chasing what everyone else is doing,” she says.

Her advice to other creators is to pay attention to their audiences without losing themselves in the latest trend.

“If you’re building something for the long term, you have to create content you can still be excited about years from now.”

For Dahn, the next chapter of Savor the Best isn’t about choosing readers instead of search. It’s about building a business that can serve both: continuing to help people discover recipes while giving them more reasons to come back, protecting the content that still has something to offer, and focusing her time on the work that matters most.

If you found this customer story helpful, please support Dahn and her mom by trying one of their from-scratch recipes or exploring the Savor the Best meal-planning tools.