The Floral Hustle

  Hello, flower friends. This is Jen, and you are listening to the Floral Hustle Podcast. On this week's mini sode, we are going to be talking SEO. And you might be going, What is SEO, Jen? SEO means search engine optimization. And I recently, um, started the floral CEO mastermind and I did a scholarship and I had, you know, a ton of people apply for this and it was so fascinating what people think they need to do to really grow your business.

And. One of those things where they were convinced that figuring out Google keywords and optimizing their website were going to be a game changer for their business. I personally used to sell advertising, used to sell optimizing your website, used to sell all the things. Google and making you show up.

But what I think a lot of people don't understand is that the majority of your business, unless you are a brick and mortar, in my experience in the floral industry is not coming from Google. But that doesn't mean that it should be forgotten. And a lot of websites actually have tools for you to help optimize your website just based on the layout and functioning of it.

There are websites out there that are completely set up just to optimize SEO. Many of those websites are for daily deliveries, um, funerals, brick and mortar like core business items. But, that doesn't mean we should forget about it. So, what is SEO really mean? to you and With your website like how can you impact your SEO?

one of the biggest things that is really hard for a lot of florists to understand is like how does SEO work and the analogy that I use is that your website and the structure of your website has a What they call like just a layout and structure that the Google search, I call them spiders, the spiders come and they crawl your site and.

They're, realistically, they're, they're, they're physically kind of crawling inside your site to figure out your relevancy on different topics. That relevancy could be to you being a everyday florist in Bloomington, Minnesota. It could be your relevancy of someone saying wedding flowers, Bloomington, Minnesota.

It could be your relevancy to any number of search terms that that person is searching for. But these spiders are crawling your site to understand your relevancy in your space. So they are looking at You know, the, the keywords on your site, they are looking for meta tags on your images. If you have a very image heavy site, Google can't read an image.

They can read the tag on the image. They are looking for, um, you know, shopping there, all of these different components, the Google spiders come in and they crawl all over your site and they come up with your relevancy based on different topics. But what most people do not know is that when you go in, you are into Google and you search your name, you might not necessarily be the first one that shows up in that search return.

And the reason why is if you've ever gone into Google and you've looked at that first or second or even, you know, multiple lines of returns, they might have a little. thing next to it that says sponsored. So that sponsored text means that that person is paying on a pay per click basis to show up when somebody is searching your name.

You also, if you are a newer website, you want to make sure you're going through the motions to properly set up. Your website for SEO success that would be putting keywords in it that you want to be relevant in that would be making sure that your location is, is, um, noted in their basic things that will help a person that potentially would be searching for a business like yours to show up in that search return.

One of the biggest ways you can show up is. by having your Google My Business page properly set up. As a home based studio, I do not physically want my address listed because I had people showing up here when I did. And so I am just listing my city. At this point, so I don't have people coming to my house and wanting to buy flowers.

It happened all the time and I was just done with it. But I still want to show up in a Google search as a florist in Bloomington, Minnesota. So I have Bloomington, Minnesota as my location. So I show up in the map portion of that search return. It is putting me as the florist. That is one way, even though that is outside of your website, your website is going to be what that person potentially clicks on.

So that is going to help funnel traffic your way. You can often go in to your reporting tool, either in your website, Or you can set up Google Analytics and Google Analytics is a program that Google has put together that you have to install a piece of code on your site and that gives you insight into behavior of how people are getting to your website.

It's feeding into behavior of how they are entering and exiting their path, their time on your site, their Basically, every single thing that you can track, Google Analytics will help you figure that out. But that is a separate step that you have to take on most websites. Also, many websites have optimization that you can go in and set up yourself, but it is a process.

I know with Wix, you actually, who is my website company, you have to go through and there's a whole section. that goes through setting up your SEO. And you potentially wouldn't even show up for your own name search until that step is completed. SEO seems like a really scary thing to so many people. But as long as you are making sure you're including the items that you want to show up on, on your site, after those Google spiders have continually crawled your website, You are hopefully going to build some relevancy on that site.

It doesn't happen overnight. Ways you can boost that relevancy that are very controllable is having marketing strategies around supporting that SEO relevancy topic. Let's just say that your strategy is that you want to show up more When someone is Googling flowers and a specific venue, you could put a blog post on your site that is the story of that wedding that you did at that venue.

That also talks about like, you know, keyword rich, SEO, um, you know, like terms that you think somebody would be Googling. And finding out on this specific venue, there are venues here in Minneapolis that have very unique features. And so if I wanted to show up when somebody is Googling for ideas, I could do a blog post featuring that idea or that concept and some creative solutions for it, and I could potentially rank.

for relevancy based on that subject because I have that content all over my site in this blog post. Another way that you can boost your relevancy is just trying to circumvent traffic to get to those types of pieces of content. Let's just say you have this blog post about five ways to decorate the hanging installation at Machine Shop in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Then, you create a Pinterest pin that features that information. Um, five different pins that would potentially point to this blog post. And so you could be circumventing traffic by this visual pin that you made. And then They're going to be going to your site and getting this payoff of learning all about five different ways they can decorate the Beam, boom, whatever you want to call it at this venue because it's a unique feature So creating pins helps drive that traffic and that relevancy on the topic because it's another place to show up You also could Um, have a page created with your preferred venues.

You could have, um, you know, your preferred keywords that are in your area embedded on your site. If you go and look at websites that are in your niche, but maybe you're not interested in doing daily orders, but you're interested in weddings, go look at area websites that are set up. Like telefloral websites, BloomNation websites, you can visibly see how they are trying to optimize SEO.

And you can basically copy that, but with weddings or whatever you're trying to promote and push in mind. If you ever have additional questions, I've been thinking about actually bringing on an SEO expert because I think this is something that feels heavy for a lot of florists. So if this is something that is interesting to you, um, please send me a DM or, uh, send me an email at jenny at the floral hustle.

com. Um, I've had a couple SEO experts reach out to me and I'd love to bring that on if that is an in. Interest to you guys. Thank you so much for watching today and listening. You have an amazing flower filled week.