CASTROVILLE, Calif. Nov. 12, 2009 Fall is the time to bring out the crock-pot, at least that is what the number of people searching recipes online showed the artichoke growers at Ocean Mist Farms.
Ocean Mist Farms, the largest grower of fresh artichokes in the country, has been tracking consumer recipe demand and trends since starting an online recipe library three years ago. The results show, not surprisingly, that in the fourth quarter a majority of online recipe viewers are searching for slow cooking or crock pot recipes, followed by searches for holiday menu ideas and recipes.
We find seasonal recipe trends within the fluctuating search volume for particular key words such as crock-pot on both search engines such as Google and within our own site, said Kori Tuggle, company marketing manager. From the traffic trends we discover online, we customize the content of our home page, the number of seasonal recipes in our recipe library and make the recipes easy to find once they are on our site. We modify our site content year round, to cater to what consumers are looking for.
For example, in November and December, the home page of features both crock pot recipes and holiday menu recipes. Starting in January, the content will shift to hearty seasonal recipes such as soup.
We aim to go beyond just offering a recipe to our site visitors, Tuggle said. We put a lot of effort into creating cooking videos and digital cookbooks to enhance their visit and give them more than what they were expecting with a traditional recipe library.
On Jan. 1, Ocean Mist will debut a new digital recipe booklet online featuring soups and salads.
Ocean Mist receives a monthly average of 30,000 unique visitors a month to its Web site, with more than 50 percent of the visitors coming to the site specifically for artichoke recipes based on the volume of Web site pages viewed.
We know people use the Internet for recipes and we want to be their source of information for cooking vegetables and fresh artichokes in particular, Tuggle said. Were using all forms of digital communication, from our Web site to social media, to help make cooking artichokes easier and more fun.
Source: Ocean Mist Farms
