Knowing the action you want your audience to take after visiting a blog post is one of the keys to whether they will stick around to browse more of your website or they will bounce back to Google and forget about your site. Defining that next best step takes understanding both the search intent of your readers and defining your ideal audience. Stay tuned to learn more about how you can strategically define this next best step for your organic search audience.

Understanding search intent

• Your reader isn’t just browsing the internet for a recipe
• Think about what your deeper reason is for searching for something (looking for a recipe that uses a specific ingredient, fits within a diet or lifestyle, or something that has a time constraint that fits what I need)
• Think about why someone is searching for the recipe in the first place 
• This can be as surface level as needing a quick dinner before soccer practice all the way to needing to find a gluten free recipe to celebrate the first birthday your child has where they can’t have gluten
• It might be helpful to write down multiple different scenarios of what might lead someone to search for the recipe

Define your ideal audience 

• You will always have multiple types of audiences coming to your site
• What you want to define is your IDEAL audience, the audience you can help the most

Based on which person you can and want to help the most, you can curate a next best step for them

The next best step

• Remember this audience is brand new to your site. If your site doesn’t catch their attention they are likely to close their window, bounce back to Google, or just move on completely. 
  • Make sure your recipe card is easy to find and stands out. That is what they are interested in! 
  • If you share helpful tips, mention that in the recipe notes so it encourages someone to go back through the blog post. 

Strategically define a next best step for the reader so that they take action. 

• How to define this
  • Suggest a blog post
  • Display a freebie
  • Serve a relevant pop up 
• Where to showcase this
  • Nearest to the recipe card
  • In the sidebar (desktop only but high conversion)
  • A pop up
  • Using Gutenberg blocks to help the content stand out and help teach return readers to look for these tips/helpful info/next step 

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