Small Business SEO – Wedding Flowers, Venues, and Page Rank

I just talked with Richard, a client that I’ve had for years, who happens to be an old friend. We met over chicken enchiladas at the Elks Club. He and his wife do wedding flowers at flowerart.biz. Their flowers are really well done and creative. Their target demographic is on the high end, but not the highest. (Can a bride be a “target demographic”?) They do weddings in Palos Verdes, San Pedro, Redondo Beach, and the surrounding area.

My first thought, when considering how to approach SEO for his site, is that people would search by city or by zip code. I was wrong. First lesson of SEO is to listen to your client and find out how their business works, what is the sales process, what is the business model?

What happens is that our target, I mean, our beautiful bride will pick a venue first. Once that is decided on, they do research on all the vendors that can support that venue. It’s not “city”. It’s “venue”.

This also qualifies the bride. If you are having a wedding at an expensive, nice venue, then you are probably spending more money on flowers. We want to target brides in higher end venues, so the budget will be larger. They don’t do run of the mill flowers or charge run of the mill prices. You want the best, you pay for the best, and you get the best.

The sales process is usually that the bride picks the venue, then goes down the list of recommended vendors and looks at each web site or calls each vendor. When they see the incredibly beautiful, outstanding site that we designed for FlowerArt.biz, they immediately pick them. Or maybe someone else. The goal is to get the phone call.

Research

Since the main source of business is referrals from venues, we’re going to look to see if there’s any business from people just searching on the web. We still want to be rated high for the keywords that people use to find wedding flowers.

Doing a quick search in Google’s AdWords tool, I found that the following related terms are used in order of number of searches per day:

• wedding
• flowers
• weddings
• florist
• florists
• bouquet
• wedding flowers
• wedding decorations
• wedding centerpieces
• wedding flower
• wedding bouquets
• flower arrangements

These are so broad that we will never own them, but we do want to use them on our site. The key here is that we will want to be found for the venue names. We’ll have to pair those keywords with the venue names.

My problem is that I’m not sure how brides actually search, what keywords they use and where are they in the planning process. We’re going to target these keywords and venue names and see what happens. After a month or two, we’ll look through our keywords and referrals in Google Analytics and see what’s working, then adjust our strategy.

On Site Analysis

It seems that we’ll need more pages on our site and we’ll have to make sure that each page is linked correctly to every other page. We now have 133. Most of those are “gallery” pages where we’re showing photos of flowers they’ve done before. (I’m a guy and not real impressed by flowers, but I must say that these are pretty cool.) We need to add more gallery pages. I’ve told Richard to post to the “news”, i.e. blog, page more often. If he makes it through the month of June alive, he’ll work on that. I’m going to look at recoding his gallery pages so that it’s easier for him to add photos.

Off Site Analysis

We have 63 external links, but I’m not sure that’s enough to blow anyone away. We’ll need to get a lot more than that. There are a lot from other vendors that they like and work with. Those are great to have. We should try to get more links from friends, but not everyone, no matter how much they like you, will add a link, or even know how to add a link for you. People are great, but doing it yourself is better.

Here is where posting comments on blogs, posting messages in forums, and writing articles for directories will come in. I’ll do some more research on where the most effective places to do that are.

It seems that there are a lot of directory type web sites out there that have hundreds of thousands or pages, but the pages all have really low individual page ranks. Because of the huge number of pages on the site, the individual page does get returned higher than our page for a specific search term. The only way to beat them is to have a much higher page rank on our pages, which should be easy to do with more external links.

Richard is compiling a list of his main competitors for me. I’ll analyze each one’s web site to see who is linking to them and see if we can replicate some of those links.

Statistics

The list of venue names, added to words like “wedding flowers”, will comprise a list of search terms that I’ll run reports for to see where we stand now. We’ll chart that same list each week to measure our progress. This report will tell us exactly where we are on the search results pages for each term. We’ll also chart the visits to the site in Analytics, as well as the referrals and the keywords used in searches that find us. Search results, visits, and keywords will be our measurement of the level of success we have.

Currently, we’re ranked pretty high for each venue and the phrase “wedding flowers”. Here is a link to the current report. http://www.waltonwebdesigner.com/flowerart/060909/