SEO for Florists - How to Get Motivated Buyers

By Ian Cheow Yu Yuan, March 01 2010

For florists, search engine optimization or SEO is the most effective promotional channel for reaching customers, especially during Valentine's Day and Mother's Day. A well-executed SEO can bring targeted traffic to your website, which ultimately translates into sales.

SEO is very different from traditional advertising methods such as direct mail campaign, TV commercials or newspaper advertisements. Firstly, SEO is more cost effective when compared to most of the traditional advertising methods because the visitors SEO brings to your site are buyers. Rather than spending on expensive offline methods that bring tire kickers, SEO generates qualified leads for your business.

Secondly, SEO produces results that are instantly measurable. With Google Analytics, you can track the number of sales or leads generated, and you can even drill deeper to find out the keywords that get you the sales.

So how do florists benefit from SEO? Most florists today have online catalog that allows visitors to buy flowers online. Men are looking for hand bouquets to surprise their girlfriends or wives. Some are looking for condolences flowers when they grieve the death of their loved ones. These people are motivated to find florists online that provide flower delivery.

By optimizing your website, you ensure that they can find you when they are searching on Google. With the right optimization campaign, you will enjoy more exposure to a motivated audience and higher sales.

The key to an effective SEO campaign lies in keyword research. Generally, keyword can be classified into 2 categories: Short Tail keywords and Long Tail keywords.

Short Tail keywords such as "Florist" and "Cars" are too general and may not be profitable. Long Tail keywords like "BMW 3 Series Convertible" can be very profitable because people typing this term in search engines are usually ready to buy. Therefore, a good SEO campaign should not neglect targeting the long tail phrases.

Some companies believe that SEO is all about ranking number 1 for keywords like "Florist". This type of keyword is very competitive and difficult to get top rankings for them. Although achieving top rankings for these keywords is not impossible, but is it worth the effort if the conversion rate for these keywords is lower when compared to the long tail phrases? This is something for us to ponder before optimization begins.

Smart SEO is the way to go. Getting your web pages into top rankings on search engine results page is dead. Focus on conversions, not rankings.