Why You Need to Secure A Cutting Edge Website

As a business owner, your website is the most important marketing tool you have. Visitors from anywhere in the world can view your site 24 hours a day to learn more about your business and decide whether or not you’ve earned theirs.

That is why simply having a website presence in 2021 is not enough. There is just too much competition out there - you must present the best version of yourself and make your site appealing if you don’t want people to leave.

What do I mean?

Check out Alux.com and you will be surprised to see just how many DIY wedding event coordinators are getting into our market. Sites like this make it so easy that almost anyone can set up a terrific looking site in minutes.

What is their formula? They start with the following:

• Secure a URL

• Build a Blog and the company gets them the hosting in one stop.

• Now they can build an audience

• Expand to social verticals and BAM - there is a new wedding coordinator in town!

Next, they realize they can make floral designs - check out The Yes Girls

Now these DIY coordinators take it one step further, get a Shopify account, and now sell flowers. Out of town requests? They search Google and place the order for their clients.

While the traditional retail florist continues to pay the wire services fees to maintain membership, the millennials are coming and they are using CS, COMMON SENSE.

They are NOT STUCK in 'This is how we always did it". This new blood is saying, "This is how we do it today." Why? Because we have an UNREGULATED industry, which means anyone can be a florist and/or a wedding planner just because they said they can.

Where Does Our Industry Go From Here?

What do we do? SECURE relations and stop treating brides like a regular customer. They are considering choosing YOU to handle the most important event in their life and they deserve a custom website experience from YOUR event division at YOUR business. I can help you set that up.

Change now and use your experience to secure business. OR, continue to not see this train is coming and wake up one day and realize, what happened to our event and wedding business? You see, once the wedding florists earn the trust of the bride, they are becoming their florist as they trust them with everyday work.

This is happening, YOUR future is up to YOU!

Take a look at your wedding website through the eyes of an excited bride to be. Is it something you’re proud of? Does it make the bride-to-be excited to choose you? Is it what you would feel is a “specialist” or does it look like something you do as well?

We need to be specialists because we are special. Each one of us has something to offer that sets us apart from the crowd. It’s up to us to make sure potential customers can find it.

2021 is the start of a brand new year and the perfect time to re-evaluate your marketing efforts beginning with your website. It is also a great time to start planning for more event work which should increase substantially with all the cancellations from 2020 being rescheduled. A new wedding and special event website is the perfect solution to capture those clients! Call me, I can help get you set up with a new site today!

Ring in 2021 with a New Custom Wedding Website from Bloomerang

2020 was a record-setting year for event cancellations and the wedding industry was hit particularly hard. Due to all the postponements, 2021 is shaping up to be a record-setting year for weddings and special events! That means the time is NOW to start promoting your wedding flowers with a new custom wedding website from Bloomerang Solutions.

Weddings are florists really shine, but many shops have sub-par wedding sites (or perhaps just an extra page on their website) that do not showcase all their beautiful work! That's why we created Bloomerang Weddings & Events, a custom interactive website built on a URL that will direct all orders and transactions directly to your site.

Best of all, your new website features your images of your flowers from your weddings!

Your custom wedding website will compliment your current site with reciprocal lining strategies that will increase page ranking and Google placement. It will include modules for vendors, galleries, wedding packages, rentals, and award/badge management, along with the following features:

• Creation of your own wedding website featuring your weddings in your area

• Your wedding site will be a stand alone for SEO and customer images that you own and control

• Receive a unique URL that focuses on attracting wedding requests in your area

• Wedding flower keyword strategy

• Provide images for us to showcase in a gallery with keywords and taglines.

• Draw attention to your products by name, flower type and sentiment

A deluxe custom wedding website is also available. In addition to the features listed above, the deluxe version also includes:

• Content creation for blogs and web pages that reflect your flowers in your local community

• Press release module

• Interactive communications (live chat, file transfer module, etc.)

Let's get started today! We just need an email that reads, YES! You work on your weddings and let us work on your website. Click on the button below to make 2021 the most successful wedding season you've ever had with a new wedding website from Bloomerang Solutions!

Personalize Your Website Template to Reflect Your Personal Brand

Does your industry provide standard website templates for you to use? In many cases, real estate agents, retail florists, and a host of other small business owners rely on pre-built templates for their websites because they’re usually free and typically do not require much maintenance.

Unfortunately, you get what you pay for when dealing with these websites and the more you look, the more you realize that your site probably promotes the company you work for more than it promotes you and your personal brand. What happens if you change jobs to work for a different company? Do you get to keep your site? Where will clients and customers look to try to find you?

Focus on YOUR brand

In the example above, a Sarasota-based real estate agent built a strong base of loyal customers but then found herself with a opportunity to advance her career with a new company. The opportunity was too good to pass up, but the price she had to pay was losing her website - and therefore her entire web presence - when she left her old company because they owned her site and all of her assets.

No matter which industry you work in, you have probably spent countless hours forming relationships and building a valuable base of customers and clients who enjoy working or doing business with you. Some of those customers may be there simply because of the company you work for, but many other may likely be customers you worked hard to earn. Those customers are there for YOUR brand and would likely follow you in any new endeavors you undertake - so long as they can find you.

Instead of relying on her new company’s website template (and risk losing everything again if she takes another job somewhere else), she decided to take control and focus on her own brand. Now when her clients try to find her, they know exactly where to look - no matter who she is working for at the time.

The Importance of Citations

No matter what industry you are in. You want to bring attention to the use of your name/brand as much as possible.In the floral industry, Teleflora turns out beautiful websites for florists, but if the florist doesn't understand the value of citations, the credit goes to Teleflora while the retail florist is selling under their brand. Understanding this the responsibility of the retail florist.

Teleflora is a partner of the retail florist but also a competitor. It's important that retail florists understand how to best handle this. In the example below, you can see that Teleflora’s products all appear with Teleflora in the name - that’s great for Teleflora, but not for the shop trying to promote themselves.

YOU are the shop designing and delivering all those beautiful flowers - make sure everyone knows it!! Something as simple as changing the generic product names to feature the name of you shop will not only go a long way towards helping your SEO, but it will also help you build YOUR BRAND instead of Teleflora.

These are just a few tips to help you grow your business, but it’s not the only advice we have to offer! If you need help with branding, citations, Google My Business, websites, social media, or any other ways to promote your business, give us a call today at (941) 806-1911 or leave us a comment below.

Citations Are Essential on the Road to Better SEO

We typically try to avoid citations when we’re driving in our car, but citations are a good thing when it comes to search engine optimization. So, what are citations - and why are they important for SEO? Simply put, a citation is any mention of your business - anywhere on the web. It can be any combination of your business's name, phone number, address, zip code, and web address (URL). Because citations play such a key role in improving your local search results, it’s important to acquire as many quality citations as you can.

Where do citations come from?

A good quality local citation will include your shop’s name, address, and phone number, which is referred to as your “NAP”. A citation that doesn’t include all three elements of NAP is sometimes referred to as a partial, or incomplete citation.

Are Citations and Links the Same Thing?

No, citations and links are not the same thing, although it is easy to get the two confused. A citation does not necessarily need to be a back link in order to add value to your website. Your value in a citation is merely the mention of your business. At that point, Google takes it from there and they identify that your business was mentioned through the presence of your NAP info, and that is how Google gives you credit for that mention. In turn, the more mentions - or citations - of your business online, the more prominent you appear to Google and that will help you tremendously with your local rank.

Why is NAP Consistency important when it comes to citations?

Google rewards consistency, so the more consistent your listings are, they higher Google will rank you. Once your information is out there, you don’t have a lot of control over where links start appearing, so it’s important to make sure the part you can control is set up properly. Keep in mind that the actual links from a majority of most online business directories are mostly not followed anyway, but that doesn’t mean the links aren’t valuable, because all links have value, and the citations that do include links are almost always better than your citations that do not include links.

Are all citations the same?

No, while all citations are valuable, some provide more value than others depending on their intended use. Citations fall into one of two categories, either structured or unstructured. The difference between the two is that a structured citation is your NAP information on a business listing directory such as Facebook, Yelp, Yellowpages, Superpages, Mapquest, etc., while an unstructured citation refers to your NAP information on any other site that is not specifically a business listing directory and many included mentions in blogs, magazine or newspaper sites, wikis and more.

Because there is such a large variation in the value of different citations, it’s important to remember that a mention of your business’ NAP on a prominent and well-known website is worth far more than a mention of your business on some unrecongizable web directory that was created for no other purpose than low-quality link building.

Why are Citations Important for Local Search Rankings?

Citations are how search engines like Google and Bing are able to verify that your business exists. They do this by using the data from multiple credible sources that all have the same accurate information about your business and that is how they not only know your shop is legitimate, but also that it is still open and operating.

Reaching clients with clear, concise information is key, so the more places your NAP information appears online, the more prominent you appear to Google. This can lead to a higher ranking of your site because search engines run on algorithms and if they determine that your business is mentioned on hundreds of websites while your competition is only listed on a few dozen, it will likely determine that your business is more popular and will give you a higher ranking. There are other factors that go into this equation, but keeping your information current and accurate is always a good starting foundation.

Tips for building citations:

• Make sure your business email is associated with your company domain and is not a generic Gmail or Yahoo address. There are many reasons why this is best practice, but for SEO purposes, listing submissions are typically more trusted and are more likely to go live when you use a domain-based email.

• NAP Consistency is critical! At the bare minimum, your name, address, and phone number (NAP) must be the same on every site!

• Add as much detail as you possibly can! Begin by adding photos of your business as well as a high-definition version of your logo. Be sure to include a full description of what your business does along with your operating hours, links to your social media accounts, etc.

• Claim your listings if you haven’t done so already. Most directory sites require you to verify your listing via email or through phone verification with a pin number to enter to claim your listing. This is extremely important and it is another trust signal because verified listings have more authority.

Having a strong citation profile with NAP consistency is one of the first things you can do to begin optimizing your local SEO. When it comes to local search, citations are one of the foundational basics which is why consistency is so important. Once you have citations set, you can begin building links, creating content and building engagement. As long as your citation profiles are set up properly, you shouldn’t have to worry about them again unless you change your business information with a new address, phone number, or operating hours.

Keep in mind that building citations is a time-consuming process that needs to be set up properly in order to prevent consistency issues down the line. That’s why it’s so it’s important to invest the time into having it properly set up and managed. If you don’t have time to do it right, we’re here to help! Bloomerang Solutions can help with with citations - as well as every other step of the online marketing experience. Give us a call today and let’s make your business bloom!

Jeff Bezos Found Success by Listening to His Customers. Listen to Yours with Surveys from Bloomerang

Did you know that Jeff Bezos expanded Amazon from a small online marketplace for books to what they are today because he would regularly SURVEY his customers on what they would like to see offered?

It's a documented fact - he expanded his product line at Amazon from simply selling books to giving his customers exactly what they wanted! He knew what that was because he took the time to ask. You may not become the next Amazon, but success can come your way this easily if you simply take some time to reach out and learn from your customers. It's easier than you think and well worth your time. Best of all, we're here to help!

What do the following leading companies all have in common with each other?

• Marriott

• The Ritz Carlton

• Hertz/Avis

• 1-800-Flowers

• Amazon

• Beneva Flowers?

THEY ALL OFFER SURVEYS to customers!

Jeff Bezos formed Amazon after surveying his customers and realized today's consumer wanted Amazon to offer more than just book. Yes, true story! I personally would not start the next of my next month if Surveys were not sent out.

Best of all…WE DO IT FOR YOU!

Even better...You will see orders after sending the survey out - start TODAY!

All I ask that you do it, PLEASE take this sample postcard to your local printer and print 5k. It's a THANK YOU card the recipient gets when they receive YOUR flowers (or delivery) When they send the THANK YOU postcard to the sender, the sender gets YOUR NAME! All my shops using the Gravity Free websites are doing this.

Do you take wire in orders? Then here is your way of letting the sender know who the flowers were delivered by!

YES, it beats the gatherer's at their own game!

Are you in? Let's go. It's up to you.

We at Bloomerang will do all the work, you just say GO!

Here is your sample postcard:

Let's get started today!

PLEASE send us your emails from orders placed in October and will begin preparing your survey. Think about your what you would like to know if you were a customer. Here are some examples:

• “Are there any items or services you would like to see in our offering to make your shopping and gift-giving easier?”

• “Is there anything we can do to help your shopping needs during COVID that we may not normally consider?”

• “Holiday shopping is just around the corner, did you know we can send flowers, plants, and gifts OUT OF TOWN?”

This last one is huge - out of town delivery. Why? Because more and more customers are searching for florists out of town instead of using you.

• “Why send your "out of town" requests with us? Because we guarantee your satisfaction 100% There is no question that the shop used in our affiliate network will always be the best the area. We appreciate you trusting us locally, but we will gift you the same guarantee out of town.”

• “Did you send with us in the past? Would you now?”

Click on the image for an example of a Bloomerang Solutions survey

These are just a few examples to keep in mind - and remember - the more you ask, the more you'll learn. NOW is the time to tighten the relationship with your customers. DO NOT let them skimp away while you are busy during the holidays!

Wait until you see these results, you will be glad you did. This is all about you securing customers and your customer satisfaction - both of which are vital in achieving a successful future.

One of the many unfortunate effects of COVID-19 is the reshaping of people's shopping habits. Now, more than ever before, we need to think like Jeff Bezos and listen to what our customers want and find out what we can do to keep them coming back for more. 

Finally, remember to give an offer for completing the survey. You are rewarding your customers for loyalty and it really works! I'm full of ideas if you need to try a different solution. Email us by clicking the button below if you want to start surveys.

Thanks and gave a great week,

-Art (941) 544-5000