As you and your team plan for the fall holidays during the (relative) summer slowdown, you may be brainstorming ways to drive more traffic to your website. Should you hire an outside party to improve your SEO? Stuff more keywords in on your site? Work up a bunch of new blogs?
Tired just thinking about all that you could do, and still confused about what you should do? Don’t be.
In a recent webinar for Society of American Florists members, Eric Wu, head of product and growth at BloomNation, shared how to make some strategic changes to your SEO strategy in advance of the mega holiday — tweaks that will deliver real results. Link to our webinar page
“SEO in most senses is a long-term game,” said Wu, who has 20 years’ experience in the field with companies such as Uber and TripAdvisor, in addition to BloomNation. “But there are things you can do [right away] to really maximize traffic.”
Think About Intent
For the past two decades, when SEO experts talked best practices, they discussed three things: content (keywords); code (crawlability); and credibility (e.g., links). But in the past few years, a new element has been introduced: customer journey.
“It’s basically thinking about how and why people are clicking to your site,” Wu explained.
Ask yourself: Are you solving that customer’s problem or filling their needs? When you do, search engines respond. To illustrate his point, Wu graphed what a search for a birthday gift might look like online. When a customer lands on your site and doesn’t leave — because they’ve found a post, for instance, about “birthday gift ideas for people who have everything” — Google actually takes note that they stayed on your site and didn’t return to their search; this can mean your business appears higher in search results.
“If you solve the customer’s intent, you can leapfrog over the competition,” Wu said.
Embrace the Google Search Console
If you aren’t already using the Google Search Console to discover the keywords and phrases people are searching for when they land on your site, the time to start is now.
“This is a great way of measuring where you are and what kind of things people are coming to you for,” Wu said, noting that for more in-depth information you can use paid tools such as Keyword Hero (keyword-hero.com) or SEMRush (semrush.com), which will help you map competitors’ keywords.
Read more tips from Wu in the June issue of Floral Management.
Mary Westbrook is the editor in chief of Floral Management magazine.