How important is it to have your web site listed high in the search engine rankings? For service orientated businesses it can make the difference beween success and failure.
I received a call from a proud owner of a flower and gift shop in a large city suburb. She had a great location, her staff created beautiful arrangements and her prices are extremely competitive. Her existing customer base seems to be very loyal but she wasn’t experiencing the growth she had expected.
In the floral business 50% to 70% of the orders received are not placed by local citizens but by wire services and people from other areas or out of state customers who call to have flowers delivered to their loved ones. This owner had her business phone number listed in all the phone books and she had a beautiful web site but she still constantly heard people say “I didn’t know you were here”. Her success in this industry strongly depends on volume and people knowing who she was, what she sold and how to get in touch with her. This was especially important for funeral and wedding flowers where the orders tend to be larger.
In today’s electronic world, your web site is the difference between success and growth or stagnation and failure. Fewer and fewer customers are looking in the phone books to find a business. They go on-line, enter their search criteria and locate a company that will get their business. Unfortunately, most people will choose a business listed on the first page of their search results. A few will also try page 2 of the search results but very few if any will go beyond that.
Back to the flower shop owner: The reason she called me was that she realized that when potential customers searched for a flower shop in her area on the internet, her business was not close to showing up on the first page. I checked for myself and sure enough if you entered the search terms “flowers” “Aurora” & “Colorado” her business was listed on the 4th page of the Google search. Yahoo & Bing were even further down. I did a source view on the home page of her web site and quickly determined why she wasn’t getting the search engine rankings she desperately needed.
Below is what I did to help this customer increase her ranking and even though this article specifically discusses a floral business, these same principles work for every type of service/retail business.
When I am helping customers increase the search engine rankings of their web site the first thing I do is perform a search using the most common terms that a customer would use to find the customer’s business. In this case the key words are “Flowers, Wedding Flowers, Funeral flowers, Aurora, Colorado, floral delivery, florist, and the business name. For demonstration purposes I am going to use XYZ Florist as the business name. None of these search terms brought up XYZ Florist on the first page. (Or even the 2nd page for that matter).
I then did a source view on the home page of the XYZ Florist web site and quickly realized that the biggest issue was with the meta tags in the heading section of her home page. This is the area that is invisible to the viewers of the web site but is commonly used by the major search engines to assist in locating and ranking the web site.
Picture 1 shows how the meta tags looked before any changes were made.
Remember the search terms I used were “flowers”, “Aurora” and “Colorado”. The only time flowers appear on her web site is one time in the keywords section and Aurora and Colorado are never mentioned. I am pretty confident in saying that every flower shop in Aurora who has a web site has the word flower in their description. I was actually surprised that this web site even showed up at all on any search engine.
The first thing I changed was the title. Having “XYZ Florist” was fine but only if someone is searching for the named “XYZ Florist”. I change this to “XYZ Florist in Aurora Colorado”. This added “Aurora” and “Colorado” for the search engines to find.
The second change I made was to the description content. This was virtually useless. I changed this to “XYZ Florist is Aurora Colorado’s premiere, locally owned Flower Shop. We specialize in creating beautiful wedding, funeral and everyday floral arrangements”. This again added Aurora, Colorado for the search engine spiders to find as well as wedding, funeral flowers and floral arrangements.
The third change was to the keywords. I try to limit my keywords to 15 and make sure they pertain to the content of the web site. My key words were; Aurora, Colorado, flowers, floral, floral arrangements, weddings, funerals, local delivery, flower shop, floral shop, CO, arrangements, & bouquets. This pretty much covered all the search terms that a person would use to find a flower shop in Aurora Colorado.
Picture 2 shows how the heading meta tag information looked after I was finished making the changes.
As you can see in picture 2 there were a few more things I added but the three most important changes made were to the title, description and keywords. It took about a month but the floral web site mentioned in this article now rates not only on the first page but in a lot of searches it is listed on the top of the first page.
By following these 3 basic steps you can easily increase your web site search engine ranking. Just remember that you need to make sure you have all the words listed that a common person would use to search for your business or web site. Always make sure that you submit your web site to all the major search engines regularly. It takes time for your site to move up in rankings so be patient.
If you have any questions please feel free to email me at dewey@deweysblog.com.
By following these 3 basic guidelines in the heading area of your index page, you can dramatically increase your web site’s search engine rankings.
