Most florist websites are a catalog that a wire service built, with the shop's name at the top and the wire service's photos underneath. They look like every other florist site in the country, because they are. They do not rank, because Google has nothing to rank that it has not seen a thousand times. And when they do get an order, the wire service keeps a cut.
You do not need a hundred product pages. You need seven kinds of pages, built with your own work on them.
1. Homepage: who you are, where you are, what you make
Your shop name, the neighborhood, your hours and phone number, one sentence about the people behind the counter, and photos of arrangements you made this week. Buttons to the pages below. A few reviews. That is it. The homepage is a front door, not a catalog.
2. Same-day flower delivery
For the buyer who is not coming in. Cutoff time, delivery area by town and zip, fee, a dozen arrangements with real photos and real prices, and an order button that goes to your own ordering, not a wire service. The two searches guide explains why this page cannot be the homepage.
3. Sympathy and funeral flowers
The search almost nobody writes a real page for. Standing sprays, casket pieces, arrangements for the home, and the funeral homes you deliver to by name. The sympathy guide is all about it.
4. Weddings and events
A separate world with a separate buyer, a separate price and a separate search. Real weddings you did, with the venue named, and how your process works. The wedding florist guide covers it.
5. One page per big holiday
Valentine's Day. Mother's Day. The ones that matter in your town. Each gets a page that lives all year and gets updated each season, so it has time to rank before the surge. The holiday guide has the timeline.
6. Occasion pages
Birthday. Get well. New baby. Anniversary. Thank you. Each is a search of its own, and each needs a short page: a few arrangements you would suggest, a price range, and a line about delivery. These are short pages, and they can be built one a week.
7. Delivery area pages
If you deliver to six towns, each one can be a page: the hospitals, funeral homes, schools and office parks you deliver to there, and a review from someone there. Not a list on the contact page; a real page each. Build the ones where you deliver most first.
What to leave off
- The wire service's catalog photos. Every florist in America has the same ones, and Google knows it. Your own photos, even on a phone, beat them.
- Two hundred product pages with one sentence each. Twenty arrangements with real photos and a paragraph beat them.
- An order button that goes to a wire service. You just paid a cut on a buyer your own site found.
- A blog you will not keep up. One good sympathy page beats ten thin posts about the meaning of roses.
How the seven link together
Every page links to two others, in the text. The delivery page links to the occasion pages. The sympathy page links to the delivery area pages for the towns with funeral homes. The holiday pages link to the delivery page. Google follows those links to understand how the site fits together, and a buyer follows them from “can you deliver today” to “here is the one I want.”
The one rule for all seven
Every page loads fast on a phone and has an order button and a tap-to-call button on the first screen. Flower buyers are on a phone, in a hurry, often upset or in a rush before a party. If they have to pinch and zoom to find the cutoff time, they order from the wire service, and you fill it for less.
Where to start
If you have none of these, build the delivery page first, with your own photos. Then the sympathy page, because it is the one nobody else has. Then one holiday page, well before the holiday. The occasion and area pages can come one a week after that.
Want this done for you?
These seven pages are the skeleton of my own floral site in Tampa Bay and of every florist I work with. If you want to know which ones you are missing, the audit is free.