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SEO experts are always looking for the recipe of success to help clients increase search ranks and improve brand results. The problem is just relying on keywords doesn’t always answer the need of the end-user. Plus, billion-dollar companies own the most popular keywords.

What can you do to increase search engine performance and drive traffic and sales to your pages? Utilize recipe cards.

Not Your Mother’s Recipe Card

Developing smart recipe cards is the solution. Recipe cards are a matrix of keywords and phrases that incorporate long-tail keywords, synonyms, and even location-specific details.

Using a recipe card approach has a few benefits. It allows you to use the major keywords to get traction with the search algorithms. It then helps you compete for higher rankings because there is a mixture of high-ranking search terms.

In terms of content, you’ll find the content is more natural. In fact, you’ll be less likely to get penalized for “word stuffing” because you are mixing in a variety of similar terms.

How To Develop A Recipe Card

Recipe cards are content optimization formulas. A very rudimentary card will use tools to find popular keywords and track them across your own content. A wide-ranging solution tracks your content and compares it to your top competitors, providing key metrics to outperform the competition.

Yoast, Moz, or Google’s Keyword Planner are good tools when it comes to research and competitive analysis in narrowly focused content. For example, if you are writing a blog twice a month, you don’t need to track pages and pages of keywords. For larger databases of content, MarketMuse provides a more comprehensive tool tracking keywords in pages content and providing competitive analysis.

Getting Specific with Keywords

Since major corporations spend millions of dollars to be the top dog in their category, a small business needs to be smarter in how to use keywords. After all, the big boys can afford to buy the recipe cards as well, tackling many of the long-tail keywords and similar phrases you might target.

Let’s take the insurance industry for example. The likes of Geico, State Farm, and Nationwide will not relent on outspending on each other. Try any number of relevant keyword phrases around “insurance” and you’ll see them track at the top repeatedly. So how does the local insurance agent get traction with a micro-fraction of the budget?

Localization.

Let the big boys own “cheap auto insurance.” A smaller agency looks for identifiers such as location, for example: “cheap auto insurance Santa Maria.” Localization mixed with a smart recipe card that touches on the variety of keywords a consumer might look for can result in better optimization than the big boys spending dollar after dollar.

For example, add into the mix of keyword content other common searches: car insurance, insurance for bad drivers, DUI insurance, and best auto insurance. Writing quality content around multiple optimized keywords gives every business an advantage, especially when localizing other areas of the content.

At the end of the day, every content creator needs to know what the competition is doing to develop content that meets consumer needs. Remember, the search engines have changed the game with end-user satisfaction as the main goal. Knowing what people enter into search results and how to deliver good content can put you at the top.

Use recipe cards to organize and track your data, even if you aren’t paying for high-end metric tools. Create content that matters.