If you’re like most florists, website revenue represents 30 to 40 percent of business. Many of these purchases are from local customers already familiar with your brand, people who visited your site directly or used your name in a search. (You can confirm that fact with a quick review of your web analytics.) The rest stem from people finding you through geographic searches or arriving from social media, directories and website references.
How do you convince those customers — who don’t know you or your shop — to stay on your site and make a purchase? That’s the big question.
The purpose of search engine optimization (SEO) is to drive traffic to your website, but that goal is only half the e-commerce picture. Think of SEO as the strategy that opens the water spigot; your website is the bucket. Great SEO will fill the bucket fast but if it’s riddled with holes, the water just escapes.
This month in Floral Management, Renato Sogueco, the former CIO of the Society of American Florists, writes candidly about conversion rate optimization (CRO) — what you need to know about it and how you can apply those principles in simple, easy steps.
