We wanted to profile two free sites that will help you get more traffic and orders on your florist website. We use these for our own shop and they have been hugely helpful.

Want to see how your site is seen online by thousands of people? Yext lets you survey free listing sites like Citysearch and Mapquest to see if your florist website is listed there. If your site isn’t listed on one of these sites, they are almost all free, so go get a listing! You can also check out how your website appears. NOTE – ignore the link to “fix it all” (they will try to charge you for this) – you can do this all yourself by going to individual sites and adding your listing (most are free).

Need to make sure you florist website is listed on search engines? You don’t need to sit idly by and wait for Bing and others to find you. You can claim your website yourself. GetListed will survey your website and let you know where you have and haven’t been listed.

GetListed gives you a score according to your search engine coverage. This is slightly misleading — some sites are much more important than others. Google, Yahoo, and Bing listings have higher visitor numbers than some of the others. But it’s easy and useful to get listing on as many sites as possible.

The critical message of florist web marketing — you can do it yourself. The days where you had to rely on radio stations, billboards, and newspaper ads to reach your potential customers are over. All you need is a computer (and hopefully a great florist website) to get the word out to your customers.

Get going and get listed – it’s never too soon to start marketing your flower shop!

So you want to get your florist website on the front page of Google’s search results.

You’re considering paying a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) company. There are some things that are within your control and you can do for free! There are other things that internal to your website and there are things that are internal. Here are two things that are external to your site you can do to promote your site for zilch, zero, nada:

1. Backlinks – Make sure you have plenty of links to your website.

Google ranks your website by the number and quality of sites linking back to yours. One way to help your ranking is to create links to your site from well know sites like Mapquest and Superpages.

Here’s a partial list of sites that you should be listed on. You can add your business for for the ridiculously affordable price of free! Your “Google Places” listing is the most important and it’s worth doing through the steps to get listed.

– Google Places (this will get you listed on Google Maps also!)
– Yahoo Local
– Bing Local
– Yelp
– Insider Page
– Merchant Circle
– YellowBot
– Mapquest
– Superpages
– Citysearch
– Whitepages
– Local.com
– Telenav
– Getfav
– Topix
– Switchboard
– Brownbook
– Localsearch.com

2. Social Media – Build and maintain a Facebook business page and a Twitter account.

Search engines only index Facebook business pages, not personal Facebook pages – know the difference between a personal and a business account. Hint: A business account doesn’t allow you to “Friend” people, it only allows you to receive “Likes”.

Once you have more than 100 likes on your Facebook page you can select a vanity Facebook URL such as: Facebook.com/new-york-florist — choose a “search engine term that you want to own like New York Florist and use this in your facebook page name.

3. Website SEO Info – Make sure your website is organized and coded to be search engine friendly (this is one of the things Floranext is really good at!):

This is something that is internal to your website. In other words, it should be built into your website – make sure your website provider offers these!

– Unique page names – this is the name of the page on the top of your browser. Every page should be different.
– Unique, descriptive URLs – your website URLs should look like flowershop.com/dozen-roses not flowershop.com/123456
– Keywords – built into every page of your website should be a unique, descriptive search engine keywords
– Cross-link sites – if you have multiple websites, put links to all of them in the footer of your websites. Example if you own brooklyn-florist.com and manhattan-florist.com, put the link to the Brooklyn site on the manhattan site and vice versa. Make sure your website provider lets you edit your footer text.
– Sitemap – a listing of all the pages on your site in XML format

Backlinks and Social media are external to your site and you be working to promote these. Things that are internal to your website like keywords and sitemap are offered by your website provider – make sure you’re getting these from your florist website provider!

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Floranext makes great florist software. Florist websites, floral POS, florist wedding/event proposal software, and florist technology. Let us know if you want a free demo or try our software for free here!

Congratulations to the local florists for taking care of Mom this Mother’s Day. Hard work and happy customers!

We’re not sure the wire services fared as well this holiday season. Here are some Facebook highlights of customers comments for the big florist wire services for Mother’s Day:

FTD Facebook page on Mother’s Day

Teleflora Facebook page on Mother’s Day

1-800 Flowers Facebook page on Mother’s Day

ProFlowers Facebook page on Mother’s DayCongratulations to the local florist who did the hard work this M-Day!

Whether you’re familiar with teen heartthrob and pop singer Justin Bieber or not, you are probably wondering what he could possibly have to do with your floral business.

Beiber made floral news when he made a promotional partnership with 1-800-Flowers, selling a bouquet named after his new hit single “One Less Lonely Girl.” The 1-800-Beiber bouquet includes 12-24 variegated red roses and also comes with a “One Less Lonely Girl Scarf,” a membership to his fan club, and a Justin Bieber CD.

In addition, a portion of the bouquets’ proceeds go to his charity, which focuses on building schools in developing nations.

When you recover from gazing into his dreamy tween eyes, you might wonder: why all the add-ons? In the latest consumer tracking study by the American Floral Endowment, the most frequent flower buyers are women over 35. Appealing to a younger target audience should always be a marketing goal, and this is their approach. What are you doing to reach your younger market?

Receiving flowers can be a clever way of reminding a market about giving flowers. Even if all the Beiber-bouquets are bought by women over 35, it is likely that they will be purchased for a younger market, introducing them to the joys (and hipness) of giving and receiving flowers. Looking for an easy, low tech way?

Find out about events going on in your community where you can remind those involved to pick up flowers for their special event. Advertising with flyers and word-of-mouth around dance studios, theaters, and performance venues of all kinds are a good place to start.

Consider using Facebook to get the word out to a younger group – and for the incredible price of… FREE, why not? One tactic we have used for our own shop is to find out about local high schools’ prom Facebook pages and get them to “like” your business.

Bieber recently made headlines again by calling a local florist and requesting that his reputed girlfriend and Disney teen-star, Selena Gomez’s, house be filled with flowers. Sources say the florist had to use every flower in the shop and needed to use multiple trucks to complete the order.

We hope you find these tips helpful, and who knows, maybe your efforts will inspire a customer to buy every last flower in your shop!

One week ago if you searched for “dresses” on Google what do you think would have come up? What if you did the same for “bedding” or “area rugs” or “skinny jeans”? It could be hundreds of companies. But it was just one retailer: JC Penny.

The New York Times chronicles JC Penny’s unscrupulous Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tactics and what they did to get to the top of search. And it follows them as, just as quickly, they get knocked off of their search pedestal.

Is anyone doing this in the flower business? Is this something you need to be concerned about for your florist website? Almost certainly someone is doing it — read on to find out what you can do about it.

First, understand how Google ranks sites. It comes mainly down to one factor: links. The more links (and the more valuable those links) the better you’re going to do on Google. If you have a Gardening website and lots of other Gardening sites point to yours, you’re going to be more highly ranked.

So how did JC Penny game the system? As the NYT puts it, “Someone placed thousands of links on hundreds of thousands of sites across the web.” Typically called “link farming” – sites use this to artificially convince Google of their site’s worth.

When Google was notified of this, they immediately demoted JC Penny (quote from the NYT):

On Wednesday evening, Google began what it calls a “manual action” against Penney, essentially demotions specifically aimed at the company.

At 7 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, J. C. Penney was still the No. 1 result for “Samsonite carry on luggage.”

Two hours later, it was at No. 71.

At 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Penney was No. 1 in searches for “living room furniture.”

By 9 p.m., it had sunk to No. 68.

This kind of unscrupulous practice is probably happening in the flower industry and in most others. Bigger companies that have the resources to play the system to their advantage. So what can you do about it?

Within days of the story coming out, Google announced a plugin for their Chrome browser (like Internet Explorer but faster) where you can notify them of any link farming activity.

We can also learn from what JC Penny did unscrupulously — you can do the same thing in an above-board manner. Getting links to you site in newspapers, blogs, and on Facebook is a great way to start “legally” gaming the system in your favor.

What are you doing to legally promote links to your site? Let us know!

Relevant Links:

Google Chrome Anti-Link Farm Plugin: http://bit.ly/eqLu9r
Want to read the NYT Article: http://nyti.ms/i4jZ6E

Flower-eating giraffe photographed on a safari in Savute, Botswana.

image via https://www.flickr.com/photos/aftab/4030225389/

All business owners know the best kind of recommendation is a personal one.

A friend recommending a product or service beats a TV or radio ad any day. So how can you generate word-of-mouth advertising for your florist website for Valentine’s Day?

In the era of social media, getting people talking about your business isn’t too hard. Here’s what we have done for our own flower shop. It’s three simple rules that add up to: “Love Your Customers And They Will Love You Back.”

1. Collect Emails From Customers

You should be collecting email addresses from customers every day. Get addresses when customers call in, put a sign-up form on your counter for walk-ins, and gather addresses on your website. Always make sure to tell people you will give them Discounts and Coupons — that will generate more sign-ups.

2. Pre-Valentine’s Day Email Blast

Do two emails to your customer base, one well in advance of the holiday the other two or three days before V-Day. The message should be a specific offer like “Get $10 off of your Valentine’s bouquet if you order before Date X”. Make sure to include a coupon or discount with every offer, that will minimize or eliminate the number of unsubscribes and spam reports.

3. Send customers to your Facebook Page to “Like” Your Business

In your email, send customers to your Facebook page. Tell them if they “Like” you on Facebook you will email them the promised coupon/discount. Every one of their hundreds of friends will see — just days before Valentine’s Day — that their friend has chosen you as their favorite florist.

Magic! You have now turned a few coupons into personal recommendations for your business to literally thousands of customers.

What other ideas do you have any more ideas for Valentine’s Day promotions? Let us know in the comments section below!

The already too competitive flower business just got a bit more competitive.

Alongside supermarkets, wire services, and order gatherers, the retail florist can now add event flower providers.

The online-only corporate florist event company H.Bloom has raised more than $2 million to steal your corporate customers. The money, which comes from ventur capital firm Battery Ventures (which has raised $3 billion in its lifetime) will most likely be used to bring the company’s New York and Washington D.C.-based business across the country.

So how does it work? H.Bloom doesn’t have to have a retail outlet, so their overhead is cheaper than a retail florist. Because they have stable, recurring customers base, they can bulk order flowers directly from the grower more cheaply than a retail business, which has more variable demand (and potentially procure higher quality flowers). And finally they have a great website which makes it easy for people to find what they are looking for in seconds.

What can a local florist do to compete in an increasingly competitive climate for event flowers? As always, smaller players can compete and win on customer service, convenience, and personality. That means engaging your customers – not just when they want to buy, but proactively through email marketing, Facebook, and Twitter. Think hard about how you can make it easy for customers and give them exceptional service offline and online.

The biggest mis-understanding about search engine optimization is that it is something you either have or you don’t.

Some sites are better organized for Google crawlers and that is an essential part of getting traffic to your site. But more than that, SEO is an ongoing process of site marketing. Here are 5 key tips for Search Engine Optimization for your florist website:

1. Know Your Ranking

Download the Google Toolbar — once installed, just roll your cursor over the bar icon on the toolbar to see your 1 – 10 ranking. A ranking of 3 or 4 is a great ranking.

2. Metatags, Keywords and Sitemaps, Oh My!

Make sure your front page and product pages have Metatags and Keywords. These tags are invisible to your customers, but they help tell a search engine robot that a rose bouquet is a rose bouquet.

3. Backlink Magic

Search engines rank your site based on the number of incoming links. The best kind of links are ones with high rankings themselves, typically high traffic sites like newspapers. Slow, steady building of links over time is a big help. Think of sites like Yelp as great places to place your content (ahem, make sure your customers or at least someone is writing good reviews of your business).

4. Content is King

Search engines love sites with regularly updated content. A great way to enable this is a blog on your site. WordPress is a good free alternative, but requires installation and database setup. Tumblr is a super easy way to blog, but won’t be hosted on your site so it’s a second best.

5. Find Yourself On A Map

Make sure your business is appearing on search engine maps. Google Place Page and BingPlaces for Business are a good place to start.

That’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg when it comes to search engine optimization. But it’s a good place for any florist to start getting his florist website up to standard.