Yhangry: 189% Organic Traffic Growth in 6 Months

Backed by:

About Yhangry

Yhangry is a London-based venture established in 2019 by Heinin Zhang and Siddhi Mittal. The two founders came from finance and started Yhangry to solve a personal problem: finding private chefs for their dinner parties around busy schedules. The marketplace they built made it easy for anyone to hire chefs for private dining, and it gave independent chefs a way to set their own prices, create their own menus, and step away from the low pay and high stress of traditional restaurant kitchens.

In 2019, Yhangry was accepted into the Google for Startups female founders residency, and the founders went full-time and launched their first website that year. Like much of the food industry, they pivoted during the pandemic, offering virtual cooking classes and meal prep delivery from chefs' homes in 2020.

Yhangry secured a 100k pound deal on BBC's Dragons' Den, declined it privately, and instead raised 1.1m pounds from angel investors. In 2022, the business joined Y Combinator, the program that first backed Airbnb. By the time we started, the marketplace had a team of 11, nearly 1,000 chefs across the UK, and more than 40,000 guests served.

The Challenge

Yhangry asked us to build their SEO strategy and grow organic visibility. Despite strong differentiation, including exclusive access to Master Chefs and Michelin-experienced chefs, the marketplace faced fierce competition from platforms like Nomad Cooks, La Belle Assiette, and Take a Chef. As a two-sided marketplace, Yhangry also had the classic supply-and-demand problem: no chefs, no reason for guests to visit, and no guests, no reason for chefs to join.

What We Did

We started with an in-depth technical SEO audit to understand the site, then mapped the keywords already driving traffic and the search behavior of Yhangry's UK audience. From there we ran deep keyword research to find high-intent terms around private chefs and private catering.

Our Head of SEO used Ahrefs to identify keywords that could drive bottom-funnel traffic. Terms tied to private chefs, specific locations, and specific occasions ranked best for this marketplace, which pointed us toward a content strategy built around queries like "how much is a private chef," "private chef in London," and "hire a chef for a birthday party." Here are some of the keywords Yhangry targets:

Local SEO Strategy

Yhangry targets the UK market, so a local SEO strategy was central to visibility in high-volume search areas. We identified location-specific, high-intent keywords that potential customers use when searching for a chef nearby, then optimized site content, meta tags, and URLs against them. Here are examples of Yhangry's first-page results for local private chef searches:

The localized content included landing pages and articles for Yhangry's local audience: local food trends, restaurant roundups, and guides to hosting dinner parties in specific UK cities. We wrote about the same topic across multiple locations. Stag do ideas, for example, covered London, Birmingham, Newcastle, and other cities with high search volume.

Bottom-Funnel Marketplace Content

Because Yhangry is a marketplace, there was a large opportunity to build bottom-funnel content across its many pages and food categories. After research on search volume and competitors, we published on topics ranging from outdoor birthday parties to MasterChef finalists, and placed CTAs in deliberate positions to drive conversions. The image below shows two CTAs on a 21st birthday ideas page, making it easy for a reader to request a quote and book a chef on the Yhangry site.

Results

Over six months, from February 2023, we wrote more than 280,000 words across 328 pages. The compounding pattern was clear: the more relevant content and pages on the site, the faster Yhangry grew. The marketplace saw a 158% increase in Google impressions and 3.3X more clicks over that window.

Organic Traffic

• Organic traffic increased by 189% from when we started working with Yhangry in February 2023.

Organic Keywords

• Organic keyword rankings in positions 1 to 3 rose 459% following a large push in page publishing.

• The total number of keywords ranking on the first page rose 233%, driven largely by the indexation of new pages.

• Organic keyword rankings between positions 11 and 20 went from the hundreds into the thousands, a strong signal that the keyword strategy was working.

Position Improvements

The core "private chef" terms climbed in the SERPs, and Yhangry earned more traffic and more chef bookings as a direct result. The table below shows keyword position changes between May and July 2023, including a No.1 ranking for "hire a private chef."

Key takeaways

1. For a marketplace, publishing volume compounds. Yhangry grew fastest as page count grew, so a bottom-funnel SEO program built around location and occasion pages is one of the highest-leverage moves you can make.
2. High-intent, low-difficulty local keywords win first. Location and occasion terms, many at single-digit difficulty, filled the top of the funnel with buyers ready to book rather than browsers.
3. Two-sided growth needs both sides. More organic demand pulled in more guests, which gave independent chefs a reason to join, easing the classic marketplace chicken-and-egg problem.

Want the same compounding organic growth for your marketplace? Book a call and we'll map the pages worth building first.