How to boost your garden design website SEO for RHS Chelsea
All images on this page courtesy of the talented Annie Spratt on Unsplash
We know Spring is peak season if you’re a business in the horticultural world like a garden designer - in and around the The RHS Chelsea Flower Show, demand for garden services and products and website traffic spikes.
In this series - leading into Spring and the RHS show season, starting with Chelsea - we want to help you get ready for the gardening season with your business website. Even if you’re not in the garden industry, the following posts are a great template for how to prepare your website for a surge of interest around a campaign or prominent event.
This time we have a super short guide for you on maximising the blog on your website. In short, this is a great way to jumpstart your SEO and content marketing. Not only will content on your blog help you show your expertise to your audience; it will also help your website become more visible on Google (through better SEO).
In short, if you want to get found organically (i.e., without paying for adverts) by your ideal clients, you need to be pushing fresh content through your site on a minimum monthly basis, or at very least, refreshing existing content to improve or develop it. If you’ve launched your website and think that the enquiries will pour in, that’s just not going to be the case.
The hard work starts now, but it’s relatively straight forward: you need to know who your audience is; the questions they are asking or their needs; and then develop content on your blog that addresses those points. Read on below as we break this down into bitesize chunks.
Wildings is a website design agency in Devon. Based in Torquay in South Devon we design standout websites for small businesses like garden designers, interior designers, florists and architects (garden, interiors and lifestyle brands). In this series, we’re looking at how to market your small garden business or brand off the back of the RHS Chelsea Flower Show or the Spring rush: catch up on the previous article, ‘Maximising garden design website visitors from RHS Chelsea’ or explore the rest of our series on how to market your garden brand at the Chelsea Garden Show →
Why is blogging important for garden designers?
Before we get into things, we want to talk about the importance of great content on your website and why you should engage with your blog as a garden designer if you want to make the most of the attention around RHS Chelsea and other garden shows.
Firstly, by publishing quality content that reinforces what you offer on your service pages, you demonstrate expertise and authority to your website visitors. They are able to take you at more than just your word; you have something meaningful to backup the claims you make about your garden design work.
When you give away something helpful for free (note, we’re not talking about everything), people see the value in that and by extension attribute more value to your brand.
Secondly, Google values websites that are regularly updated with quality content. It wants to help people answer their questions by connecting them with websites that provide those answers. Publishing content via your garden design blog is an excellent way to keep your website fresh and relevant in Google’s eyes.
As you can see, both points above work together. Great content satisfies your audience as well as Google in a virtuous circle. The more you do it, the more it drives the cycle.
Here’s what we’ll cover in using your blog to generate great content that resonates with your audience as well as Google:
Write blogs with your audience in mind
Use your blog to answer the questions people are Googling
Your blog should include good images (which are optimised
Wrap up your blog with a Call To Action
Repurpose blog content for marketing elsewhere
1. Write blogs with your garden design audience in mind
It may sound obvious to focus on your audience - surely everyone is doing that! - but it’s actually much easier to focus on yourself. Whether we like it or not, it’s hard to put others first and be objective, but this is the key to good blogging. To generate any kind of success through content marketing, you need to write with the needs and questions of your audience in mind.
If you’re a garden designer or a garden brand, that’s going to be geared around how to make the most of a garden and how it interacts with the home or someone’s lifestyle (space, layout, functionality, maintenance). See below for more garden design-related content ideas.
Thankfully, once you get in the mindset, it’s actually very easy to produce content that appeals to your ideal clients and writing comes easily, as it draws on things close to your heart and expertise. In fact, there’s a helpful rule of thumb that we use to that end.
Good content that engages your audience should do one of the following:
Educate
Inspire
Entertain
Engage
Content that educates is always a solid foundation on which to start. People carry around with them questions and problems that relate to their homes or gardens. Answering those in a a small way is a great way to draw people in and show your skills, as well as build trust.
If you can inspire your audience through your content, this is another great way to publicise your business. People often look to the experts for ideas and alternative ways of doing things. If you can show your audience what’s possible, some may have a go, but others may realise that their time and money is best spent on getting you to help.
Not all content necessarily needs to be serious. Quality content on your website that entertains is another excellent way to build rapport with your audience and build an engaged following. Some times people simply want a laugh or to pass the time. A bit of humour and lighthearted content when well deployed strikes a chord with people, as they may feel the same way as you.
Lastly, content that engages your audience is always a good benchmark. If you can give your audience a compelling reason to keep reading and not move on, you improve your chances of engaging them with the other things you offer. Engagement can be as simple as leaving a comment, signing up to a newsletter or downloading a free resource.
As you can see, each of these types of content focusses on delivering something valuable to you audience - even entertainment, which we all need! The more you produce content with your audience’s needs in mind, the more likely it is to engage you for one of your services.
2. Use your blog to answer garden design questions people Google
One of the helpful by-products of quality content is that Google favours it. You will start to notice your website becoming more prominent to lookalike visitors asking similar questions and consuming the kind of content you are publishing. As above, the key to improving your visibility on Google is to keep your audience at the centre.
In technical terms this is known as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), which is the dual practice of (a) tweaking your webpages and (b) producing content, both with the aim of appearing higher in search rankings for particular search terms. These terms are often known as keywords, which are tend to be short meaningful phrases, such as ‘best garden designer in London’.
Once you have worked out what your ideal clients are searching for on Google, you can create content based on those questions and needs. Again, the critical element here is understanding your audience so that you give your content the best chances of resonating with the type of person you would ideally like to work with.
Given that big industry event or shows like RHS Chelsea create such a huge amount of interest in gardens, designers and the horticultural industry, we’ve put some suggestions together for blog titles to give you an idea of what can work. The key principle here is to use your event as a springboard or to establish common ground with visitors who might also consider your products or services.
1. Top five garden designers
This a tried and tested technique to capitalise on people actively looking to sift and choose a garden designer. By offering a helpful curated list you do a lot of heavy lifting for people, meaning they can rely on an expert’s analysis and selected highlights. Don’t forget to pop your own business in the list (naturally!), giving your take on how you are different and a worthy choice.
2. How can I get the Chelsea Flower Show look?
Many people will be inspired and caught up with the magic of the Chelsea Flower Show, but lack the ability to implement it at home. This is where you come in. This kind of post is a great way to make garden design accessible and show your expertise. People love educational content like this that is achievable. There will always be a percentage that decide to get you to do it for them as well.
3. Top 10 Chelsea Flower Show plants
As above, this type of blog title takes advantage of the surge in interest that the Show generates. You can position yourself as a trusted authority using this type of content, providing a curated list that takes the hassle and thinking away from your audience.
4. Chelsea Flower Show trends & top ten looks
People do love the last trends and designs even in their garden - shop the look, anyone? We love to emulate those who are so good at creating amazing gardens. There’s an element of envy here and this type of blog uses that desire to get people engaged.
5. 5 steps to recreate a Chelsea garden at home
A blog title with ‘5 steps’ or similar is known as a listicle (think ‘list’ combined with ‘article’). It’s a very helpful, but condensed, way of providing practical advice. Not everyone wants to wade through a long article, so top tips and steps with bitesized advice are very popular with visitors. Helping people in small ways through your content is a surefire way to generate business enquiries.
3. Include good garden-related images (which are optimised!)
Website content on your blog is not just about the words; great images will make your content perform even better. Well chosen images do a few important tasks such as illustrating the points that you make, as well as stoking desire in your readers to ‘get the look’ that you show off. You may have noticed that rather than including website or branding images, we’ve chosen beautiful garden photos for this blog - specifically to resonate with people who love gardens like we do.
Professional brand photography is one of the three pillars of exquisite website design, which we wrote about in a recent blog. If you don’t have access to professional brand photography, don’t fret. You can still get a really stylish, consistent look if you’re not ready or able to commission a professional photographer.
Read more on our blog: 5 powerful visual elements for amazing website design (& what to avoid)
In short, by using free sites such as Unsplash or Pexels, you can pull together an attractive set of images, plus use them for other purposes in the future to maintain consistency with your branding.
In addition, don’t forget two other important steps once you’ve chosen your imagery:
Reduce the file size
Give the image a filename that makes sense
Add a tailored alt tag or alt text
If you upload large images sizes directly from Unsplash, for example, which can be several megabytes (MBs) in size, you run the risk of slowing down your website. This makes for an inferior experience for visitors, which Google will eventually penalise in your search rankings. Good, relevant alt tags also feed into your SEO.
In terms of optimising the file sizes of your images, we suggest using Squoosh.app, a free online tool from Google. As a rule of thumb resize images to a maximum width of 2500 pixels and around 300 to 400 kilobytes (KBs) file size.
When it comes to images alt tags or alt text, these are helpful for those who use a screen reader, so it is a case of accessibility. Google also takes them into account for SEO purposes, although they are a minor factor. In short, alt tags should be no longer than 125 characters in length (we check ours using LetterCount.com) and essentially describe the image or give it context.
Read more: Image Alt Text: What It Is, How to Write It, and Why It Matters to SEO by HubSpot
4. Wrap up your blog with a Call To Action
Once you’ve done all the hard work of getting people on your garden design website and engaged with your content, don’t let them disappear never to return. This is where a Call to Action (CTA) comes in handy. A CTA is a directive or reminder to your website visitors to undertake a key action before leaving.
In simple terms, highly desirable CTAs for you are likely to be to get in touch with an enquiry or subscribe to your maillist to stay informed.
A CTA allows you to build a group of people who are ‘warm’ to you and your business. In other words, they are more likely to engage with your or purchase from you in future. If you are able to build up a list of warm contacts, you don’t need to do as much hard graft generating leads from cold - i.e., those who have never come across you before.
It’s much easier to market your business to those who know about you than those who are completely ignorant to your existence!
Here are a few ideas of CTAs that we deploy across our site (note, they are not all the same, and are tailored to each location or our objectives):
Home page: a selection for different sections, such as contact us, find out more about us or explore our portfolio.
Portfolio items: get in touch with us for those who are keen to work with us off the back of our previous work
Service page: book a discovery call for those who want to explore a potential project further
Blog article: subscribe to the maillist for those who are still exploring options and educating themselves before taking next steps
5. Repurpose content for marketing your garden design
Once you’ve written and published your content via your blog on your garden design website, that’s not the end of the process. Blog content is incredibly rich material which you can use for a variety of other purposes.
The principle behind repurposing your blog content is that you don’t need to write new material from scratch, and so save yourself time and effort in your marketing. It also gives you lots of reference material so that you can point people to it to illustrate thoughts, ideas and points in other content.
At the end of the day, we are all busy people who tend to be time poor, but still need to engage with marketing in order to move our businesses forwards. Repurposing your content allows you to do your marketing but also leaves you more time and focus to do the other important things, which you probably enjoy more too!
How to repurpose your blog content (and save time!)
Create social media posts that (very) briefly summarise the key points of your blog and remind people to visit your website to read it in full
Create a free, downloadable checklist based on the points in your blog for people to tick off in their own time. You can use this as an incentive for others to sign up to your maillist
Create an implementation plan from the blog, which takes the checklist above one step further. Visitors may agree with all the points you make, but by helping them put them into practice, you provide even more value. Don’t forget to use this as a sign-up incentive too (AKA a lead magnet)
Upload key visuals from the post on Pinterest which can generate further traffic to your website and tends to have long lasting reach than social media posts
Update past blogs with new internal links to your fresh material where relevant to keep your content evergreen, which will help keep traffic coming to your website
