SEO for Florists

SEO for Florists: 5 Tips For Improving Your Organic Rankings

December 29, 2020
Category: SEO

According to MarketResearch.com, the floral industry in the U.S. has a combined yearly revenue over $5 billion, which is spread across around 15,000 retail flower shops.

And every year, more and more of that revenue is shifting to online sales. Why? It’s a better user experience for customers to be able to hop on the computer (or their smartphone), see a variety of floral arrangements, and make a purchase based on [hopefully] great product photography and prices. So how does your floral shop cater to this savvy shopper? How do you ensure they find you when they search for florist in your city or flower delivery near your town? The answer is SEO, or search engine optimization.

What is Search Engine Optimization (SEO)?

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is the practice of increasing the quantity and quality of traffic to your website through organic search engine results. It’s the practice of optimizing your web pages to make them reach a high position in the search results of Google or other search engines. SEO focuses on improving the rankings in the organic (non paid) search results. If you have a website and you want to get more traffic, it should be part of your marketing efforts. SEO is often about making small modifications to parts of your website. When viewed individually, these changes might seem like incremental improvements, but when combined with other optimizations, they could have a noticeable impact on your site’s user experience and performance in organic search results.

So as a florist, how can you increase your website’s SEO? Think User Experience (UX). Google and other search engines are in the business of providing the best user experience. They do this by aiming to provide the best/most relevant results for a user’s search or query. So how does that relate to the flower business?

So if you want your floral shop’s website to be considered the best result, you should be aiming to provide the best customer/user experience online. Below are some tips on how to step up your florist website’s user experience, and thus SEO.

Make sure you’re fully utilizing local directories & citations

Local business directories and citations are extremely important to local service providers like a florist shop. Sure, you may be able to ship flowers across the country, or even internationally, but most florists are serving their local market. Given that, ensuring your florist shop is consistently listed with places like Google My Business, Yelp, and even Facebook is vital. The goal being to fully flesh out all of these online directories and citations with the basics like your NAP information (Name, Address, Phone) along with other best practices like a description of your business, your service area, photos, videos, etc. If you’re unsure where to start, check out HubSpot’s list of the biggest and most important business listings sites. If you’re an established floral business looking to assess your current listings and citations, you can check your local listing score for free with MOZ Local. You can use MOZ’s service to help address inconsistencies or just use it to identify gaps so you can manually add/update listings. Also see: 9 Benefits of Google My Business for Small Businesses

Beyond making sure you have local directories and citations, you also want to actively use your local directories and citations to your benefit. More and more customers are making a decision on the florist shop they buy from before even clicking through to their website. Features of directories you could and should use to cater to this include:

  • Adding images & products to your listings. When it comes to ecommerce, people buy through photos so ensuring you have great pictures of your arrangements and other gift products can play a big role in potential customer’s decisions. Google My Business allows you to link directly to products and product categories on your website.
  • Reviews. Great reviews are authentic and can’t be forced, but providing the best user experience can help you continually improve on this front. There are however best practices to reduce the friction for customers to leave reviews as well as reputation management tools like GatherUp that can help automate this. Here’s a great article from WordStream to help: How to Ask for Reviews (With Examples!).
  • Special offers. Google My Business and Yelp are both big fish in local search results, and both offer the ability to add special offers to your listings. Whether it’s a discount coupon or

Prioritize user experience on your website

When it comes to search engine optimization for your florist website, you should be catering to user experience, not search engine crawlers. In fact, Google uses page experience signals as part of their ranking algorithm. So by prioritizing your user experience, you are also improving your search engine optimization. These search signals include:

In short, your website should be fast, secure, and easy to access on mobile devices.

Create granular website pages and/or ecommerce categories for holidays, special events, flower type, etc.

Sure, broad searches like florists near me,   florist in city, state or flower delivery in your town are searches you want to own. But you should also cater to more specific searches. By doing so, your floral business’ website can compete for more types of searches, and ideally provide a better user experience by having content specific to those searches. Examples could include:

  • Category pages by flower type. Rose arrangements are a staple, but also providing pages/categories filtered by other popular flower types can help your website own searches for things like orchid flower arrangements or lily flower delivery. If you offer other gift types, consider building categories for users searching for fruit arrangements, gift baskets, balloons,  etc.
  • Pages for specific holidays. Mother’s Day, Valentine’s Day – you know the holidays that keep the phone ringing off the hook. By building these more granular holiday pages you can benefit from captured organic traffic for searches like Send Mother’s Day flowers in your city. Even something like Administrative Professionals’ Day could be a win. You want each of these pages to be unique, so include information specific to this holiday, order deadlines for delivery by the holiday, popular arrangements, etc.
  • Pages for specific events. Similar to holidays, having pages that cater to specific events (and provides relevant, unique information) is a win for organic rankings. If you do wedding flowers, create a page that speaks to the types of services you offer (arbor arrangements, bridal bouquets, centerpieces, boutonnières), what your process looks like, price ranges, etc. Other events that call for flowers like prom, graduation, and retirement should also be part of this effort.

Create content, not just arrangements

Your website should not be a stagnant destination. It should be constantly evolving – and growing. To do so, creating new content – or content marketing – is a must. Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action. Some content marketing ideas for florists could include:

  • Detailed history on a particular flower type
  • A seasonal guide to flowers in your local geography
  • Wedding table centerpiece ideas
  • Plant maintenance tips
  • Tutorial videos for floral-based decor ideas (Ex. How to Make the Perfect Thanksgiving Centerpiece)

Incorporate technical on-site SEO best practices

When it comes to on-site SEO, there are still best practices to cater to search engines and how they rank websites.

On-site SEO (also known as on-page SEO) is the practice of optimizing elements on a website (as opposed to links elsewhere on the Internet and other external signals collectively known as “off-site SEO”) in order to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic from search engines. On-site SEO refers to optimizing both the content and HTML source code of a page.

The important thing to remember is that your number one goal should be to cater to your website visitor’s intent and user experience, not just search engines. That being said, as long as you’re prioritizing your user experience, there are more technical SEO best practices to consider on your website, including:

These are just some high level SEO tips for your florist business, but they really are just the tip of the iceberg. If you’re looking to learn more about SEO, here are some recommended resources if your green thumb is extra green when it comes to search engine optimization:

  • The Beginner’s Guide to SEO from MOZ. This guide is designed to describe all major aspects of SEO, from finding the terms and phrases (keywords) that can generate qualified traffic to your website, to making your site friendly to search engines, to building links and marketing the unique value of your site.
  • Google’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide. This guide won’t provide any secrets that’ll automatically rank your site first in Google (sorry!), but following the best practices outlined will hopefully make it easier for search engines to crawl, index and understand your content.
  • HubSpot’s Inbound Marketing Certification Course. This inbound marketing certification course covers much more than SEO, but is a highly recommended to look at inbound marketing a bit more holistically for for floral business.

If you’re not looking for resources and instead looking for SEO help for your floral business, Bound By can help. Based in Austin, TX, we’ve helped floral shops in multiple states across the US improve their digital marketing including increased organic rankings, traffic, and ecommerce revenue through search engine optimization as well as profitable pay-per-click campaigns through Google Ads. We’d be happy to tell you more about our client’s successes and how we can help your florist shop – give us a call at (512) 487-1000 or drop us a line.