SEO your garden centre webshop and grow sales

Edwin Meijer, managing director of Garden Connect, discusses how search engine optimisation can lead to an increase in sales and visitors for garden centres and their webshops.

Retail

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29 August 2019

Over the course of 2018, Garden Connect renewed its search engine optimisation (SEO) services and has now announced its first results: a 130% increase in revenue and a double-digit growth of conversion rates for their customers.

“Our team of six Google-certified marketers has been working on renewing our search engine optimisation services in 2018. The goal: set targets with customers and make sure they are achieved. Stop talking about things people in the garden industry don’t understand like CRO, CTA and CTR. Our customers don’t want to learn abbreviations, they want to see results. So we focused on just that, and it’s an approach that works very well.” said Edwin Meijer, Garden Connect managing director.

Webshops increase revenue

The strategy works well for purely webshop-based customers and for garden centres who are only selling online as a side business: “We noticed one of our customers wasn’t fulfilling his potential at all. We discussed this and set targets: double the revenue and increase the number of visitors by at least 50%. A bold goal, but according to our analysis it had to be doable.”, said Meijer.

Garden Connect started optimising said customer’s website on January 1, 2019. “SEO takes time but we noticed the first progress (sic) in April. In May and June, we reached an increase of revenue with 130% and the number of visitors increased by 61%.”, said Meijer.

More orders from existing customers

Websites that already generate a lot of traffic can optimise their website to get more out of it. Meijer continued: “As part of our renewed services, we’re doing a lot of A/B testing. So for example, we show some prospective online customers a red order-button, and some a blue order-button, to determine which colour button attracts the most orders.”

Putting content aside, webshop speed is important as well. “We’re testing continuously what is working and what isn’t. One of the centres we’re working for already had about 50,000 visitors per month. By improving the website speed and doing A/B testing, the revenue increased by 40% to over £1.3m. And we’ve only just started, so that’s very promising for the future.”, Meijer concluded.

For more information on Garden Connect, see here.

Read More: Garden Centres Garden Connect retail