Organic sessions
+287%
SEO case study · Content Engine
Kornfeld Mühle
Organic flour mill & online shop · Freiburg, Germany
How a Black Forest flour mill rose with the sourdough wave
+287%organic sessions
in 12 months
in 12 months
Fig. 1 — the starter, fed for 12 months
01 · The challenge
The mill's shop sold 30 flour types, but home bakers searched 'Roggensauerteig ansetzen' and landed on recipe portals that recommended supermarket brands.
A stone mill outside Freiburg with three generations of know-how and thirty flours — rye 1150, spelt 630, heritage Einkorn — sold through an online shop that Google treated as a product catalogue and nothing more.
When lockdown baking turned into a lasting sourdough habit, the demand was all informational: how to start a starter, which flour, why it isn't bubbling. The mill had the answers in the miller's head and on Instagram, but not on pages a search engine — or an AI answer — could read.
Month 0
roggensauerteig ansetzen
- rezeptportal.example › sauerteigRoggensauerteig in 5 Tagen
- backforum.example › roggen-starterStarter ansetzen — Anleitung
- supermarkt.example › mehl-type-1150Roggenmehl Type 1150, 1 kg
- … kornfeld-muehle.example on page 5 (#41)
Month 12
roggensauerteig ansetzen
AI Overview
Mix 50 g rye flour Type 1150 with 50 g water at 26 °C, feed daily for 5 days…
Source: kornfeld-muehle.example
kornfeld-muehle.example › sauerteigRoggensauerteig ansetzen5 Tage · 4 Zutaten · Video 4:12
02 · Diagnosis
A good mill with a flat starter.
Week-one audit across crawl, content, structured data and answer engines. Six findings explained most of the gap.
- 01 · ContentHigh
Products with no reason to rank
30 flour pages, 110 words each on average. No answer to ‘which flour for a rye starter?’ anywhere on the site.
- 02 · SchemaHigh
Zero recipe rich results
64 recipes lived in PDF downloads and image carousels — no Recipe markup, no crawlable ingredients.
- 03 · TechnicalHigh
Faceted URLs eating crawl budget
Shop filters produced 3,900 parameter URLs; Google crawled those more often than the recipes.
- 04 · ContentMedium
Cannibalised ‘Sauerteig’ intent
Blog post, FAQ and a product page all targeted the same query and split the signals three ways.
- 05 · VideoMedium
Starter videos hidden on social
The miller's best how-to clips lived only on Instagram — no transcripts, no on-site embed, no indexation.
- 06 · AI searchMedium
Invisible to answer engines
0 of 24 tracked starter questions cited the mill; recipe portals were quoted with supermarket flour.
03 · The strategy
The Rezept
Four ingredients, one rule: every answer a baker needs ends at the flour the mill actually sells. Built on our Content Engine plan — AI-assisted drafts, editor-refined, shipped against keyword clusters.
- 1
Recipe schema
Recipe JSON-LD on every bake: prep and proof times, yield, nutrition and step-by-step HowToStep, with the mill's flour named as the ingredient — and validated weekly in Rich Results Test.
- 2
Topic clusters
Four starter hubs (rye, spelt, wheat, gluten-free) with 120+ spokes. Each spoke answers one baker's question and links to the exact flour type it calls for.
- 3
AI Overviews
Answer-first openings, ratio tables and dated methods signed by the miller: the formats answer engines quote. 24 questions are tracked monthly for citations.
- 4
Video SEO
Short starter clips re-hosted on-site with chapters, full transcripts and VideoObject markup, so the recipe page — not a social post — wins the video carousel.
04 · Timeline
Feed, rest, bake: 12 months on the counter.
Drag the slider or pick a month in the timetable. The starter rises to that month's organic sessions; rubber bands mark where it stood at each quarter.
- Sessions / mo
- 15,870
- Recipe rich results
- 136
- Flour orders / mo
- 1,610
- AI citations
- 19 queries
Bake — Scale & handover
Feed
Months 1–4 · build the starter: crawlable, structured, mapped.
Rest
Months 5–8 · let it ferment: links, video and answers mature.
Bake
Months 9–12 · into the oven: AI answers and orders compound.
05 · Results
Out of the Ofen.
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
Recipe rich results
0 → 136
Organic flour orders
+164%
Baseline610 orders
Month 121,610 orders
AI answer citations
19 queries
Where the mill ranks now
Google.de positions, baseline vs month 12. Modelled.
| Query | Volume / mo | Before | After | AI answer |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| roggensauerteig ansetzen | 6,600 | 41 | 2 | Cited |
| sauerteig ansetzen | 18,100 | 58 | 4 | Cited |
| sauerteig füttern | 4,400 | 100+ | 3 | Cited |
| dinkelmehl 630 oder 1050 | 2,900 | 37 | 1 | Cited |
| roggenmehl 1150 | 2,900 | 14 | 1 | — |
| vollkornbrot backen | 9,900 | 100+ | 6 | — |
| bio mehl online kaufen | 2,400 | 18 | 2 | — |
| sauerteig starter set | 1,300 | 100+ | 3 | — |
Get a plan like this
Content that answers the questions your buyers ask — and leads them straight to what you sell.