Work Your Content to Make it Fresh
Content is like food: offer your readers the same old, same old every time and they'll eat elsewhere. A good, plain steak is nice, but few people want a steady diet of it. You have to learn how to handle the leftovers creatively: steak one night, a good Philly cheese steak the next night, beef stir fry after that, and then beef tips with a yummy sauce over pasta gets you to Thursday...
So what does this have to do with SEO? Plenty, especially if you're a food company like Kraft (or you're writing an item during lunch, like me). Jennifer Laycock recently wrote a spot-on case study for Search Engine Guide that covered a new approach Kraft took to its content recently. Yes, if you're a food company, everyone expects you to publish recipes on your web site. It's the way Kraft made it fresh that will make you salivate.
Kraft came up with a one bag, five meals approach: get five family
dinners out of one bag of groceries. Users can reduce their food
bill while eating something different every night. While I haven't
tried them yet the meals are said to be quick and easy to prepare,
and Kraft provides lots of useful information with each bag's PDF
(like shopping lists and nutritional values for the recipes).
The food company did a number of things right that you can emulate.
First, they put a new twist on an old favorite by packaging up the
expected recipes in an unexpected and useful way. Second, they took
the old recipe stand-by and made it timely by considering the current
economy. With the US going into the second year of a recession,
lots of people are trying to save money wherever they can. Food
takes a large bite out of most families' budgets, and many adults
either never learned to cook or got out of the habit. With Kraft
coming to the rescue, it could gain a lot of new visitors and new,
loyal customers.
I didn't go into a lot of detail as far as the actual format and
offerings, but Kraft obviously put some serious consideration into
this as well; Laycock describes this as creating valuable content
by giving them exactly what they need, how they need it. You'll
have to understand your target audience really well to manage this,
but clearly the food giant did: they offer PDFs for each week's
plan, full of the kind of information users need. Their bags are
based around four themes: chicken and beef, chicken and pork, chicken
and fish, and healthy living. That covers a lot of people.
With content of this quality and usefulness, you don't have to
do anything to encourage it to go viral; it happens by itself. I
just did a search for 1 bag 5 dinners without the quotes and got
more than 690,000 results. Kraft dominates the first page of results,
of course, but you can also find YouTube videos of the recipes,
people blogging about their experiences cooking from the PDFs, forum
posts, and more. That should give you some food for thought when
it comes to cooking up great content!
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