When it comes to flowers, picking the freshest blooms is a no-brainer for any thriving floristry business. Florists might know all the tricks to keep flowers at their best, but when it comes to helping your business bloom, did you know that having a ‘fresh’ website really matters too? We asked BFA Partners Queen Bee to give us the latest buzz on how to keep your floristry website as fresh as your florals.
Here’s what they had to say!
From clever content to carefully selected keywords, cultivating your content online is one of the most important ways to organically grow your floristry business. Adding new content on a regular basis to your site creates a wonderful halo effect. Not only does it keep your website up to date (fresh!), but it naturally encourages your users to visit you more. This extra rise in visitors (traffic) means your site is seen as having more ‘authority’ and is rewarded with a little boost in SEO, pushing you up the search engine rankings. Hooray!
Keeping your website fresh does require a bit of extra TLC, but it’s totally worth the results. Here’s our 6 top tips to add some extra oomph to your online offering and freshen up your floral vibe!
Refresh Your Imagery
You wouldn’t fill your bouquets with out of season flowers so don’t let your website become stale either! Keeping your website fresh means making sure that you look your best online too. From keeping your product ranges updated with stunning photos or showcasing that exciting *new* seasonal bouquet range, your website can become shorthand for what is happening in store. From your socials to your site, everything should be aligned to create a cohesive vibe.
Add New Content Regularly AND Remember to Repurpose Old Content
Content helps people find you! From educational content (how to arrange a vase or tips on how to dry flowers) to customer ‘experience’ stories (e.g. real life weddings), blogs are brilliant for bringing to life all aspects of floral conversations. It allows customers to get a deep dive in to the way you do business and can help you showcase your floristry expertise. Having evergreen content online (content that will be interesting to your consumer for a long period of time), is a smart way to keep your site rich but don’t be afraid to repurpose old content too. Refreshing a topic that your customers enjoyed and putting a new spin on it is all part of keeping your content as fresh as a daisy!
Keywords Count
Figuring out which keywords you want to be ‘found’ by is important. Keywords are the words and phrases that your ideal customer is putting into a search engine when looking for specific content. The search engine results are then ranked based on the sites that answer the queries the best. The more *new* content you add to your site that includes these important keywords, the more your site gets crawled and re-ranked. Refreshing your site with industry trending keywords is a super simple way to keep your site relevant. From Valentine’s flowers in February to Christmas Wreaths in December knowing what topics are important to your business means keeping on top of keywords. You can check out more about this over on Queen Bee’s blog – ‘3 ways to discover keywords for your content marketing.’
Grow Your Internal Links
Internal links are like clever little signposts. Not only do they help your user navigate your site, but they help search engines like Google navigate it too. Links might be small, but they are a mighty part of any successful site. The more you can connect (link) relevant pages of your site to help your audience discover what they need, the better their user experience. Not only do users turn in to customers, but one of the juiciest metrics that the search engines value is engagement. The more your users are clicking between pages the more time they are spending on your site. This in turn increases your engagement metric. So, think about your topics and relevant subtopics. Link blogs to other blogs, link to new products or updated FAQs. Keep the links intuitive and fresh. Encourage your users to explore deeper into your site with crisp new content that will engage them further.
Keep Your Site Maintenance Weed Free
Florists are renowned for having splendid shop windows so don’t forget to apply the same elbow grease to your website too. Regularly remove any out-of-date content, add missing Alt tags (picture descriptions) and fix any broken links. Take some time to review your meta description and Headers (H1) for those all-important keywords (see tip 3). Not only are these pointers essential to keep your site up to date but it also helps it run smoothly. No-one likes a clunky user experience or to find themselves on a ‘404 page not found’ dead end! Show your audience that you’re at the top of your game with a terrifically tidy site that is cultivated with care.
Dig into Your Site Analytics
Analytics help you stay competitive. They allow you to understand a little bit more about how your site is being used and if or where any improvements can be made. Think of your sitemap like a carefully constructed bouquet. Each layer plays a pivotal role in the overall look, feel and success of your site. Analytics that give some insight into user behaviour are a great place to start. Identify any pages of your site that have a high bounce rate (pages that people visit but leave quickly) and look to see if there’s anything on that page that could be improved to keep them lingering longer. Likewise, see what pages are already keeping users engaged (look for high time spent metrics) and add more of this content in the future. Digging into the data can reveal a variety of new ways to expand and grow your business. Tip: You’ll need to set up a Google Analytics account to get all this data and more.
All websites need a bit of work to grow. Keeping your content fresh is by far one of the best ways to help your business bloom. Why not explore the growth potential of your site with a few (or more) of our top tips?
Thanks to Queen Bee! You can find out more about our BFA Partner and how they are looking to support your floristry business here.
