Campbells and green bean casserole. Hershey’s and s’mores. These recipes and food brands are so entwined you can’t have one without the other. One of the best ways to market your food product is to provide your customers tantalizing recipes that display its taste and versatility. Recipes, especially branded recipes can inspire your customers to purchase your products and re-create the recipes they saw online. But what if your recipes are not getting the traffic or popularity it deserves? The reasoning could be lack of SEO optimization.
There are over 4.9 billion recipes on Google and the number continues to grow everyday, making it extremely difficult for brands to rank high with their recipes if they are not optimized correctly. Let’s take a moment to learn about the importance of optimizing recipes on your website and why optimized recipes can help grow your brand’s marketing strategy.
Why Should You Add Recipes to Your Food Product Website?
How many times have you looked up a recipe before preparing dinner? Providing recipes for your customers is not only a great way to add SEO and intentional content to your site, it also fulfills a need that all of your customers have. Recipes have also been found to be beginning-points of a customer journey. According to BrandingMag, recipes are often the beginning of activity on social media sites, with Pinterest being the most important.
Benefits of Optimized Recipes
Provides TOFU experience for new and returning customers
Enhances user experience and engagement
Provides value-added content to visitors
Encourages repeat visits and customer loyalty
Boosts SEO and organic search visibility
Leverages recipe content to improve search engine rankings
Attracts targeted traffic interested in cooking and related topics
Above all, it just makes sense to show your consumers the countless ways to use and enjoy your food product, whether it is a non-alcoholic beer, matcha powder, or spicy BBQ sauce.
How To Write a SEO-Optimized Recipe
At its core, a recipe is a set of instructions that tell the reader how to create a specific dish. Growing up my grandmother used to keep a hand-written recipe journal in the kitchen with her at all times. I still have it today, and it’s covered with notes, spills on the pages, and short-hand anecdotes about the particular dish. Some recipes follow a pattern while other state ingredients and a sentence about how to mix them; not a measurement in sight.
Writing recipes for an online audience is different and requires specific guidelines to not only help the reader quickly access the information, but also tell Google everything it needs to rank and display it properly. This specific coding is called Recipe schema, and it allows your recipe to appear in interesting ways on the search engine.
What is Google Recipe Schema?
Have you ever noticed the special search page Google provides when you search for a recipe? All those recipes utilize recipe-structured data schema markup to help their content stand out and attract visitors to their page. It’s been proven that following this markup increases search rankings, improves click-through rates, provides an enhanced user experience and allows your recipe to be used by voice assistants like Google Home and Amazon Alexa.
Parts of a Recipe Schema Markup
These elements are some of the most important parts of the recipe schema:
Image
Name of the Recipe
Aggregated Rating
Author
Date Published
Recipe Description
Nutrition
Prep Time
Recipe Category
Ingredients
Instructions
Recipe Yield
Total Time
Video
Each of these elements are used by Google to provide searchers the best possible information they need to pick what recipe they are making for dinner.
A majority of recipe plugins, such as WP Recipe Maker, Tasty Recipes, and Recipe Card already have the schema built into their code, making it easy to fill-in and optimize your recipe.
Understanding Recipe Intent
Other than utilizing recipe schema, optimizing your recipe for Google follows the same SEO steps and principles as any other webpage. This means researching your keyword, creating an optimized meta-title and meta-description, adding relevant copy, internal linking to relevant web pages and optimizing images.
One of the biggest mistakes I see on e-commerce sites publishing recipes to market their food product is lack of copy and relevant content. Tell the reader why your product is a great alternative, show how easy it is to use, answer questions that readers may have, and include a call-to-action about your product, either linking to its product page, sharing a newsletter sign-up, or another growth strategy.
But don’t go too far. On the opposite side, readers complain insistently about how food bloggers tend to stuff their recipe pages with thousands of keywords, personal stories, and shove ad on top of ad onto the page, essentially slowing it to a crawl on some mobile devices.
I get it. Adding every single “Also Asked” is a great SEO strategy, however, for a niche that is heavily saturated, UX and keyword intention needs to be top-of-mind. Long content such as recipes should always have a “Jump to Recipe” button or TOC to help navigate, as well as only provide intentional information that will help the reader.
The sweet spot is finding the balance between providing your audience with expert content without leaving anything important on the table. Let’s take a look at some consumer goods brands that are doing this right:
Currently, King Arthur Baking receives over 1.7M organic sessions on their recipe content, alone. In this flourless chocolate cake recipe example, King Arthur includes Google recipe schema, ratings, internal links to the products used in the recipe, and multiple helpful tips, including internal links to helpful blog posts. They also include a question section which builds authority. The CTA includes a sign-up to their newsletter.
No joke, I make this recipe 2-3x during football season because it is so good! Along with following Google’s recipe schema, Pillisbury provides ratings, FAQ, and content surrounding what readers may be looking for. Internal links point to products and related recipes. Pillsbury’s recipe content accounts for ~1.2M organic sessions per month.
When looking for a buffalo chicken recipe, Frank’s RedHot has you covered. Their recipe content pulls in ~230k organic sessions per month, and this particular recipe brining in 83k sessions per month. Related recipes, reviews, and a Q&A add content to the page as well as an internal link to their list of best Buffalo chicken dip recipes.
Using Recipes in Your Brand's Marketing Strategy
So you’ve got your optimized recipe all ready to go, now what? Well, the world is quite frankly, your oyster.
Writing SEO-optimized recipe content can be shared and utilized throughout your entire marketing strategy, including email marketing, social media marketing, packaging, and even paid advertising. Share your bbq chicken recipe on Pinterest to gain social sessions or add a new matcha recipe to your newsletter to educate customers about new ways to use your product.
Additionally, brands also have the opportunity to partner with influencers and bloggers with sponsored content. Many food bloggers offer brands the ability to collaborate and create original recipe content to share with both the brand’s and influencer’s followers.
For example, food blogger Itsaflavorfulllife partnered with the Washington Beef Commission to create a recipe and video showcasing the brand’s product, ultimately sharing the video with over 81k viewers.
One SEO-optimized recipe post has the ability to be used across multiple marketing channels, and thus, earning it a higher ROI. Unlike social media marketing which relies heavily on timeliness, evergreen recipe content can live on forever and does not require constant manipulation. I still have recipes that I created in 2016 (like these Swedish no-bake balls) that receive over 800 organic sessions per month. In its lifetime, this single recipe has accumulated over 38,400 organic sessions.
I encourage food brands to leverage optimized recipe content into their marketing strategy to help build organic traffic, and provide a top-of-funnel experience for new customers. Not only can the optimized recipes continually grow organically, they can also be used in many different parts of your business and marketing strategy.
Looking to optimize your recipe strategy? SearchCraft SEO specializes in creating and optimizing recipe content for food brands and food blogs.
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