The Floral CEO

 

Hello flower friends, this is Jen and I had a ton of great, like, I like just get excited when we're talking about things that help make people's business better. And I can see the light bulb starting to go off when that person is really understanding. And so I wanna talk about SEO and. Especially, there's so many different websites that are out there and there's so many different labels that are out there that I just wanted to start off with like some basic understanding of really understanding how your website is performing.

So the first thing that I usually look at when somebody says they're not getting a lot of orders, uh, I look at, okay, how easy. Is it to navigate their site? Like are the things clearly labeled when you get to a place, are they actually paying off with what you thought you were going to get? And so on and so forth.

So that's kind of the start. Then I like to see the pillars that they should have probably in their social media, that those pillars of revenue. Kind of live somewhat throughout that site. So if that person is a wedding and event florist, obviously they have a wedding and event section. That person is a retail florist.

Maybe they've streamlined and siloed like the um, you know, funeral flowers and they have upcoming Valentine's and you know, they've really kind of like siloed those revenue sources together. But here are the things that really I like to look at to see. If a site is working, so the first number that I kind of look at is called unique visitors.

A visitor is somebody that happens along your site and enters into your site. So this person within a certain timeframe has not visited on that same device. They are then cookie. So we all see the little thing. Let's say cookies and you have to hit this okay, to, okay, people using cookies for your data.

And when you come back, you are now a session. We have unique visitors, but that unique visitor could have multiple sessions. So if we look at. Let's just say we had 500 unique visitors, but a thousand sessions, that means that that person, uh, like almost everybody in the site, is at least viewing having two sessions on your website.

All right? Then the next thing to look at is, is the website doing like. Basically setting up that experience for success or people leaving. So that is called bounce rate. Bounce rate means when somebody comes to your website and they essentially leave, um, a lot of times you can. You know, website companies that supply some type of reporting or you have, um, Google console installed so you can get access to that reporting.

A lot of times you can just go in and look and see what is my site bounce rate? Because if your bounce rate is 75%, they are not getting what they thought they were going to do with whatever search that they, you were coming in then. That next number is, you know, I kind of like to go look at what is our page path?

Where are people going when they come to the site? They're going to the homepage, then they're clicking weddings, then they're clicking about us. Then they're going to the CaTECH desk form, and then after that, you know they're leaving. Which that would be natural if they submitted a form for them to leave, or maybe they're going on your gallery page and they're scrolling through all those.

Uh, another metric that I look at is time on site. So if somebody is spending a long time on your site, that should mean a good thing, but that also could mean that they left your site up in a browser. And then went and did something, but their computer has maybe some type of, uh, setting on it that is keeping it, uh, moving or keeping it not, not going idle.

And so that session time doesn't stop even though that person walked away then. Then if we are doing e-commerce transactions, we want to look at our. Cart abandonment rate. So if somebody comes in and they're looking to buy flowers, but you had 10 people enter and three actually check out, you had, you know, about a 60% abandoned cart rate.

But let's just say that you had, you know, five people check out. But you still lost five if you had 10 people enter that process. Uh, then we look at what is called website conversion. So if you had a thousand people, a thousand unique users come to your site, the e-commerce specific, uh, conversions, they say 3% is, eh.

6%, five to 6% is doing really rockstar. So if you look and you are converting well below even so-so something on your page of the page set up or the content, the price, it could be a million things, but it is slowing that process down that somebody isn't converting. So I often like would go and just act like I'm a customer and like I'm gonna go through the process and look, I'm gonna go through my checkout process to see is this a total epic pain in the ass?

I'm just gonna like surf around and see if I find something. Um, things that make people veil is like really slow page load times. Um. Really requiring a ton of information to do a transaction. People are like, I don't wanna give all the same information. Um, poor page layout, poor buy button placement. I mean, there are a million reasons why your store could be converting lower.

Uh, I have coached some stores that their conversion is like around 15%. So it is definitely possible, and especially if you have a robust catalog that you know, you know our converters, you can always look at data. Like what is my highest clicked on catalog item? What is my highest converting catalog item?

Those are all things that you should be able to dial in in your analytics, but we wanna know where, what page are people leaving? What page are people, you know, like just bailing out of the site because it didn't provide value? Or maybe they were on the site for three minutes and they're just ready to leave.

But you can actually track paths on how people got to your site. What Google, you know, like wording or keyword or did it come from social? Did it come from an email? Like you can look at, um, 'cause there's a thing called UTM codes. Even chat, GBT is placing a UTM code, which is basically a tracking measure so that when it goes into your Google Analytics, they can get credit for it.

It's going to show that that referring traffic came from Google, came from Facebook, came from TikTok, whatever it is, so. They're getting smart on being able to help you be educated on figuring out where my client's coming from. Because what if you get a ton of TikTok, you know, people coming, but like you never convert anything out of that.

You get tons of audience and it's a ton of work, but you don't get any orders, you don't get any, you know, like engagement, um, from those customers on the site. So it might not be your ideal customers. Playground to be on TikTok. So testing that content on Instagram and Facebook might be something to look and see what their social UTM codes refer and how that performance on your site looks.

And then also if you have, um, you know, let's just say an Instagram story and you put a URL in there. Like all of those things can track as long as you have tracking metrics set up. And when you have that insight, you can be unstoppable because you're, you can be like, I know that this is better. I at least understand my benchmark for now.

And you know, here is the, to me the most important metrics is to know your U unique users, your bounce rate, your conversion percentage. And, um, the number of sessions because that's showing if people actually, the content is good, that they're coming back, you can make a lot of decisions based on that little bank of numbers because you can look and say, is this working?

Are people converting? Am I getting people there? Because if you are having a problem along the way, to me it really boils down to two things. You have an audience problem. Or a conversion problem if your sales are really slow. You have an audience problem or a conversion problem, and it could be even both, which makes it super tricky.

So make sure that you have access to reporting and make sure when you get a new website. You also make sure that that reporting is installed in it. That is the critical piece that helps you hold your website company accountable for making sure that your website performs. A lot of these places are giving you cookie cutter templates, and then they don't do shit.

Well, they did it because they can give it to 10, to 15, to 30 to 40 to 50 to a hundred other florists just like you. That is not going to work. We need a website that is going to convert. We need a website that we have easy insights into data. We need a website that just makes more sense. But anytime you change your website.

You also potentially change all of the code that Google has been crawling for years and then deeming you as relevant content because people, you know, engaged with your site after they were referred out of Google and so on and so forth. So a lot of times all of that clout with Google that you have built over years and years potentially goes to the wayside because.

You basically got a whole new code subset for the Google spiders to crawl. So think really delicately about making changes like that because you don't wanna start over if you had some momentum. Maybe you just needed a little tweak or a little tune up. I hope this little episode all about SEO and understanding the metrics behind it was helpful.

Um, please, if you are having a hard time with this, I would love to do a one-on-one call with you. It is so easy to turn, you know, a website around. Just by making little tweaks and really turning it into a lead and money machine, because that's inevitably what we want. So thank you so much for listening, flower Friend, and you have an amazing flower filled day.

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