Most Shopify stores are not utilizing their site's blog to it's fullest potential. Posting relevant (and useful) content is the key to attracting high value customers that keep coming back.
Stores selling food or groceries have a golden opportunity to attract customers to their website by using recipe cards embedded within blog posts.
Recipe cards provide useful information for readers, and allow you to advertise your products from within the recipe itself. It's the golden ticket to attracting your ideal customer.
If you’re running a food-related business on Shopify (or on any e-commerce platform), it’s time to jazz it up with some recipes.
If you are unsure, here are 4 fantastic reasons for posting recipes to your store's blog.
1. Recipes Add Value to Your Site
It’s no secret that online grocery shopping has been rising dramatically.
Some surveys suggest that 70% of grocery shopping could be taking place online as early as 2022. And health concerns related to the Covid-19 pandemic are only hastening that prediction.
A recipe, especially when done the right way, is an almost immediate conduit to online grocery shopping.
In fact, we now know that online grocery shoppers frequently look up recipes before making a purchase.
What does this mean? It means that if you want visitors to make purchases from your Shopify store, recipes may be the most effective way to draw them in.
Recipes add to the overall usefulness and value of your site. It’s a great way to not only attract new customers, but to keep them coming back for more.
Showing visitors creative and delicious ways to use the products you offer is an easy and fun way to keep them buying your products consistently.
And with Shopify’s Recipe Kit app, you can attach the products from your online store right within the recipe, maximizing your ability to move from casual visit to online sale.
To make this recipe app an even more powerful tool, add your blog as a menu choice on your online store’s main page. That makes it easy for online shoppers to find awesome recipes to use with their food purchases.
Then, once you’ve installed the Recipe Kit app, you can link recipes directly to posts that already exist in your blog, or create a whole new post based on the recipe. The choice is yours!
And here’s the best part: when creating a recipe card, you can attach product pages directly to items in your ingredient list.
How? As you’re typing out the name of an ingredient on your recipe card, click the “Attach Shopify Product” button.
Now, whenever your visitors look at your recipe card, they can easily click through to your online store to purchase ingredients from you.
It brings the tasks of online shopping and meal planning together on one convenient platform.
2. Recipes Help Build a Sense of Community
Food is about more than the act of eating. It’s also a shared experience. And the recipes and food content posted on your blog can unite diverse groups of people who share a love of food and cooking.
Back in 2012, food vendors in Italy promoted a nationwide evening of risotto and cheese, using a recipe posted on social media.
This accomplished the purpose of increasing sales of foods from the Parma region of Italy, but it also brought people together in a real and enjoyable way all over the country.
While this might seem too ambitious for your modest online store, there’s plenty of opportunity. By posting recipes for popular holidays like Christmas, St. Patrick’s Day, and Valentine’s Day, you are uniting your audience around experiences they share.
You can also build a community by posting recipes that appeal to your target demographic. Recipes for ethnic food (Chinese, Mexican, Italian, or Greek, just to give a few examples) bring together all those with common experiences around such specialized cuisines.
And posting recipes for favourite childhood comfort foods like chocolate chip cookies, macaroni and cheese, or grilled cheese sandwiches (all with your own special twist, of course) stir up happy memories for most of us.
3. Recipe Cards Provide a “Visual”
What stands out in your memory the most? A textual description or a compelling visual image?
If you chose an image, you’re not alone. Most of us respond better to images than to text. A visual effect stays in our memory much longer.
Food content absolutely cries out for a visual component. Photos of a luscious chocolate cake, a fresh salad, or a fruity beverage will make your site stand out.
And the Recipe Kit app includes a field for adding images, even prompting you to go back and add images if you forget.
And while we’re on the topic of visual appearance, the recipe cards themselves provide a professional and attractive appearance when they are integrated into your blog.
And what’s even better than an image? How about a video of the process of making or enjoying the food?
Video is a powerful means of communication that’s sure to stand out.
And these images and videos make you stand out in search engine results, too! Which brings us to our next point...
4. Improving Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Ever wondered why some sites rank higher in the Google search results than others?
Search engines look for certain characteristics which signal that a site is valuable and authentic.
One of the biggest things that they want to see to rank a site highly is something called “structured data.”
And the structure of a Shopify recipe (complete with images, video, ingredient lists, nutrition information and possibly ratings and reviews) signal to the search engines that users will find useful and valuable content... causing it to rank higher.
If you’re not sure how to include rich data in your Shopify store's recipe, Recipe Kit is a lifesaver for this. All you have to do is make sure all the fields are filled out completely when you create your card. In doing so, you ensure automatically that the card has all the data it needs to rank on Google.
This recipe app within Shopify gives your post the exact structured data that search engines look for.
Not only that, but the recipe card gives it an appealing and professional look, which greatly increases the likelihood that users can find it and use it.
For all these reasons, posting recipes on your store blog is the best content marketing strategy you could use for food-related e-commerce.
Go ahead and install Recipe Kit on your Shopify store today to try it out!
