As Americans get ready to spend $2.1 billion on flowers on Valentine’s day this year, ftd.com is ranked the most visible of ten top US online flower delivery companies both in organic searches on Google.com and in Google’s paid search listings.
While content from proflowers.com is the most visible on social networks, taking account of people’s social media activity on Facebook, Google+, Twitter, Pinterest and LinkedIn.
The findings come from an analysis of the search and social media performance of leading US flower delivery companies by Searchmetrics, the leader in search and content optimization.
“37.8 percent of Americans will buy flowers for Valentine’s Day this year ‒ it’s a huge opportunity for online flower businesses,” said Marcus Tober, CTO and Founder of Searchmetrics. “Researching information on search engines or seeing products and services mentioned on social media are often the starting point for online purchase decisions, so companies that are highly visible in these channels can potentially boost online traffic and sales. Our study highlights how the leading providers in online flower delivery are performing in these areas.”
The Searchmetrics study analyzed how the ten online flower delivery company websites rank in Google’s organic and paid search results against a database of millions of search terms.
This analysis was used to calculate the SEO Visibility and Paid Visibility scores¹ (index scores developed by Searchmetrics to measure how visible and prominent websites are within Google’s organic and paid search results) for each site.
As the table underneath shows, in organic searches, ftd.com is the clear leader with an SEO Visibility score of 50,831 points, with 1800flowers.com (41,022) coming in second. Teleflora.com and proflowers.com are placed very close together in third and fourth place with scores of 29,383 and 29,271 respectively.
In paid search the best performing site is also ftd.com, with a Paid Visibility score of 7,949 points, closely followed by 1800flowers.com (7,628) and proflowers.com (7,473). However, some of the sites in the analysis do not appear to be spending on paid search advertising
To measure visibility on social networks (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest) Searchmetrics uses a Social Visibility score² based on how often content from a website is shared, liked, pinned, tweeted etc. on the social sites. The analysis indicates that in social media, proflowers.com is very dominant with a Social Visibility score of 56,240741 – way ahead of second-placed 1800flowers.com, which has a score of 8,363977.
“While paid search visibility is based on buying ads on keywords, one of the keys to achieving high visibility in organic searches and in social media is creating an ongoing stream of valuable web content that your target audiences want to consume and potentially comment on and share with others,” explained Tober. “Companies that regularly churn out interesting content on their websites and blogs have an advantage.”
Many of the flower delivery companies are generating a wide range of content across their websites, blogs and social media to capitalize on Valentine’s Day. This includes offering discounts, posting ‘date night’ ideas, promoting eco-friendly gifts, running competitions and publishing tutorials about how to make handmade gifts.
For example, ftd.com recently posted an article on its blog and Facebook page with ideas on how to run a Valentine’s date night for the whole family. While proflower.com has created an online love poetry generator that it is promoting on its blog and on social media.
1800flowersnow.com’s ‘WowHer’ campaign gives customers the opportunity to win a Caribbean cruise by entering a ‘WOW Me NOW Sweepstakes’ on its Facebook page.