Helping Florists Build Their Online Revenue Through Smart SEO.

We launched our 360º floral marketing program, partnered with a good many florists to improve their online marketing, and have pushed out some incredible results.

That being said, we really want to focus on one florist in particular for this post, hoping that you can learn from what they’ve accomplished.

Central Square Florist is a wonderful florist with a great community based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

We absolutely love working with David Levine, the owner of Central Square Florist, and his daughter, Jackie Levine. They both are very passionate florist and truly understand the heart and soul of their community and business.

We’ve seen significant rolling results for Central Square ever since we initiated them in to our 360º marketing program, helped largely by their eagerness to learn, and adapt every aspect of what we do into the ground-level of their business.

This really helps everything that we do, but more than that, it helps tremendously boost the results of their marketing efforts.

To be clear and transparent in this post, Central Square is part of the 360º marketing program, which encompasses SEO (Search Engine Optimization), PPC (Pay Per Click, otherwise known as Search Engine Marketing), Email Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Blogging, and Conversion Optimization, all in a perfect synergistic ecosystem, where all of the strategy and tactics are integrated to help each piece of the puzzle as they come together.

That being said, this post will focus on a few of the major SEO techniques we used to specifically increase their organic revenue by 220% in a given month (that means revenue that comes from Google, Bing, and Yahoo searches).

In May 2014 we had a 219.28% increase in organic revenue compared to the same period in 2013.

This is staggering, and it wasn’t without proper strategy.

Central Square Florist is based in Cambridge, which in itself is a very large market, but not anywhere near the size of the overall Boston market, which is the market Central Square plans to dominate. They’re well on their way.

When Central Square started the 360º marketing program they were already ranking well in Cambridge, between the 1-3 spot in Google, which is a great position for a nice location. But we wanted to be on the first page of Boston, that’s our sweet-spot.

When pushing a search of “Boston Florist” or “Boston Flowers” we weren’t anywhere to be found within the first 2 pages.

We wanted to fix that, and we did.

If you search for “Boston Florist” or “Boston Flowers” on Google you will see Central Square Florist cleanly placed on the front page, poised to move up even further towards the top.

If you search for “Boston Flower Shop” or “Boston Flower Delivery” on Google you will see Central Square Florist in the top 3 positions. This is a bulls-eye, as 70% of clicks go to the top 3 organic listings in any search engine query.

So, here’s some of what we did to achieve this:

1. We used hyper-local content

We built locally focused landing pages that essentially drove traffic from locations within Boston (the page that is now ranking #1 for “Boston Flower Delivery” is a good example).

These pages focused on the locations that get the most deliveries, which we found through Google Analytics and delivery data. We set up a landing page for each location and pushed relevant categories on these pages to convert web visitors. They convert better than any other landing pages we have for our 360º clients.

They are also filled with location-rich information, which Google sees as useful content for searches that contain local intent, thus we rank better for these types of searches than our competition.

2. We tailored all of the information on the site towards the local search

By editing the products, the categories, the homepage meta information and the other pages on our site to focus on Boston and other major locations, we were able to quickly shift Google’s understanding of our site to be the dominant force in Boston, noticing that we have very high local relevance in reference to the other florists trying to rank in our location.

I wrote a more thorough blog post on how to optimize products on FlowerManager for this sort of tactic here.

3. Long-tail organic content, that no other competitor has

Google has been pushing editorial content for quite some time, but now more than ever with their recent algorithm updates such as “Hummingbird” and the Panda 4.0 refresh.

Google Hummingbird, which was implemented a few months ago essentially swapped out the original engine at Google with a new engine that does a better job of understanding what is known as “conversational search” essentially meaning any search queries that sound like sentences.

“How do I keep my flowers alive longer”

“What are the best flowers to get for Father’s Day?”

“What kind of flowers are best for Valentines Day”

The list goes on, but focusing on this kind of quality editorial content helps give Google more to index, it shows that we have vested interest in helping our customers get exactly what they’re looking for, it shows that we are the authority on the subject, and that we are trying to inform consumers about what their options are.

If you check out Central Square Florist’s blog, the content is rich and full of information, information for which Google likes to give credit.

Beyond Google’s Hummingbird algorithm comes Google’s “Panda” algorithm which is focused on trimming low-quality, low-content sites out of the index. Which means the more editorial content we have, the more pages we have, the richer those pages are with relevant content, the better chance we have of dominating the rankings, and the better chance we have of our competition dropping out of the index altogether.

In Conclusion

The best way to beat your competition is to be on a whole new level entirely.

Google knows this, and they will reward you if you achieve this. We help our clients achieve this. Central Square Florist already had quality rooted in their DNA, we just help push the needle online.

There are more things to SEO obviously than what we listed above, things that we do every day with the 360º program to bring more revenue to our clients, but these are a few of the tactics we use to push revenue in the right direction.

We’re always open to helping more florists push their marketing forward, if you want to talk more about our 360º program please contact John Barron at 941.927.7674 x137