Honing Your Marketing Strategy for a Healthy Food Website for Kids

The prevalence of childhood obesity stands at around 19.7%, reports the CDC. This is a serious health problem that needs to be combated through a multifaceted perspective—including education, social media, and dedicated kids’ health and food/cooking websites and blogs. A plethora of healthy food sites abound for kids, offering information, recipes, and ideas for gourmet escapades for children. If your site is focused on encouraging children to follow a healthier, happier nutritional regimen, make sure you embrace the following marketing strategies.

Before targeting your SEO and other strategies to kids, it is important to know the devices they are most into. Statistics indicate that more children aged under 11 have access to tablets than any other device. Mobile use has also burgeoned, with most children aged eight or upwards having a smartphone of their own. It is therefore vital to ensure your site is tablet- and mobile-friendly. Use Google’s Resizer tool to see what your site looks like on every type of device and make requisite changes to resolution, design, fonts, colors, and other issues that can wrest from readability and user-friendliness. Children are also relying on Google as the primary means of obtaining trusted information. This means you should work hard to hone your SEO strategy.

If you have a kids’ food or recipe site, improve your search rankings by choosing a limited number of categories that are true to your content or specialty. For instance, if you specialize in healthy dessert recipes for kids, include main categories like cakes, cookies, cupcakes, pies, no-bake desserts, raw desserts, and baking tips. You can then use sub-genres or categories (e.g. crinkle cookies, chocolate chip cookies, novelty cookies) to enhance the user experience. You should also use long-tail keywords that set your recipe apart from what kids might find in competing sites. For instance, instead of simply calling your recipe “apple pie,” use more specific words like “raw vegan apple pie with Medjool dates and orange juice syrup.” You should also optimize alt text for all images, being as specific as possible. This will enable Google to work out exactly what your content is about.

Think about what you want when you are looking up a recipe. You probably want to get to the ingredients, cooking instructions, and information on cooking time quickly. Of course, as a creator, you may have a host of information to share. For instance, you may suggest the use of specific child-friendly cooking equipment for a specific recipe—for instance, a child-friendly knife to slice onions, child-sized oven mitts for baking, and smaller rolling pins for tiny hands. While this information is useful, it should be placed strategically—for instance, at the end of the recipe as a sort of “tip.” Filling the first part of your blog posts with long-winded explanations about equipment, health information and similar, may cause a small child to log off before they even have a chance to check out the beautiful pictures of each part of the recipe instructions.

To mark your site as one that kids look forward to visiting weekly or monthly, go with the seasons. Plan ahead so your audience can make gorgeous chocolate Easter eggs in March/April, start with Thanksgiving dessert planning as early as September, and make sure to provide a host of smoothie and fruit salad recipes before the peak of summer. Providing recipes at the right time will inspire kids to ask their parents to shop for the ingredients they need to make many of these delights at home.

The obesity epidemic in the US is affecting kids as well as adults. Health food sites aimed at children have an important role to play in getting kids excited about cooking and consuming nutritious foods. To make sure your site or blog appeals to them, make sure it is mobile-compatible, use sound SEO strategies, and make sure your site is user-friendly and attractive.