SEO tips for garden centre websites (RHS Chelsea 2025 guide)
All images on this page courtesy of the talented Annie Spratt on Unsplash
We’re going to focus more specifically on SEO for garden centre websites in this instalment, as Spring is peak season if you’re a business in the horticultural world, including garden designers. In and around The RHS Chelsea Flower Show every May, search traffic and footfall for garden centres and garden designers spikes, which presents a great opportunity.
Leading into Spring and the RHS show season, starting with Chelsea, we want to help you get ready for the gardening season if you’ve got a garden centre website or are a garden designer. Even if you’re not a garden brand, 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 helpful guide on SEO for garden centre websites, in which we focus on maximising your website blog - hopefully it’s not been collecting dust since last Spring or RHS Chelsea! For us, improving your website SEO is all about quality, specific content that answers people’s questions. There is a time and a place for technical SEO, but without great content on your site, you’ll always struggle to get seen in search results and get clickthroughs to your website unless you are prepared to pay for adverts. Even then, if your website content is sub par you’re unlikely to see the results you want.
In short, if you want to get found organically (i.e., without paying for adverts) by your ideal clients on Google or search engines, 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. This content should relate to people’s cares and questions. 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, ‘Tips for a high converting garden design website at 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 centre website SEO?
Before we get into things, we want to talk about the importance of great content on your garden centre website and why you should engage with your blog if you want to make the most of the attention around RHS Chelsea and other garden shows (applies to garden designers and other garden brands).
Firstly, by publishing quality content that reinforces what you offer on your product pages (such as bulbs, seeds, plants or other garden services), 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 the products in your garden centre or work as a garden designer.
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 garden centre 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 the blog on your website is an excellent way to keep your website fresh and relevant in Google’s eyes. You can then link to your relevant collections, products or seasonal offers to take advantage of that search traffic.
As you can see, content and the Google search algorithm work together: great content satisfies your audience, and if it satisfies Google, it’s more likely to increase your search ranking, which creates a nice SEO virtuous circle. The more you create quality blog content, the more it drives the cycle.
Here’s what we’ll cover in using your garden centre 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
Read more about the principles of SEO and how it relates to your website: 10 fundamentals of SEO: our comprehensive list for a tremendous Google-friendly website
1. Write blogs with your garden centre 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 and any sort of SEO traction for your garden centre website. 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 centre (or any garden brand for that matter), it makes sense that a chunk of your website content be geared around Springtime when most people tend to reengage with their gardens. (As a side note, this is why supermarkets and DIY shops like B& Q start rolling out gardening equipment, garden furniture and bulbs in early Spring when gardens rise to the top of people’s consciousness.) A few examples of the the seasonal Spring questions include:
What is the best flower to plant in Spring?
What are the longest lasting Spring flowers?
What is the easiest flower to grow in Spring?
What is the most beautiful flower in Spring?
For garden designers liekly questions are more likely to relate to how their garden interacts with their home or lifestyle (space, layout, functionality, maintenance).
Thankfully, once you get into your audience’s mindset, it’s actually very easy to produce blog 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 gardens. Answering those in a a small way is a great way to draw people in and showcase your garden centre products, 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 garden products or services.
Read more on writing blogs that people like and are good for SEO: How to write brilliant blogs for better website SEO
2. Use your blog to answer garden centre-related questions
One of the helpful by-products of publishing quality content on your garden centre website 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. If you’re not sure how to do this, examine your Google Search Console account, a free free SEO insights tool from Google. As above, the key to improving your visibility on Google is to keep your audience at the centre of your content.
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 for gardens centre websites, garden 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 the event or seasonal interest as a springboard to establish common ground with visitors who might also consider your products, services or pay your centre a visit.
Blog title ideas for garden centre websites
If you want to improve the SEO of your garden centre, the kind of questions to be handling in and around RHS Chelsea will generally be to do with Spring. Ideas include:
What is the best flower for Spring?
What flowers are in the Spring season?
What is the 3:5-8 rule in floristry?
What are the spring flowers in the month of April? [You can alter the month and create a series with this title]
What is the easiest flower to grow in Spring?
What are the classic Spring flowers?
What flowers bloom in April in the UK? [As above, you can modify the month or create a series of monthly posts]
What are the best colour flowers for Spring?
RHS Chelsea related blog ideas for garden designers
Alternatively, if you’re a garden designer with a show garden at the Chelsea Flower Show (or if not, but you still want to get traffic to do with the show) these are some that will help your SEO.
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.
Read more on generating ideas for your blogs via Google Search Console: Google Search Console: use free insights for better SEO
3. Include good garden-related images (which are optimised!)
Images are an important part of SEO for garden centre websites, although the written content on your blog is still the number one priority. Great images will make your content perform even better, particular because gardens and plants are so visual. 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 for this blog, we’ve chosen beautiful garden photos - 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.
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 on our blog: 5 powerful visual elements for amazing website design (& what to avoid)
4. Wrap up your blog with a Call To Action
Once you’ve done all the hard work of getting people on your garden centre website and engaged with your content, don’t let them disappear never to return. If you’re a garden centre, you’re going to want people to visit your location to see your amazing plant selection. If so, they’re more likely to make a purchase! Or you might want to steer people towards a seasonal promotion.
Whatever your desired outcome, 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. It may seem obvious, but having a clear next step helps improve the results on your website.
Other popular CTAs include getting in touch, making an enquiry or subscribe to your maillist to stay informed.
A CTA to your maillist also allows you to build a group of people who are ‘warm’ to you and your garden centre. 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 garden centre business to those who know about you than those who are completely ignorant to your existence!
Call to action ideas for garden centre websites
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):
Get in touch or plan your visit
This is a good one for your home page and main navigation with the key information people need such as opening hours, address or map.
Explore the collection
If you’re a product based business like a garden centre it makes sense to curate your offerings to appeal to people, as people often don’t know where to start or need some inspiration. For garden designers, explore the portfolio items would work so that people can see your design style.
Book a consultation
It might be the case that you offer garden consultation services at your garden centre or have a certain number of slots for a particular offering. In this case, a book a call CTA works for those who want to explore your service more in depth on a one-to-one basis.
Get a discount code
Rather than go down the usual route of asking people to subscribe to your maillist, offer an incentive for people to give you their e-mail address. This will boost the rate at which people join your maillist. It’s also a good way to show your products and value to those who are exploring options and educating themselves before taking next steps
Read more on how to set up your garden centre for success: 5 surefire essentials for an amazing website design (& what not to do)
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
