How do you rank higher in Google?
This is Part One of a series on this subject. Over the years this has become more and more important for cut flower businesses and something that a lot of people do not understand.
Roz Chandler, an expert digital marketeer and flower farmer gives her advice on the foundations of SEO for your cut flower business. She endeavours to talk plainly and clearly about this technical topic. Join her on your journey of how to make your flower farm more visible.
You will learn:
Resources mentioned in the show:
Connect with Roz Chandler:
Thank you for listening. I’d love it if you subscribed to the podcast and left a review or rating.
How do you rank higher in Google?
This is Part One of a series on this subject. Over the years this has become more and more important for cut flower businesses and something that a lot of people do not understand.
Roz Chandler, an expert digital marketeer and flower farmer gives her advice on the foundations of SEO for your cut flower business. She endeavours to talk plainly and clearly about this technical topic. Join her on your journey of how to make your flower farm more visible.
You will learn:
Resources mentioned in the show:
Connect with Roz Chandler:
Thank you for listening. I’d love it if you subscribed to the podcast and left a review or rating.
Welcome to the Cut Flower Farming Growth and Profit In Your Business podcast. I'm your host, Roz Chandler, a flower farmer for over ten years and thirty years as a business owner and Marketing Director. This podcast is for you if you're an ambitious flower farmer, and looking for hints and tips to grow your business, we'll be covering strategy, marketing tactics, pricing, social media, and upscaling your flower farm. So much more. I'm so excited to introduce you to my amazing guest speakers along the way. All of you will be at different points in your business. Our podcasts will take this into account. We look forward to joining you on your journey.
So today, I want to talk about the foundations of search engine optimization, or SEO, as it's called. Now, I started my first digital agency in 2000. And I have to say that SEO’s come a long way since then, and it changes all the time. I’ve just got one piece of advice. Your website is a living, breathing animal. You cannot build it, put all the metatags in place, and feel that the job's done. You go job done now. Unfortunately not. So let me talk through some of the mistakes in the foundations of SEO. And then in another edition of the podcast, we'll talk about technical.
But SEO is a very complicated subject. And you can find millions of books on Amazon on SEO. But I thought let's go through some of the mistakes, common mistakes that people make when they're setting up their website or believing that their SEO is done. So mistake number one is not understanding or writing down or knowing your audience. So one of the most important things you can do is understand who you're targeting. Now that might sound really obvious. But you need to know your audience at the most minute and granular level. You need to know how they talk, where they go. You need to know their sort of search behaviour. At the same time, consumers expect instant responses today and results to their queries. They want this in real-time. They want to go on Google, they want to put that what they're searching for, and they want a good result. So one of the most common mistakes in selecting keywords is neglecting the preference of search engines and use this for longtail keywords. Gone are the days where people will put in a few words because they'll get millions in their results that are fed back to them by Google. It's just too much. So the longtail keywords are really important.
So here at Field Gate Flowers, you know, we're a wedding flower business, but we're also a local regional business. So we need to be very careful about our longtail keywords. We wouldn't say we did wedding flowers. Of course, we do. But we would say we did wedding flowers in Northhamptonshire. And if we're going one step further, we will put wedding flowers in marquees, Northamptonshire. So you must define your products and services in the same way. So some hints and tips. Look to understand the markets in which your consumers buy, look to see what they're actually buying. Get a group of friends together and brainstorm. Get a big flip chart and what would they search for services like yours? So let's say I had a group of friends and I began, okay, you've got your wedding in 2022. And you're going on Google, what would you search for? And I think you'd be a little bit surprised by some of the results. It's not always what you think people search for. I'd start to look at historic data and real-time data and use some tools and understand how behaviour is changing, and what people are actually looking for. I'd map out my keyword selections. And I'd use all the Google planning tools, the keyword planning tools to understand the keywords that I want to drive my customers to my website. So if you don't sell cheap flowers, then don't use the words. You have to be really careful about who your customers are. You might sell to a budget bride, in which case you'd budget wedding flowers. And also if you're local, you might put a location. So yeah, get a group of friends together and give it a good go.
Mistake number two is not having an SEO plan and a roadmap. There's no point in knowing everything about your audience. They're not taking any action to be against your audience. Last year, only 36% of small businesses had an SEO strategy. And honestly, it's really critical for your success. And it also changes because Google will change its algorithms quite regularly. And they tend to call them animals like pandas, and so on. And that will affect the ranking of your website. So as part of your plan, evaluate and understand your competition. How do they rank? what keywords are they using? What's their content on their website? And what do you think about their performances and break down your tasks into different goals that you want to achieve?
Mistake number three is creating the wrong type of content. It really is a common pitfall in search engine optimization is to produce content that is not relevant to your audience. That might sound a little bit mad. The problem is that you want to rank for a particular keyword, but that you fail to focus the text on your target topic. So at Field Gate Flowers, our target is marquee weddings. So our content is built around marquee weddings, search engines, like Google, want to serve their users with the most relevant content for their search terms. Thus, if your content does not answer the user, what it's looking for, you won't rank well. So the mistake is often the result of trying to fit a few different topics within a single piece of content. So you're doing a blog and you're trying to get all your keywords in there, and you're trying to talk too much about lots of different things. That way, you spread your keywords out too thinly, you're creating low-quality content, just for the sake of including lots of keywords, and that doesn't work. So you need to optimise the keywords in one article. So we would optimise for instance, marquee wedding flowers, we would do marquee wedding flowers, marquees hoops for marquees, brides who are having marquee weddings, marquee wedding venues, and so on. Your primary goal should be to produce content that generally genuinely corresponds to the questions while your target audience looking for and use the right search terms. You know, the market is and I've been one of these that make the two biggest mistakes with content. They're not focusing the content on the right audience. And they're not producing content that's based on, you know, trust and authority and expertise. They're really the most important two things you can do. It's important to give Google what it wants. Okay, that's the most important thing.
Mistake number four is not publishing original content, and plagiarising someone else's content. The problem with that is that not only is it not great to plagiarise somebody else's content, it's a spammy practice. And it's really highly discouraged. But if you do that, content can be duplicated. And any duplicate content is a no-no for Google. And I'll talk about that more on a technical SEO. But you do not want to produce duplicate content across the web. So don't do it. All right. It's one thing you shouldn't do.
Mistake number five is not looking at your title tags and meta descriptions properly. What tends to happen is a website developer will develop a website, he'll put in his title tags and meta descriptions, and they’re not necessarily, they might be, they might not be the right ones for you. Honestly, it's so important to get this right. And one of the little hints and tips somebody always said to me, is, you know, obviously each page has got to be different because you've got different content on each page, but secondly, when you put the word Field Gate Flowers. I might put on my wedding page Field Gate Flowers, a wedding florist in Northamptonshire, Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire, for instance. Actually, it's better for me to put wedding florist in Northampton, Buckinghamshire and Bedfordshire Field Gate Flowers, because although I am Field Gate Flowers and I will be highly ranked for my brand's name, what people are actually searching for is a wedding florist. Okay, so that needs to come first in your tags, not your brand name, unless, of course, you're Coca-Cola. So that's really quite important. And we'll be talking a lot more about title tags and meta descriptions. But the sort of tip I would say is, you know, write uniquely for every page, that's really important. Ensure your content on the page is relevant to your meta tags. So if you've got a page about marquee wedding flowers, then your tags should be about marquee wedding flowers, don't make them too long. And follow Google's best practices. You can find them online, they're easy to find. Just do that.
Mistake number six is missing quality links. So you've got to understand that external links and the quality of external links into your website are really important. It's like somebody voting. It's like somebody putting their hand up and saying I vote for this business, and therefore, I'm going to link to it from my website. So it's really important that when you have links coming into your website, it can be photographers, in our case. It can be venues. It can be directories like Hitched or wedding directories. It can be some PR that you featured in that has a link to your website.
All of these are an ideal opportunity to increase your search engine optimization. But the link has to be right. And we can talk about that later. But the link in terms of what you write is really important. So our tip on this is to build a link-building programme. Based on quality, don't buy links, honestly, monitor and always check it and see if the links are broken, because that's not great for your SEO. And there are tools to do that.
Mistake number seven is not looking at your internal links. And you might think internal links, why do I need internal links on my own website. It’s how your pages link to each other. And that's really important. So make sure you don't include internal links just for the sake of having them in an article. But they actually match the topic and focus on a piece. So if you're talking in a blog about, we’ll go back to marquee wedding flowers. I’m a bit obsessed with this but whatever I'm talking about, a blog about marquee wedding flowers, I’ll have an internal link that would go to show you my gallery on marquee wedding flowers and that's an internal link within a website. So you need to a tip would be to group together topically related web pages with internal links, audit them. You know, broken links or they're slow pages, balance the number of internal links you use, and avoid in any linking from irrelevant pages.
Mistake Number eight is not investing. This is really high up on the list. Not investing in a fast and mobile-friendly experience. Now it's so important if you look at the analytics of your website, you'd be amazed at the amount of people who are now looking you up on a mobile is increasing day on day on day. And actually, you know, a few years ago, we were talking about responsive websites and we build a website that's responsive for mobile. Now actually, we've moved much more into actually mobile to be the number one device that people are using is mobile. So really bear this in mind. Think about load speed. So if you've got a lot of video on your website, and the load speed is quite long, you might want to consider putting a video somewhere else like Vimeo or YouTube, and then loading it because the loading is really important. So think about the SEO mistakes that fall around mobile, that's a slow site speed. The images and videos are really slow. It's got poor local information because on a mobile unit can be served local websites. And it's non-responsive, the website is non-responsive to a mobile. So the most important thing is to improve your site's loading time. Absolutely 100%, you've got a responsive design. And I wouldn't believe there's a web designer who wouldn't have a responsive design. Now, I've seen better ones. And I've seen worse ones. But most are optimised for mobile. And just make sure the mobile experience is better.
Mistake number nine is not understanding that your SEO works across lots of other digital channels. So it's just part of your digital mix. Think about your other digital channels, your social, your email, your page. Your PR is all part of your SEO, whatever links you're putting out in your social will be formed part of your social form part of your SEO strategy. So keep researching it. And just make sure it takes into account all of your channels.
Mistake number 10 is not utilising the analytics. So what tends to happen with a website is we put on Google Analytics or Webmaster Tools and so on and we never really look at them, which is a really fundamental mistake. And I would suggest that you put in your diary once a month that you're going to look at those analytics. And it's the only way you're going to know if your search engine optimisation and the content that you're putting on your website, is doing its job. Regularly look at it. Look at your Google Analytics, look at your Google Search Console. You know, look at different ways that you can change things. You know, always go back to looking at your keyword research, looking at your links within your site, internal and external. Always go to look at competitors. You know, there are lots of tools out there and SEO Moz is a good one. I would suggest you look at some. Google has its own tools too. In order to help you and keep on top of your SEO strategy. So that's the mistake. What I want to talk to is also about the technical issues of SEO and I'll cover that in another podcast.
Honestly, I think these days you need a degree in SEO to understand it. When I started out my first digital agency in 2000, it was fairly simplistic. You bought a really nice website with some great content and you did your meta tags and it worked. There was lots of cloaking in those days where people used to put behind website all their keywords and so on. Blackhat I think it used to be called. And things have moved a long way. And Google is a lot cleverer than that. So really, what you need to do is follow the advice of Google to build your site, the way they are suggesting you build your site. Most importantly for me, and probably the number one tip is that it's is a living, breathing thing. You cannot build a website and not keep going back and changing it, relooking at the keywords, looking at your analytics. And yeah, it's my number one tip today. That's what I would do. Thank you very much for listening.
This has been your host, Roz Chandler. If you'd like to know more about growing your cut flower farm, do join our Facebook group. It's called Cut Flower Farming Growth and Profit In Your Business. Many thanks.