Recipes That Sell the Ingredients

A shelf of things nobody knows how to use

A customer at a butcher's counter points at beef shanks and asks what to do with them. At the spice shop down the street, someone holds up a jar of sumac with the same question.

Both shops list these products online with a photograph and a price. Neither website says what to do with them.

People ask that question long before they think of a shop, and a website that answers it meets them there.

Where the search starts

The search rarely starts with the butcher. People look up how to braise shanks or what to do with sumac, and only later for where to buy.

A product page with a name and a price matches none of those searches. A recipe that uses the product, written in the words people type, matches them all.

The visitor who arrives at a recipe is already planning to cook, with the ingredient in front of them and the shop that sells it one link away.

What a recipe page holds

A recipe that sells its ingredients is a complete page, not a teaser, and follows the order a cook needs:

• A plain title in the words people search, such as how to braise beef shanks.
• The ingredients with quantities, in metric and in cups or spoons.
• The method in short steps, with times and temperatures.
• Your own photographs of the dish and of the key ingredient raw.
• Links from each ingredient you sell to its product page.
• The shop's hours, address and phone beside the recipe.

The last two turn a recipe into a reason to visit. Without them the page helps strangers and does little for the shop.

Tested in your own kitchen

Cook every recipe before publishing it, with the products you sell and an ordinary home oven if you can. Write down what actually happens, including the times.

Photograph the dish where you cooked it. The pictures need to show real food made with the real product, so the reader trusts that it works.

Use your own words and methods. A recipe copied from a book or another site is already online elsewhere and says nothing about your shop.

Linking ingredients and products

In each recipe, link every ingredient you stock to its product page, and list on that page the recipes that use it. Visitors can then start from either end.

Product pages gain from this too. A shopper looking at an unfamiliar spice sees what to make with it before deciding.

In the shop, a card on the shelf can carry the recipe's address, so staff answering the counter question can hand it over.

A worked example

A waffle shop in a seaside town sells waffles at its counter and, from a shelf by the till and its website, its own batter mix, Belgian pearl sugar and berry syrups from a nearby farm.

Customers bought the pearl sugar, then came back asking what else it was for. The website listed each product with a photograph, a price and one sentence.

Webmaster Tools listed the searches that brought up the site: what pearl sugar is, how to make the dense Belgian waffles at home, and whether an ordinary waffle iron would do.

The owner tested five recipes in the shop's kitchen after closing, from waffles made with the mix to pearl sugar buns and a berry syrup salad dressing, and photographed each on the counter.

Each recipe gives metric and cup measures, links the mix, the sugar and the syrup to their product pages, and shows the shop's hours and address beside it.

The recipes answer the question people search before they think of buying, and the next step, buying the sugar, is one link away online or a short walk from the beach.

Hours and address beside every recipe

Many recipe visitors arrive from a search on a phone, and the recipe is the only page of your site they have seen. They may not know you are a shop, or nearby.

A small box beside each recipe, with the hours, address, phone number and a line inviting them to call and check stock, tells them. On a phone it moves below the recipe, so keep it short.

Add the same box to the printable version, since many cooks print a recipe and take it into the kitchen.

A few recipes, kept up

A handful of good recipes does more than dozens of thin ones. Start with the products customers ask about most, and add one a month when something is worth cooking.

Time them to the seasons, such as grilling cuts as the weather warms in May. When a product changes, update the recipes that use it.

Titles in the words people use

Title each recipe the way people search: how to braise beef shanks, not Grandma's Sunday special. Use the names customers use for a cut or a spice, and mention the other names it goes by.

The same plain words belong in the page's title and the first lines of the recipe, since those are what a search result shows.

The counter-case

A shop whose customers are mostly chefs and trade buyers gains less. They know what to do with a shank and search for suppliers, not methods.

Some products need no recipe, and a shop without time to test properly is better off with two good recipes than ten untested ones.

For a shop selling to home cooks, though, the gap between the shelf and the kitchen is exactly where its website can help.

Starting the recipe pages

1. List the questions customers ask at the counter.
2. Pick three products people buy and then ask about.
3. Cook and test one recipe for each.
4. Photograph the food where you cooked it.
5. Title each recipe in the words people search.
6. Link each ingredient to its product page.
7. Put the shop's hours beside every recipe.

Step three cannot be skipped. A recipe that fails in a customer's kitchen costs the shop more trust than having no recipe at all.

A page shaped by the questions one group asks before it comes, this time school groups, is covered in a page for teachers planning a field trip.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.