From the shop floor
Doing your own SEO
The titles, descriptions and alt text people search by, what to write in them, and what Trellis does for you before you touch anything.
Search engine optimization sounds like a job for someone else. For a flower shop it is mostly three small pieces of writing, done once per page and once per photo, and a website that does the rest on its own. This is what the three pieces are, what to put in them, and where they live in Trellis.
What the search engine actually reads
When someone types “sympathy flowers” and the name of your town, the search engine is not reading your whole website. It reads a handful of things per page: the page title, the description under it, the words in your headings and text, and the alt text on your photographs. It also reads a few files most people never see, like the sitemap and the structured data that tells it your opening hours and your prices. Trellis writes those files for you. The title, the description and the alt text are yours.
The page title
The title is the blue line in the results. It should say what the page is and where you are, in that order, in plain words. “Sympathy flowers delivered in Greenville” beats “Sympathy” and it beats “The finest bespoke sympathy florals for every occasion”. Keep it under about sixty characters so it is not cut off. Every page gets its own title; two pages with the same title compete with each other.
If you write nothing, Trellis fills in the page’s name and your shop’s name. That is fine for a page nobody searches for, like your refund policy. It is not fine for the pages that bring people in.
The description
The description is the gray text under the title. It does not move you up the results, but it decides whether the person clicks. Write it as one or two sentences a customer would want to read: what you make, who it is for, when it can arrive. “Hand-tied sympathy arrangements, made the same morning and delivered across Greenville. Order by phone or online.” About a hundred and fifty characters. No list of keywords separated by commas; nobody clicks on those.
Trellis shows a preview of how the title and the description will look in a result while you type, with a character count, so you can see the cut-off before the search engine finds it.
Alt text on every photograph
Alt text is the sentence that describes a photograph to someone who cannot see it, and to the search engine, which cannot see it either. It is easy to skip, and it matters more than most things on the page for a business whose whole website is photographs.
Write what is in the picture, as you would say it on the phone: “White lilies and eucalyptus in a tall glass vase”. Not “flowers”, not “IMG_4471”, and not a list of every occasion the arrangement could suit. One sentence, the flowers first, the container if it matters. Every product photo in Trellis has its own alt text field next to the picture, and you can fill it the moment you upload.
Write for the customer, and the search engine follows.
Headings and words on the page
The heading at the top of a page should match the title, or nearly. The text underneath should say the things a customer actually asks: what is in it, what sizes it comes in, when it can be delivered, whether it can be picked up. Write for the customer and the search engine follows. Do not write for the search engine and hope the customer follows; search engines have learned to tell the difference.
What is yours, and what is done for you
Yours to edit
- Title, description, the social title and picture, and whether a page is shown to search engines, on the SEO screen for each page, with a preview and character counts.
- Alt text on every product photograph, on the product’s own page.
- A list of your pages showing which ones still have work to do.
- A bulk import from an export file, if your old site already holds your titles and descriptions.
Done for you
- Sitemaps, kept current, with your product pictures in them.
- Structured data: your shop’s opening hours, each product with its price and reviews, breadcrumbs, and same-day delivery, in the format search engines read.
- When you rename a product’s web address, the old address forwards to the new one, so the links you already earned keep working.
- After you publish a page or a product, the search engines that accept a nudge get one.
- Pages that should stay out of results, like the cart and checkout, are kept out.
- A product feed for Google Shopping.
Where to start
Start with the pages Google sees first. Open Content, then SEO Meta, and give each of these a clear title and a one-line description: your home page, your shop page, your blog, your reviews page and your subscriptions page. Then move on to your best-selling products and your delivery-area pages. Then work through the photographs of your best sellers and write the alt text, a few each day. After that it is a habit: every new product gets its sentence when the photo goes up.
- Title: what the page is and where you are, under sixty characters, unique per page.
- Description: one or two sentences a customer would want to read, about a hundred and fifty characters.
- Alt text: what is in the photograph, one plain sentence, flowers first.
- Heading: matches the title. Text answers what customers ask.
- Renames: change a product’s web address freely; the old one forwards.
None of this needs a developer, an agency or a plug-in. It needs a florist who knows what is in the vase, and a system that lets them write it down.
See it on the screen
Ask, and we will open the demo shop and show you the SEO screen and a product page.
