Our SEO Competitor Analysis Reveals What’s Cooking for Personal Chefs in the UK

In several episodes of Billions, we watch Bobby Axelrod (a multi-billionaire) dismiss his personal chef who has just finished preparing and serving another 5-star meal in Axelrod’s home or at a place of Axelrod’s choosing.

Have you ever wondered what it would be like to have a personal chef? 

Well, there are an estimated 500 searches each month for the term “personal chef” in the UK.

It seems that there are quite a few people who are actively seeking a personal chef.

As such, this piqued our curiosity. So we decided to conduct an SEO competitor analysis of the top ten websites ranking for the keyword “personal chef”.

Initial analysis of search intent behaviour of people searching for “personal chef” uncovers the following frequently asked questions:

•  How much money does it cost to hire a personal chef?
•  What is the difference between a personal and private chef?
•  Is a personal chef worth it?
•  How much is a personal chef in the UK?

We will get into the answers to those questions and also ask who is answering those questions later in this report.

But first, let’s get an overview of the competitive landscape. First, we’ll introduce our main organic competitors.

Here are the top 10 websites ranking for the keyword “personal chef” in the UK. We’ve listed them from weakest to strongest.

Forest Holidays creates “authentic experiences in Britain’s amazing forests; connecting people, nature and local communities.”

Website visitors clicking on the search result: forestholidays.co.uk/food-and-drink/personal-chef are sent to a service landing page. This page is designed to sell their “In Cabin Chef” service.

Taste The Love is “a Manchester based event catering company started by Sarah Holder, a one-woman rocket of love, life and energy on a mission to bring fabulous, flavourful food into your life.

Website visitors clicking on the search result: tastethelove.co.uk/affordable-personal-chef-service-manchester are sent to a localised service landing page. This page is designed to attract people looking for an “affordable personal chef” in Manchester.

Eden Private Staff “has a team of twenty six based in London and Somerset who manage a diverse range of roles in the UK and overseas, including housekeepers and nannies, butlers, chefs, house managers, and PAs.”

However, Eden Private Staff does not specialise solely in personal chef services, it is a domestic staffing agency.

Website visitors clicking on the search result: edenprivatestaff.com/what-we-do/private-chef are sent to a localised service landing page. This is designed to attract people looking for an “affordable personal chef” in Manchester.

Bark describes itself as “a world-leading services marketplace with over 5m customers in 8 countries around the world.”

Overall, Bark does not provide personal chef service. In fact, they see themselves as “the Amazon of services’ that include personal chef services.

Website visitors clicking on the search result: bark.com/en/gb/personal-chef-services are sent to a directory landing page. And this page allows people to get quotes from personal chefs near their location.

Cordon Bleu London is “a world leading culinary school that is steeped in history and has a rich heritage spanning over 120 years.”

As such, Cordon Bleu London does not provide personal chef services. Rather, it trains people to become personal chefs.

Website visitors clicking on the search result: cordonbleu.edu/london/how-to-become-a-personal-chef/en are sent to a course description page. This page outlines the “steps, qualities and skills” needed to become a personal chef.

Dineindulge offers “a unique & truly special private chef experience brought direct to you.”

Website visitors clicking on the search result: dineindulge.co.uk/private-chef are sent to a service landing page. Overall this service page allows website visitors to book a chef.

Take a Chef has “has developed an advertising intermediation platform…designed to put diners who wish to contract private chef services [in contact] with chefs offering their services as independent providers of such services.”

Take a Chef is like a specialised version of Bark – an “intermediation platform”.

Website visitors clicking on the search result: takeachef.co.uk are sent to the website’s homepage. On this page, in the hero section, is a start button that fires up a “user requests wizard” for finding a chef.

Interestingly, Take a Chef holds two positions in the top 10 organic results for keyword “personal chef” in the UK.

Website visitors clicking on the search result: takeachef.co.uk/private-chef/london are sent to a localised service landing page. And this page houses the aforementioned “user requests wizard” on their homepage.

Galor provides “a bespoke, tailored chef service which is geared towards giving our clients the best possible fine dining experience.”

Website visitors clicking on the search result: galor.co.uk/services/private/private-diet-chef are sent to a service landing page. However, this service page does something we have not seen thus far. That is, it paints the main benefit of a personal chef as being someone who can help “manage your diet”.

La Belle Assiette describes itself as “a leading chef service.”

Website visitors clicking on the search result: labelleassiette.co.uk/private-chef are sent to a service landing page. And this page allows customers to search a database of “354 local professional chefs in the UK, all tried and tested.” 

So, here are the top 10 positions for pages ranking for the keyword “personal chef”.

1. La Belle Assiette
2. Galor
3. Take a Chef
4. Take a Chef
5. Dineindulge
6. Cordon Bleu London
7. Bark
8. Taste The Love
9. Eden Private Staff
10. Forest Holidays

Next, let’s take a deeper look at these pages. And see how they perform for the following:

•  Traffic 
•  Keywords
•  Backlinks 
•  Referring Domains

1. First place goes to La Belle Assiette (484 website visitors).
2. Second place goes to Take a Chef (475 website visitors).
3. Third place also goes to Take a Chef (315 website visitors).

1. Two first place positions go to Take a Chef (92 keywords).
2. Second place goes to Eden Private Staff (78 keywords).
3. Third place also goes to La Belle Assiette (42 keywords).

1. First place goes to Take a Chef (6000 backlinks). Wow! Way to go Take a Chef!
2. Second place goes to Take a Chef (105 backlinks).
3. Third place also goes to La Belle Assiette (40 backlinks).

1. First place goes to La Belle Assiette (31 referring domains). 
2. Second place goes to Take a Chef (14 referring domains).
3. Third place also goes to Eden Private Staff (10 referring domains).

Overall, it seems the winner is Take a Chef. Well done, Take a Chef!

They took away a total of 6 awards.

At the start of this report, we did a quick analysis of search intent behaviour of people searching for “personal chef”. Overall, we uncovered some frequently asked questions.

Using alsoasked.com, we can get a map of questions broken into two categories:

•  Commercial Intent Searches
•  Informational Searches

Commercial Intent Searches use words and phrases linked to the buying process.

For example, someone searching for “Does Kim Kardashian have a personal chef?” is just looking for information.

Whereas, someone searching for “How much is a personal chef?” is probably looking to hire (or rehire) a personal chef. Whether now or at some point in the future.

Therefore, it is important that any business serious about selling personal chef services creates content that answers commercial intent questions.

So, how do the top 10 competitors rise to this challenge?

First, let’s pick a couple of examples of commercial intent questions:

•  How much money does it cost to hire a personal chef?
•  Does a personal chef live with you?

We are going to throw each question into an incognito window Google Search. This is to see who we find in the top 3 search results.

Then we will be looking to see if any of the top 10 competitors show up.

Finally, we will also be making a note of which websites do turn up. Because it means they are obviously doing something right when it comes to aiding the personal chef buyer’s journey.

Let’s go!

Nice! 

Dineindulge, our fifth position organic competitor shows up in the Ad position. As such, this shows us that at least they are willing to pay to appear at the top of the search results. And in this case when someone searches for “How much money does it cost to hire a personal chef?”.

In addition, Dineindulge also tops the organic search results.

And look who’s in the fourth organic search result position: La Belle Assiette. In fact, we already know that they are the top organic competitor for the keyword “personal chef”.

Next, we click on the top organic search result: dineindulge.co.uk/how-to/cost-of-hiring-a-private-chef

Takes to the following page:

All in all, this page has 706 words. As well as a “Get a quote” call-to-action at the bottom of the page.

In fact, this page is the sixth most important page on dineindulge.co.uk. As it brings in around 30 search results each month.

Overall, this page ranks for 4 keywords. And the keyword that is responsible for attracting the most traffic to this page is “hire a chef”.

Cool! 

There is a featured snippet at the top of the page.

And this definitely draws the attention of people searching for information about personal chefs. Especially concerning whether or not they live with you.

Unfortunately, that featured snippet is not owned by any of our top 10 competitors 😞

So, what is kamikoto.com?

Clicking on this featured snippet takes us through to the following page:

Well, it’s a section of a page…

After all, it was a featured snippet.

However, the snippet is part of an article entitled: Differences Between a Private and Personal Chef.

Kamikoto makes knives and they have been “…at the beating heart of Honshu 本州, Japan’s largest island, for more than 800 years.”

In conclusion, this just goes to show that not all your online competitors are in direct competition with you. 

And this is a perfect example of paying attention to every business and resource vying for your potential customers’ attention. You could even discover some unique backlinking opportunities in the process. 

Below the featured snippet, is our ninth place competitor for the keyword “personal chef”: Eden Private Staff.

And a click on this link takes us to the following page..

Of course, this page is headed by a form that obviously needs no introduction.

Overall, the page has 729 words. Yet, only 402 words are attributed to an article answering the question: “Does a personal chef live with you?”.

In fact, the rest of the words are used to promote available staff and job vacancies.

In conclusion, this page is a real mixed bag. It lacks a clear focus on the target audiences’ needs.

We doubt that the majority of people searching for an answer to the question: “Does a personal chef live with you?” are looking to become chefs themselves.

From a little bit of investigating into a couple of random commercial intent questions, we have discovered something interesting.  That is, only websites in the lower half of the top 10 competitors list have created “top-level” content.

However, the content does not exactly set off any fireworks. Thus, could be greatly improved.

Or put another way, it won’t take too much for a competitor to create more in-depth articles. Ones that would easily blow these two examples out of the water.

Next, let’s move on to take a closer look at the domains of the top 10 competitors.

Note: the data analysis shown is from November 2020.

La Belle Assiette is the personal chef service provider with the highest domain rating of 45.

In the chart above (and the charts that follow) you will see entities that are greyed-out.

This is because they are not specialists in providing personal chef services:

•  Cordon Bleu London is a school
•  Bark is a services marketplace
•  Forest Holidays sells “holidays and short breaks in the UK’s most beautiful forests”
•  Eden Private Staff is a domestic staffing agency

La Belle Assiette is the personal chef service provider that received the most overall search traffic of 1,993 website visits.

However, Galor received the most traffic from people searching for the analysed keyword “personal chef”.

Galor and Take a Chef are the domains that have top keywords linked directly to personal chef services.

And 60% of the top 10 competitors for the keyword “personal chef” have their brand name as their top keyword.

Overall, La Belle Assiette is the personal chef service provider with the highest number of keywords ranking in the top 3 search positions.

As a result, they have 58 keywords that rank in the top 3 search positions.

Take a Chef is the personal chef service provider with the highest number of backlinks (8,447). And the highest percentage of dofollow backlinks (98%).

Let’s do some final analysis on the five personal chef service providers.

These are the five websites that specialise in personal chef services.

Note: their ranking positions for the keyword “personal chef” are shown in brackets:

•  La Belle Assiette (1)
•  Galor (2)
•  Take Chef (3 and 4)
•  Dineindulge (5)
•  Taste The Love (8)

Our final analysis is a Content Gap Analysis.

First, we are going to pick a target website e.g. labelleassiette.co.uk. Then we will compare it against the remaining four websites in the list.

This will allow us to see the keywords that more than one of the comparison websites ranks for but the target website doesn’t.

Overall, there are 44 keywords where at least one of the competing sites ranks in the top 10. But labelleassiette.co.uk doesn’t rank anywhere in the top 100.

Only 16 of those keywords have a monthly search volume over 100.

The keyword with the highest search volume is “wedding catering” (1500 monthly searches).

And the website with the highest ranking position for this keyword is tastethelove.co.uk (6th position).

Overall, there are 111 keywords where at least one of the competing sites ranks in the top 10. But galor.co.uk doesn’t rank anywhere in the top 100.

And 37 of those keywords have a monthly search volume over 100.

In fact, the keyword with the highest search volume is “wedding catering” (1500 monthly searches).

Once again, the website with the highest ranking position for this keyword is tastethelove.co.uk (6th position).

There are 92 keywords where at least one of the competing sites ranks in the top 10. But takeachef.co.uk doesn’t rank anywhere in the top 100.

And 33 of those keywords have a monthly search volume over 100.

Overall, the keyword with the highest search volume is “wedding catering” (1500 monthly searches).

Yet again, the website with the highest ranking position for this keyword is tastethelove.co.uk (6th position).

There are 78 keywords where at least one of the competing sites ranks in the top 10. But dineindulge.co.uk doesn’t rank anywhere in the top 100.

And 24 of those keywords have a monthly search volume over 100.

The keyword with the highest search volume is “wedding catering” (1500 monthly searches).

Yet again…noticing a pattern yet? The website with the highest ranking position for this keyword is tastethelove.co.uk (6th position).

There are 113 keywords where at least one of the competing sites ranks in the top 10. However tastethelove.co.uk doesn’t rank anywhere in the top 100.

And 38 of those keywords have a monthly search volume over 100.

The keyword with the highest search volume is “assiette” (1300 monthly searches). 

However this is not a very useful keyword unless Taste The Love has an interest in the french word for plate.

As such, the keyword with the second highest search volume is “private chef” (1100 monthly searches).

That’s a lot better!

Overall, the website with the highest ranking position for this keyword is labelleassiette.co.uk (3rd position).

Overall, the website with the smallest content gap is labelleassiette.co.uk.

And the keyword with the highest potential is “wedding catering”.  

In fact, this keyword has an estimated search volume of 1500. Yet interestingly, none of the five websites rank within the top four search positions for this keyword.

Anyone looking to understand or break into this arena will usually ask some or all of the following questions:

We estimate that it would be a cakewalk for a newcomer to dominate UK search for the keyword “personal chef”.

In fact, they would only need backlinks from at least 3 high quality websites to rank in the top 10.

This doesn’t take away from the fact that to reach this goal they would still need:

•  A good website
•  A focus on SEO
•  Content marketing
•  Outreach 

In addition, they would also require as much patience as they would effort. 

This is because good, long-term online growth takes time.

On the whole, however, if you were serious about ranking in top position for the keyword “personal chef”, you could easily surpass these competitors.

In the UK, the most dominant players for this keyword are DineIndulge, La Belle Assiette and Galor.

DineIndulge is the one to beat from an SEO perspective, but this is totally achievable.

As DineIndulge has published around 80 blog posts. But only 11 of those blog posts generate website visits (just 113). 

La Belle Assiette does a little bit better in terms of blog post numbers that rank in Google’s Top 100 search results. They have 176 blog posts bringing in 253 website visits.

Finally, Galor only has a solitary blog post from November 2017 that ranks in Google.

But…this post brings in zero traffic!

Therefore, if you are a newcomer, it would make sense to focus on content marketing. We’d suggest targeting profitable keywords that your audience are using. As well as keywords that the competitors rank poorly for.

Definitely! The volume of searches for the keyword “personal chef” in the UK is relatively small.

As we saw, there are 500 monthly searches in the UK versus 4,600 in the US. 

However, the current big dogs seem to be dominating the top 3 search positions by default.

Almost half of the websites in the top 10 results are not businesses that provide direct personal chef services.

In fact, this number grows when we look at the top 20 results.

Any actual personal chefs that we found such as markheirs.com (position 19) or stellagrove.co.uk (position 24) have decent websites but no blog content.

Adding regular, valuable and keyword-rich content to their sites would boost their rankings. It would propel them out of the search result graveyard straight up to the summit of Top 10.

Easy. Anyone who wants to change their approach.

•  Better content marketing, especially focused on the London or bigger cities market
•  A transition to a more customer-led, rather than product-led approach
•  Focus more time on outreach activities

From our overall research, not really. 

Overall, there are a lot of the websites in the top 20 results for the keyword “personal chef”. But they are basically directories.

They are marketplaces, comparison websites, job websites etc…

As such, despite being powerful, they don’t have a content strategy because they produce lots of new keyword-rich pages on a regular basis.

However, these kinds of websites are not designed to facilitate the buyer’s journey. That is people who are seeking to hire a personal chef.

They do a poor job of answering buyer questions.

Ultimately, the very essence of content marketing is to create content that aides the buyer’s journey and guides/accompanies a potential customer through the main three buyer stages:

• Awareness: The buyer realises they have a problem.
• Consideration: The buyer defines their problem and researches options to solve it
• Decision: The buyer chooses a solution

Very few of the websites we studied have a content or SEO strategy in place that satisfies these stages. And if they do, they don’t execute their strategies in a consistent manner.

Thus, it would be easy for an up-and-coming personal chef to swoop in and dominate the search engine rankings.

Do you want us to answer another question? Add a comment below and we will get back to you.

Naturally, for many business owners, investing the resources and time necessary to beat your competition can be difficult.

And that’s where a marketing consultant, such as myself could help. My team and I can help you to devise and implement a winning strategy that works for your business. In addition we’ll optimise your existing content too. 

As a result, we’ll help you beat your competitors and increase your website traffic (and those all important sales).

Alternatively, why not get in contact for a bespoke SEO competitor analysis report for your business? Discover exactly what your competitors are doing well and not so well. And then learn what actions you need to take to outrank and outperform them.

If you found this interesting or it gave you some inspiration, you might enjoy some of our previous reports. They span a cross-section of different industries: 

•  How Pest Control Service Providers Can Attract Traffic, Not Rats
•  What Accountants in Manchester Need to Do to Beat Their Competition 
•  How Can Removal Firms in London Beat Their Competitors?
•  Legal Services Competition Analysis: Crisp & Co vs Slater and Gordon Lawyers

Alternatively, sign-up below for weekly competitor and website analysis reports.