This Is What I Mean by Relevance

Happy 4th of July weekend to my American readers.  I had no intentions of posting today, or this weekend, however, the weather has changed and a picnic in the park  before fireworks (which Hanna has been SERIOUSLY looking forward to) has become a cook out on the (covered) front porch.

With that in mind I saw the ice cream maker buried in my cabinet and thought it would be fun to make some ice cream for tomorrow’s cookout.

I somewhere along the line lost the recipe book that came with the ice cream maker and so I of course went to my good friend the Big G for some answers.

I typed in

homemade ice cream recipes

because that’s what I’m looking for.

The very first site I came across in the Big G was ice-cream-recipes.com ~ sound promising, even though as  marketer I know those dashes in there probably mean it’s a site done by a marketer, and not someone who is completely in love with making ice cream… but we’ll see.

Ok so I was right… Here’s what I see when I get there. Remember… this is ME… as a CONSUMER looking for stuff.

Holy links batman.  Confusing and overwhelming to the eye is what I thought. I looked around a little and landed on the “top 10 ice cream” link in the box there. Thinking the site name is ice cream recipes ~ that will be the top 10 ice cream recipes. right?

Not so much. I got a bunch of words that didn’t say much. Chocolate ice cream is really yummy. You can eat it for a snack, even one scoop is good. BLECK.

So now my marketer hat was on, and I decided to really look around and see if I could find what I was looking for ~ BTW ~ the keyword “ice cream recipes” is NOT a buying keyword. Think about it… I’m not trying to buy anything I just want to make some ice cream for my BBQ.

I would almost think this site was set up as an adsense site ~ get paid for the clicks, but the ads aren’t even good, prominent, or relevant.

Within the fluffy paragraph there was a link for the word chocolate ~ so I thought that wold lead me to an actual chocolate ice cream recipe. NOPE.

Instead I get a history of chocolate.

COME ON!! I just want to make some chocolate ice cream. I don’t care that cocoa beans were used by the Mayan civilization to make hot frothy drinks. GIVE ME A RECIPE.

If I didn’t have my marketer hat on, I would have left this site long ago, but now I’m really curious how many things I’m going to have to click before I actually get to a recipe.

Ok, now in the navigation bar I see a “ice cream recipes” tab. It leads to a drop down menu, to a drop down menu, to a drop down menu that has out of the 9 links I can click 3 actual recipes.  (you know recipes 1, 2, and 3 ~ yes, that really encourages me to click! NOT.)

I finally click on chocolate ice cream recipe 1 and barely get a recipe.

It tells me the ingredients, then tells me to make a custard base, drop in the chocolate after it’s cool, and then stick it in your ice cream maker.

Really? wow.

Then the next 3 paragraphs on the page tell me different ways I can use chocolate ice cream, as well as the fact that it is Jackie Chan’s favorite flavor.

Who CARES!! I want a real recipe I can use today. I don’t care who else likes chocolate ice cream!!

That’s it. I’ve had it ~ I can’t believe I stayed this long. Now let’s see where else I can find an ice cream recipe.

Ahhh…this is better:

That’s what I’m talking about. Simple. Clean. Easy to find. Easy to use.  Each of those links leads to a complete, easy to understand ACTUAL recipe.

Ok ~ this is funny ~ my husband who is also looking for ice cream recipes and has no marketer brain in him, landed on the same site and was not equally as horrified as I was. He in fact, found a simple chocolate ice cream recipe (after 25 clicks).

Take Aways:

1. Be relevant. If people are coming to your site for recipes ~ give them recipes.

2. Less is often more. (a lesson I’ve learned quite well from the comments on the new design) (thank you all for your emails and comments) You don’t have to give people an entire history lesson about what they are looking for, just give them what they’re looking for.

3. Easy navigation makes it much easier to find what people are looking for. If they don’t find what they want on the page they land on, having easy navigation from page to page/topic to topic, will help people stay and look around for a while.

4. White space is nice. The front page of that site had really small font, tons of orange links, and hardly no white space. It makes for a site that is very hard to read. Hard to read sites, don’t get read.

At some point on that site I remember seeing that millions of people had been there. In fact, there’s a visible traffic counter on the site. I believe it. It’s number 1 in Google for homemade ice cream recipes. Now whether that traffic converts to anything resembling an income ~ that’s a whole other story.

Hope that gives you some food for thought when considering your site, how it works, how people feel when they get there, what you’re offering and if you really are giving that.

Me… I’m gonna go make some ice cream.  Thanks allrecipes.com