Decoding SEO: Expert Insights & Strategies with Ryan Freeman

Episode 255:  Vonda and Lori as they sit down with Ryan Freeman, President of Strider and a seasoned expert in the fields of SEO and online marketing. Ryan sheds light on the overwhelming landscape of SEO, cautioning businesses against making quick decisions and falling for fear-driven sales tactics.

With a focus on the importance of making informed choices, Ryan answers Lori's questions, talks about why SEO that is business specific is important, and encourages everyone to navigate the digital marketing realm with a reputable company without pressure. Furthermore, he provides valuable insights into recent Google changes and offers practical, no-cost strategies to enhance your business's SEO performance.

Tune in to equip yourself with the knowledge and tools needed to optimize your online presence before the holiday season kicks in. Ryan prepared a guide with his top three ways to ramp up offline marketing to help your online presence.
Flourish This Holiday Season: A Retail Florist's Guide

Sponsored by:
Flower Clique
Flower Clique Prep School
Real Life Retail Florist

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

It's very rare that we don't see improvement within the first you know month, month and a half.

SPEAKER_01 0:07

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 0:08

We usually see something happening pretty quickly.

SPEAKER_03 0:13

Welcome to the business and pleasure of flowers. We're your hosts, Vonda LaFever and Lori Wilson.

SPEAKER_04 0:19

And we believe that business and fun are a perfect combination. Kind of like us, Vonda. Good morning, Vonda. I'm excited. We have a guest here, and I'm so glad that he said yes because I feel like I say his name three to four times a week on the telephone. And when you reached out to ask him to join us, I was like, I don't know if he likes us or not, because I'm always sending people to him when I don't know answers.

SPEAKER_03 0:47

So we have with us Ryan Freeman, who's the president of Strider. So welcome, Ryan. We're glad you're here.

SPEAKER_00 0:53

Welcome. I am excited to be back. Thank you so much for asking.

SPEAKER_03 0:56

I know, could you believe it? It'd been like two and a half years we looked up, and it's like, can you has it? It does not seem right.

SPEAKER_00 1:02

But yeah, yeah, it's like, you know, the kids are six inches taller and the beards a little grayer, and here we are.

SPEAKER_04 1:08

I think we had you on, was it during COVID?

SPEAKER_00 1:11

Yeah, I think that was first time.

SPEAKER_04 1:13

Yeah, it was early just trying to figure out COVID stuff and bring in anything we can to talk about what to do, navigate through a great time to launch a business, right?

SPEAKER_00 1:24

Yeah, yeah, great time.

SPEAKER_04 1:26

Yeah, yeah, exactly. So well, we are excited that you are here. And like I just said, we talk about you a lot because we get a lot of florists calling us saying those buzzwords about SEO. And when I receive the call, I'm like, I don't know, call Ryan Freeman, S. Strider. He knows.

SPEAKER_03 1:48

That's right. We say, well, we can do a few things at Flower Click, but what we can't do, you need to talk to Ryan because he can guide you in the right direction. And he's honest, upright, you totally trust him. And if he can't do something for you, he's gonna tell you, and he'll tell you what the scope of his services are. And like I said, that's why we always refer you to Ryan, because we can totally trust what you're gonna help our people do.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

I'm glad this is a podcast because I'm blushing like crazy right now.

SPEAKER_04 2:14

That's all true. And it is the truth, it is the truth because I think what I always say is you know what? We know he has a lot of integrity and we trust him. So you can reach out to him, he'll talk to you and let you know if it's something he can do to help you or not. So uh, but here's the thing, one of the reasons we wanted you on is this whole SEO thing, it's always changing, it seems like. Always, always, always. So just when I feel like I have a slight handle on what I can say to people about the few things we can do to help organically grow your SEO, then I get in a staff meeting and Cammy's like, oh no, no, no, no. And then I'm like, you know what? I give up. I'm gonna retire. I'm done. I'm done.

SPEAKER_03 3:08

So no, you're not gonna retire, Lori. You're gonna retire the SEO conversations. Yes, I'm gonna just keep sending them to Ryan.

SPEAKER_04 3:16

So that's why we wanted to talk to you. Like, what is the deal?

SPEAKER_00 3:22

Well, I I gotta say first, that's one of the things I really appreciate about uh FlowerClick is that synergy, right? Where at you know we have the same conversations on our end where it's like, okay, we can help you with this and this, but you know, if you want to understand why you're not profitable, if you want better pictures for your website, if you want somebody to actually manage what's on your website, that's not us. There are people who are really, really good at that. And here's their info, you need to go talk to them.

SPEAKER_03 3:50

Yeah, stay in our way. Stay in our way. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 3:56

And I think after you know the last several years, especially with COVID, you know, and then the ups and downs of e-commerce, uh, you know, big boom during COVID, and then yeah, fears with the economy, however much that was realized. And there's fear, right? People stop buying luxury goods. So, yeah, the floral market's up and down, and there's a lot of uncertainty. And you know, so often we're getting that. Well, what do I need to do? And how am I doing relative to the industry? Those kinds of questions. And that's where I think you know FlowerFlick's so well positioned to answer that stuff.

SPEAKER_03 4:28

So we can answer a lot, but we can't answer, oh, how can I get more business? Am I doing everything I can to make sure my business is growing and not stagnant? You know, those are the questions we go. Well, we can see this, but somebody can do a deeper dive and really help you and to understand that.

SPEAKER_00 4:46

Yeah.

unknown 4:47

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 4:47

It's why it's good to have you know good people that you trust all around in different areas.

SPEAKER_03 4:52

So yes, we thank you for that too, because we get some people who say, hey, Ryan told us to call you. So that's great. We appreciate it. Two-way. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 5:01

Yeah, better for our clients.

SPEAKER_04 5:03

It is. So I want to start out and ask you a question. And if you can't answer this, Vonda will just edit it out. And that's fine. We'll just pretend it never happened and we'll never talk about it again.

unknown 5:18

Right.

SPEAKER_00 5:18

Podcast integrity.

SPEAKER_04 5:19

Podcast integrity. No, seriously.

SPEAKER_00 5:21

Okay.

SPEAKER_04 5:22

So, truthfully, here is a question I get a lot from even our own members. I just got it recently. I had one of our members who I just love and adore reached out to me, and they had a local person reach out to them. A local, I'm listeners, I'm doing air quotes, which I do every single podcast because I just can't not do them. A local SEO person reached out to them and sent them a document of their website. Okay. I'm not using that language because I don't know.

unknown 5:58

I don't.

SPEAKER_04 5:58

So a proposal is what they have, and here's what, but here's what we can do. Okay. And she said it hilariously to me as it should be like sending me some foreign language and said, Can you interpret this for me? And she's like, shh, and they said they can do this though, but I and it was a significant amount of money also to pay. And I okay, my here's my question. What do these people need to look out for from companies that do this? Because that's scary.

SPEAKER_00 6:35

It is in the industry, it's a very well-known scare tactic intro. It's sales technique as old as sales itself. Right. You you come in, you you set up a fear, you create an alarm, and then you offer the solution. Right. And you know, these are automated reports, they cost pennies to run anything, and they go through and scan your website, your digital footprint for all the known, just kind of a very baseline set of parameters for different things. And we've got tools that do it too. We've got a actually a free tool on our website where you can go do that. The problem is those reports are exactly that. They're just an automated look with no context, no understanding of competition, of industry, of local aspect. You know, if you are in Omaha, it's very different than if you're in Manhattan.

SPEAKER_05 7:27

Oh.

SPEAKER_00 7:27

So what kind of parameters are you looking for? You can't just sit here with any business in any aspect of your business. You can't just sit here and say, well, this is what your numbers should look like.

SPEAKER_04 7:36

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 7:37

Well, you know, maybe in an ideal perfect world where everybody's dealing with exactly the same playing field, maybe. And then again, even then, maybe not, because maybe you're you might be focused in a different niche. An event florist will have different parameters than you know, an everyday delivery florist.

SPEAKER_05 7:56

Sure.

SPEAKER_00 7:57

Right. There's just so much context that's required with those. And if somebody's coming in using an automated report as a scare tactic to feed you a nice high quote, generally run.

SPEAKER_04 8:11

Even if it's local, even when like somebody walked into your shop and said, Hey, I did this for you because I care about your business. Like us.

SPEAKER_00 8:21

Yeah. And you know what? We did I was just remembering uh a couple years ago at the Great Lakes Floral Event Expo, we were handing out reports like that for all the registered attendees, but they were about a half inch thick. Right? There was a lot of info in there. And we were handing that out, and you know they you know that trick where you go around and you gotta get your card stamped.

SPEAKER_05 8:43

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:44

We're like, okay, we'll stamp your card after we've walked you through this because we want to explain it with some context. We're not just sitting and there's no sales pitch. I don't want to just give you this and have you walk away, go, okay, there's a bunch of numbers on here, and like some there's some in red ink and some in green ink, and I'm assuming yeah, one's good, one's bad. But it's okay, let's let's walk through this, get a general understanding. You know, again, provide a little bit of you know context both ways. And then, okay, here we'll stamp your card, and that's the transaction.

SPEAKER_05 9:12

That's genius.

SPEAKER_00 9:13

And then if that's something that you know motivates you to have a conversation, we'll have a conversation later.

SPEAKER_04 9:18

Right.

SPEAKER_05 9:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 9:19

And doing it that way, we probably didn't close as many sales as we could have if we you know slid the okay, here's our 495 offer right beside it. No.

SPEAKER_04 9:28

But you actually gave them helpful information about their business.

SPEAKER_00 9:32

Yeah. If somebody starts coming in and yeah, local local in a lot of ways is good. Local for online marketing can be scary because floral is just so different.

unknown 9:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 9:45

In what ways? So elaborate on that to our listeners, because we have a lot of up-and-coming flower shops that listen to us that are brand new. How are we different?

SPEAKER_00 9:57

Okay, so uh from they're different from an e-commerce perspective and different from a website perspective as well. Because most Florist websites are built on industry-specific platforms. It's a teleflora, it's a Florenext, it's you know, one of these. And you know, the opportunities for optimization within those platforms are to different degrees restricted. Some are extremely restricted, some give you a little bit of room to play around. None as much as I would like. But there's there's definitely a spectrum there.

SPEAKER_05 10:33

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 10:34

But to come in cold and say, okay, I'm this week, I'm gonna walk into the chiropractor, the corner store, and the florist, and I'm gonna give them all these scare reports and say, here's my $2,000 quote to fix your SEO, without having any concept of what you're able to do with their website platform. And say, here's all the work we're gonna do for you. And then you get the check, you get their website, access credentials, you go in there and you find out that you can do none of all this that you just sold because you don't know the industry, you don't know the platform. And now you're sitting here and you're at that point, you've got the $2,000 in your bank account. What are you gonna do? Turn around and give it back. Or are you gonna tell them, well, you know, we're doing stuff. We're doing stuff, keep just hanging there.

SPEAKER_06 11:19

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_03 11:20

And that doesn't surprise me on the back end because often we get like a one-off, we call them one-off shops that have a platform that we've not worked on before. So we have Denise, who's our back-end girl. Denise is just she gets in there and she digs in and she'll like say yay or nay, but it takes all of that before we even say, okay, we'll try it. And so you can't even imagine those people who are local from the way you're describing, and it's like they just like think one size fits all and they can figure it all out. But each one of them is a lot different, right?

SPEAKER_00 11:56

Yeah. And like a little kind of inside industry secret in that too. A lot of these people, you you go back two years, they weren't doing SEO, five years they weren't doing this. Yeah, we saw the same thing in 2008 and then COVID as well. There's this huge spike in online marketing agencies because it's you know, zero barrier to entry. It's in a sense like floristry, where you can get in, there's no licensing requirements, right? You can just get in, call yourself a florist, and then for as long as you got money, you're a florist until you either are successful or you go broke. Right. And it's that's true. Sorry. And then in one sense, it's insulting to the florists who put right take it our professionalism seriously, study design, learn how to run a shop properly.

SPEAKER_04 12:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 12:46

But I mean, the whole florist industry licensing thing is a whole other conversation for a different podcast.

SPEAKER_05 12:51

But right, right.

SPEAKER_00 12:52

Right. That's uh same thing here. So there are goodness, there are so many companies now that just advertise to people saying, hey, we will help you build an agency. You don't have to know anything. We're gonna give you all the tools. We'll give you so basically we're gonna give you white label outsource labor, and we're gonna give you this automated tool that generates scare reports. We're gonna slap your logo on that, and here's gonna be your sales pitch. You're gonna walk in with this report, slap it down, scare somebody into a $2,000 investment, and then you walk out and you hand this off to you know your outsourced overseas team, and they do the fulfillment, and you go knock in the chiropractor next, and away you go. And it's people that don't know what they're doing. I'm in groups of agency owners, and you know, we see these people kind of come in and they're in our meetings for a while, and then they kind of drop off the back end. Not many of them hang around for the long haul. Again, a lot of the people who are coming in with that type of approach, that's what they are. They were middle management in an office cubicle somewhere within the last five to ten years, and now they're an agency owner because they paid some guy 10 grand to set them up with a platform.

SPEAKER_03 14:02

And the scare tactic. And that's what's so hard, is because uh as a general rule, florists, I mean, we're smart people, right? We can do cost of goods sold, we can do labor, we can work on knowing what the flowers are, all of that. But then when it comes to like that technology and somebody says, Oh, you need SEO, well uh now, and you say I need it otherwise, you're not gonna succeed. Somebody's gonna do better than you. I mean, you're scared, really, because you don't know what to do. And yeah, I don't know. And that's happening so much that, like Lori said, she gets those calls all the time.

SPEAKER_04 14:35

So let me switch to a more positive, all right. Let's pretend a shop signed up with a reputable company like Strider, or you know, there's others out there too, I'm sure. So let's pretend they signed up for a I don't know, I'm assuming you have tiers levels of SE programs, right?

SPEAKER_06 14:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 14:57

Let's manage expectations. So what would a shop, what would expectations be for the first six months? What what does that look like for them? They're not gonna like fly all the way up to number one.

SPEAKER_00 15:12

Well, so the most common answer in SEO is it depends.

SPEAKER_05 15:16

I know you're gonna decide.

SPEAKER_00 15:20

So we you know we we can talk about kind of the chunky middle, and then there's outliers, right? So the outliers will be the person who's that brand new florist in Manhattan where it's it's dense, there's a lot of established competition, you're gonna have to work. Right. And the other outlier is you know somebody who's maybe just yeah, has a lot of low-hanging fruit that hasn't been dealt with. And you can go in there and fix some things, they're gonna see that needle move really fast. Um I've had a few of those. Uh those are always nice wins, but for the most part, you're gonna see you know some movement within the first two, three months. And then usually you'll see the campaign up to full speed by about six months. That's the the most typical approach to it, because they there's some signals that Google can pick up right away. Right? And there's some signals that Google's gonna take a little time to process. So if you're talking about things like links, like things that are on other websites that need to then get crawled and then have Google calculate that back into your site, that takes a little more time. Changes to your site, you know, when Google crawls that page, it'll pick up the change, and then that'll start factoring in. Yeah. So there's a lot of that that kind of just some of it just takes a little bit of time. Some of it can get picked up pretty quickly. So if you've got some really bad SEO on your site that we can fix on-site quickly and get it recrawled, then you'll get the immediate benefit of that. And then long term you'll get the benefit of off-site content, link building, sometimes cleaning up citations and directory stuff is necessary.

unknown 16:57

Right.

SPEAKER_00 16:57

And all those things can take time just for the whole ecosystem to process, but it'll get there.

SPEAKER_03 17:04

So you're saying sometimes it's within a couple months you're gonna see a little bit of difference, but oftentimes it takes six months to get it to the point where it's like, okay, everything should be Google has crawled and found you and put you where you should be.

SPEAKER_00 17:19

Yeah, it's very rare that we don't see improvement within the first month, month and a half.

SPEAKER_01 17:25

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 17:25

Like we usually see something happening pretty quickly. But uh getting up to full speed, yeah, we want to say six months because that's allowing for things like again, links to get crawled, uh changes to be picked up, uh, things to get recalculated.

SPEAKER_04 17:40

And then after six months, does it kind of just maintenance you have to keep going, or does it keep going up, up, up, up, up, or does it just we look for that to keep going up, right?

SPEAKER_00 17:54

Because until you're getting a ton of traffic and enough sales, right? Then you know we want to see growth. So we'll we had a point where for our core terms, we're doing really well on traffic, so then we want to start expanding that out a little bit. So that can be you know broadening our keyword focus, that can be trying to target the next town over.

SPEAKER_04 18:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 18:14

Right now we want to start growing our geographic target a little bit. Okay.

SPEAKER_03 18:19

If I want to really increase the number of orders, I I've got everything in there. So it's been three months, six months. Now I'm I really want more orders. That's when I'm gonna do pay-per-click. Is that what I would go for if I want like direct orders?

SPEAKER_00 18:34

Yeah, so if you want orders right away, like where you can turn the switch on, turn it off, that's where Google Ads comes in.

SPEAKER_05 18:41

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 18:42

Right, because that will get you the immediacy. Um but that's also going to stop as soon as you stop paying for ads, that flow of orders stop.

SPEAKER_05 18:50

Oh, right.

SPEAKER_00 18:50

So those two go really well side by side. Because the different parts of the real estate on a search page. And now as SEO builds up over time, that's going to be great ROI there. But if you do any kind of searching on your phone now, the first page scroll, scroll and a half on your phone is ads. So if you're not in that ad space, people aren't seeing you. And you have people now have to scroll below the fold just to get to the organic results. And a lot of people don't on mobile.

SPEAKER_03 19:24

Yeah. Yeah, and mobile for sure. You know, on a desktop, it's a lot easier, right? It's a lot easier to do that. But you're right, when you're on your phone, I didn't even realize that. But now that you say that, it's like, oh yeah, that makes sense. That's all those ads.

SPEAKER_05 19:38

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 19:39

Yeah. So it's a combination of the two that is going to make the biggest difference.

SPEAKER_00 19:43

Yeah. Okay. You do have some people that are, okay, I'm intentionally skipping the ads and want to get to the maps pack. I want to get to the organics.

SPEAKER_04 19:51

But it's because I know about them. It's because I know what they are. I think the majority of people don't even realize they're ads.

SPEAKER_00 19:58

And sometimes the ads are really helpful. If it's a well-written ad and a well-targeted ad, it's going to be directly speaking to your pain point. Of course. So and at that point, you're taking out kind of the the third-party editorial intervention.

SPEAKER_05 20:12

Right.

SPEAKER_00 20:12

Instead of Google saying, I think this is what you're looking for. How does this website meet your meet your needs? This is me saying, Hey, right here, pick me, pick me. I've got exactly your solution.

SPEAKER_04 20:24

And I will re rephrase what I said. I skip ads when I order flowers. I don't skip ads when I'm buying clothes. So there you go. There's a difference. I don't so ads work for me, but because I'm in the floral industry, I'm very picky who I order flowers from. So those ads don't work for me.

SPEAKER_05 20:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 20:47

Because I'm looking for a flowers member when I order a flower.

SPEAKER_00 20:53

And that's that's the kind of the maturing landscape, right? For e-commerce, is that you know, people are they're not just clicking on the first thing they see, they have preferences. So is it what immediately meets my needs? And there's clarity in some of those ads that you don't get from the organic result. Or you know, the person who's just has an aversion to ads. Right, okay, I don't want ads, I want something with they feel like an editorial endorsement has more integrity, so they're gonna skip to that.

SPEAKER_03 21:22

Yep. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so we are like months away, obviously a little over a month away from Christmas and then into Valentine's Day. So my question for you, Ryan, for our clickers is what is it that they can do? I mean, besides call you, obviously, and have you look at everything and make some suggestions, which is what we always suggest. But what can they do themselves to make a difference in their SEO or their business to look at and go, hey, I I'm doing everything I can do myself before I hire someone else?

SPEAKER_00 21:58

Yeah, putting it in the Framework of that, hey, you've got a month, month and a half to get some of this done.

SPEAKER_03 22:03

Yes, right.

SPEAKER_00 22:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 22:05

Not a lot, but yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:06

Yeah. So I had about three ideas for you. The first is we're gonna get a little old school and we're gonna get out of our office, out of our shop, we're gonna go out and get face to face with people, you know, meet some people. So person-to-person networking is happening again, and it's new again. And it's that chance to actually build up real kind of credibility with people and generate some word of mouth and some brand awareness. Uh, another great thing is sponsoring local events. All right, so whether you're whether you're sending flowers or just you know, cutting a check, usually they're not expensive, right? You know, for a few hundred dollars, you can sponsor a local event, get your name, get your logo up there, get mentioned in the program, right? These things matter. And uh you'll very well might get a link back to your website from their website as well as a sponsor. It's a local link, which is way better than just you know some random blog somewhere linking to you. Right? So it's a high value link. Plus, you're getting the good PR and brand awareness. Yeah. And this really matters because you know, as was exposed with the uh one of the Google trials this year, they really pay attention to brand searches. So it's not just the you know, florist near me, it's Bob's Florist. And if they see a lot of local searches for Bob's Florist, that triggers for Google that, okay, Bob's Florist is a local brand.

SPEAKER_05 23:38

Right?

SPEAKER_00 23:39

It's not a Coca-Cola McDonald's brand, but in the context of Springfield, Ohio, this is a uh this is a brand. And like local brands really matter. So when you're getting uh good search volume on your company name, then yeah, that tells Google that you matter, and that actually has a significant impact on your search results.

SPEAKER_03 24:01

So, what is it that I could do if I'm a flower shop and I'm like I'm sponsoring oh, the soccer team, right? And so great example. I I uh get some shirts for them, and then how can I get my fans from my soccer team to like search me, right? Even just put in a search for me because that's gonna help things, right? Is that what you're saying? So if you just keep searching Bondus Flowers in whatever town, yeah, it's gonna bring that awareness.

SPEAKER_00 24:31

You can try and kind of artificially engineer that, or you can just, you know, yeah, do it with with the understanding that over time being present in your community is gonna generate that kind of top of mind awareness where people are gonna search for you.

SPEAKER_05 24:46

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 24:46

And when you do that and you start to get even a little bit of saturation, right, that search volume goes up, and then all your rankings go up because Google will recognize that you're a brand.

SPEAKER_03 24:55

That's interesting because you're right, that is old school. I mean, when we started our business in Dixon many years ago, it was like my husband was on the chamber of commerce, I'm gonna be uh involved in the church, and then we're gonna sponsor this. And it just boomed at the point because everybody's like, Who are these people? You know, it was when the internet was just starting. It was like, yeah, I didn't even think of that though. That just makes so much sense.

SPEAKER_00 25:18

Yeah, we're back to the old question of how do you build a brand. And you know, you can do some of that online, especially if you you know go viral or what there's some air quotes for you. But you know, air quotes. Yeah, viral, but you know, going viral is hard and it's really hard to engineer. Most of the time it happens by accident.

SPEAKER_05 25:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:37

So if that's what you're relying on is a happy accident, then you know, just take your money to the casino instead of yeah, exactly.

unknown 25:46

Right.

SPEAKER_00 25:46

So you want you want to be a little more thoughtful and more strategic with it. So even yeah, even now, digital billboards are all over the place. Like now we're so used to y'all like you got the guy with the stick rolling up the billboard, right? Yeah, now so many of them are replaced by digital, and that's so cheap to get into. Yeah. So you can get that kind of side of the road, you know, big, bright, lit-up exposure. And hey, you're on the billboard and you're on the soccer team, and you know, you sent 200 bucks to the local theater company for their production and you're in their bulletin, and it's just those touches, touches, touches, and then you know, something comes up, it's oh, I need flowers. Well, who comes to mind? It's that company that I've seen and I've seen and I've seen.

SPEAKER_04 26:28

And right there, the other thing I'm sitting here thinking about is you know, if you're sponsoring a soccer team or a little softball team, develop a relationship with the coach or the team parent, have them tag you in their pictures and in all and then you're getting tagged, you're going across all social media platforms, people are seeing you, top of mind awareness, they're buying more product from you, then they're gonna review, like it all is connected.

SPEAKER_03 26:58

Okay, so then you just reminded me of something, Lori. So that common communication with the coach, you can talk to them about selling flowers for a fundraiser and to do their uniforms or anything like that, because then you have that whole thing going on. So, I mean, because they're always looking for fundraising opportunities, and why not sell flowers instead of candies? Oh, you know, absolutely exactly yeah, wow, wow, a lot of great possible school stuff.

SPEAKER_04 27:22

Plus, it's so fun to go to a little kid soccer game. Yes, fun.

SPEAKER_00 27:28

Right, and it all ties back into the SEO aspect as well because it's gonna drive more searches, elevate all your rankings.

SPEAKER_04 27:35

And you're doing something for your community. That's the thing.

SPEAKER_00 27:39

I mean, it's it's feel good.

SPEAKER_04 27:41

You're doing something for your community. I love what you said too. We talk about this all the time in in our flower click shop talks as far as collaborating with another small business, especially for Valentine's Day, you know, a local restaurant or a local spa or something, flower shop and spa gift cards or restaurant gift cards, and then cross cross-promote on your social media, tag each other, and so your customers see this, and their customers see you, and all of that stuff matters, and it's free. That's the thing, it is free, and it just takes time. And that's where you come in, Ryan. That's why they come in because they don't have time.

SPEAKER_03 28:27

Okay, second one.

SPEAKER_00 28:28

Second one, get busy on your reviews, right? So it's not just about getting reviews, but acting on them. And there's a great article on the White Spark blog by Miriam Ellis, where she goes through how reviews are customer service, public relations, sales, business intelligence, content marketing, and ranking factors.

SPEAKER_05 28:49

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 28:50

So you know, we it can be really tempting to think, okay, you know, reviews are nice. Some people think reviews are scary.

unknown 28:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 28:58

Don't be afraid of a bad review. Bad reviews are a great opportunity because if you can get in and win that person back, their customer for life, they're gonna be so loyal.

SPEAKER_05 29:07

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 29:07

And even if you don't, if you respond to that review well, you're gonna show that you are a mature, well-reasoned business person who is able to just own up to a mistake if a mistake was made, or just you know, deal with an irrational person calmly. Right, you can't really come across well, but you've got to be requesting reviews because this is now the number one really influencer for people making a purchase decision, even more than word of mouth of friends and family, yeah, is reviews. And so they're looking at review count, they're looking at review recency, they are looking at star count. Um, sometimes people will go deeper into uh the review content, but those are the big things. And so if you've got like 500 reviews, but you know, 480 of them came from two years ago, people notice, especially especially in retail because things can change so quickly. You get turnover of staff or management, and all of a sudden it's a very different experience. So that matters. So quoting from Miriam, right? How reviews are customer service, this is you interacting with your customers. Someone leaves you a great review, thank them.

SPEAKER_05 30:13

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 30:14

Like get in there and thank them, do it quickly. Right? It's public relations, it's showing how you're interacting with other people, uh influences sales, influences rankings. I it's just it's such a big deal, and it's so easy to overlook because the process can be annoying. But if you can get a good review tool that will make it really easy for you to send out review requests a couple times a week, you can do that by email or SMS or both. And then when those reviews come in, reply quickly. And this is where AI can be really helpful because it can be a little drudgy, right? To say, okay, let's say you've got 10 reviews to get a reply to, and they're they're all you know really nice. I love my flowers, best experience ever. Well, you know, thank you so much for your great review. Really love serving you. Thank you so much for your great review, it was all pleasure. All right, so there are tools now, and there's lots available. We have one, but there are you know, there are plenty to choose from that will give you an AI-generated suggestion.

SPEAKER_05 31:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:16

So it's not doing the response for you, but it's like, okay, hit a button and it's gonna take in the context of that review, it's gonna generate a nice response for you that you can now tweak a little bit, which is so much easier than trying to come up with something from scratch.

SPEAKER_06 31:30

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:30

Right. If you can edit a little bit and say, okay, this is how I would say it, but now that you know the the AI has done most of the heavy lifting for you.

SPEAKER_03 31:37

No, yeah. And usually if you're using the same AI tool and you correct it and then show them it's correct the next time it learns the way you respond. Yes. Next, then after about five or six of them, it's like, oh my God, that's just like what I'd say, you know?

SPEAKER_00 31:50

Yeah, yeah, you're training it for sure.

SPEAKER_04 31:53

Well, last week Vonda and I were working on some things, and I have my own account, chat GPD account, and I use it for inspiration, just like that. I don't ever copy paste because I like to do my own thing, but it's great inspiration. And I would put something on a rough draft, and Vonda laughs, she goes, Oh my gosh, this sounds like you. And I was like, He knows me. It's my friend. He knows how I talk because it like had some humor in it. And I was like, it's creepy, it's very creepy. Yeah, so what I will say as far as answering reviews, this is my pet peeve, and I have seen it in on flower shops, mostly larger, like you're talking about, and not any of our members, thankfully. But I saw this once, it was in Philly area. I was looking for a flower shop, and and that's you know, highly concentrated flower shops, so many up there. But I clicked on some random one and they had a ton of reviews, and I noticed they were answering every single one with the exact same thing. And what even they had a like a two-star review, and somebody copy pasted thank you so much for a review. We I mean a positive with and it was a negative review, and I'm like, somebody needs to be fired over this. So you know, I hope everybody listens will heed what you said. Use it for inspiration. Make it your own, do not just copy and paste.

SPEAKER_00 33:35

Yeah, and you know that the AI tool wouldn't have done the positive response.

SPEAKER_04 33:38

So now it's like it's not hard, just use it and then turn it into your own language and you know, add something personal about the actual incident and make it your own. But it was just like, ah, somebody was not reading what they did.

SPEAKER_03 33:56

So, Ryan, you mentioned a re to review tool. Do you have a review tool that you can help people with? That's my question.

SPEAKER_00 34:05

Definitely. Yeah, we have one that you know basically lets you pull together your reviews from a number of different platforms, see them all in one place, reply to them all from one place. Nice. And it's got the the AI tools for suggested responses.

SPEAKER_03 34:19

So then at one time there was review tools that would take you to a different site and say, if if you want a three or four respond here, and it takes you right to Google or whatever. If you have a one or two, and then it takes it to the shop to talk about to have them what is that called?

SPEAKER_00 34:40

Review gating.

SPEAKER_03 34:41

Is that is that something that people still do or some people still do.

SPEAKER_00 34:46

It's it's been illegal for a few years.

SPEAKER_03 34:48

Oh, okay. So it's okay. All right, okay. But I know yeah.

SPEAKER_00 34:53

Yeah, it it's such a great sales tool, right? And I still get florist calling saying, hey, you know, so and so is calling me and offering this review tool that will do this if it's a positive review and do this if it's a negative. Okay, you know what? That yes, that appeals to the business owner and me a hundred percent. And we used to offer tools that did that, but we stopped as soon as the laws changed.

SPEAKER_03 35:13

Okay, okay. And some people might be not be aware that the laws have changed and that should not be done now. So yes.

SPEAKER_00 35:20

Yeah, okay. Yeah, the laws are pretty clear now. You have to treat all review requests and up interactions the same. You can't filter your reviews based on quality. So you can't be like, okay, I'm gonna put only my five-star reviews on my website. I've got a you know, if I'm gonna show my review feed, it has to be my full review feed.

SPEAKER_01 35:44

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 35:44

Right. Um sure. Yeah, so they there are some rules around that, and then yeah, it's that whole interaction process. Someone has to have equal opportunity to leave a review, no matter what their response is.

SPEAKER_04 35:57

Well, and going back to what you said, it provides the owner an opportunity to respond and show, hey, let's let's make this okay. Because I love to read the response to a negative review. I relect more on that than I don't really care about the negative review. I want to see how they made it.

SPEAKER_00 36:16

I'm I'm the same. I also want to see are the negative reviews rational.

SPEAKER_04 36:20

Right. And usually I came to the person that wrote the negative review. I'm like, ah, they're crazy.

SPEAKER_00 36:25

Yeah, if they're like total review score is uh, you know, a bit lower than I would write, but the people are around, okay, fine. But then you also see the character of the data.

SPEAKER_04 36:33

Exactly. And that's what you're looking for. And you need to look at that as opportunity to show your great character. So don't be scared of them. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:44

That also leads into like you know, Miriam's point about uh reviews being business intelligence, right? One of the features I love in our tool is we it can turn your reviews into a word cloud. So you can start seeing positive and negative sentiment, you know, what themes are coming up in all your your reviews. Quite often you'll see you know customer service front and center or flowers delivered, like good things like that. Sometimes you'll see an employee's name show up.

SPEAKER_06 37:09

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 37:12

That's very cool.

SPEAKER_03 37:18

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 37:19

Or you know, sometimes something shows up in red and it's like, okay, this is a theme. This is something maybe we need to address. And you know, seeing some shops like that too.

SPEAKER_03 37:30

Wow.

SPEAKER_04 37:31

That's that would be very handy because then you don't have to go in yourself and spend time analyzing, looking for that kind of stuff.

SPEAKER_00 37:39

Yeah, it's just really really neat to see what people think about you because that is your brand identity. Ultimately, it's the customers and the market that decide what your brand identity is.

SPEAKER_01 37:49

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:50

Right. We try, but it's up to you know, it's up to people how they perceive us. So we at least get a little sense of that through analyzing reviews.

SPEAKER_03 37:59

Cool. Okay, and you have one more maybe that we could work on before the holidays.

SPEAKER_00 38:04

Yeah. So the last one was uh just jumping into your uh social media strategy, creating a content calendar now and doing as much prep as you can. Because if you wait until you know the day before Veterans Day, if you wait until you know, okay, you'll Black Friday's like right here. I should probably post something. Guess what? You're probably gonna be too busy to post something.

SPEAKER_05 38:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:25

And even if you do, it's not gonna be good because you're busy. Right.

unknown 38:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 38:30

Again, AI is your friend. Yeah. You can you know, jump into something like Chat GPT, there's a million tools that'll help you with this. Yeah. And say, okay, let's just help me to start with a content calendar, maybe factor in some either local events or different cultural holidays that we want to mention. And then we can start preparing either preparing some graphics for that ahead of time. Yeah, depending on the social tool you use. You can usually schedule your posts and even create AI images within that scheduling process. So it's okay, I need I've got a calendar, so I know what posts I need. I can go into the tool, have the AI help me create the graphics. Of course, human intervention. Right. Right? We're not just going AI and publish.

SPEAKER_03 39:17

No, no.

SPEAKER_00 39:19

But if we can get the AI to do some of the heavy lifting, and again, training more and more is training your brand voice as you're going through it. Yeah. Right? It's it's learning more about you to be helpful helpful. But you can get your posts planned, you can get them created, get them scheduled, and then you can sleep at night because you know that's taken care of instead of being that that one more thing that I didn't get to today because you know somebody came out at the funeral at four o'clock.

SPEAKER_03 39:43

Yeah. And if you think about it, most of the people could go around their store in two days and take enough pictures in store to be able to utilize for the next month. I mean, really, they're putting up their holiday things now, and there's plenty of content to have something that's not necessarily graphics because people don't want to see graphics all the time. They want to see what's going on in your shop. Yeah. So yeah, and but get some of your staff help with those captions.

SPEAKER_04 40:09

You know, if you have creative people on staff or younger generation, you know, put them up on if you have a Trello, like we use Trello or Trello. Canva has a free social media calendar now. Uh, you can Google free social media calendars and pull up whatever works. Put your pictures up there and give access to your employees and let them throw up some captions and see what works. You know, make it a group effort because it it can be hard. Sometimes your brain just does not function. You cannot come up with stats.

SPEAKER_00 40:41

Oh man. Yeah, you wait till the end of the day when all the work is done. Okay, now I'm gonna be creative. Go.

SPEAKER_04 40:46

Well, Von and I always joke like after 3 p.m., like we have burned every brain calorie and we're done. We're just depleted. We got done and left.

SPEAKER_00 40:55

Yeah, that's when I do the accounting.

SPEAKER_04 40:58

Exactly. We have to do the stuff that does not involve creativity or really to hopefully not.

SPEAKER_00 41:03

Not with the accounting.

SPEAKER_04 41:04

Yeah, right. Not with accounting. We'd hope not. Yeah, that's right.

SPEAKER_00 41:07

Zero creativity.

SPEAKER_04 41:08

So, well, this has been really, really informative. And I hope all of our listeners walk away with some new ideas and tips for the holidays. This has just been really great.

SPEAKER_03 41:20

It's been really great stuff, Ryan. And always we appreciate everything you share with others and with us. And I'll we'll drop your information in there if anybody wants to reach out to you and see if what you do can help them before the holidays. And I think Christmas is you know busy, but we all know we got to gear up for Valentine's Day. That's the biggie, you know?

SPEAKER_00 41:42

It just doesn't stop too, right? We write through until Mother's Day.

SPEAKER_04 41:44

Then Mother's Day. And then summer, you gotta keep that up, keep your SEO up through the summer because that's your slow month. So you want to Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 41:53

Well, don't wait till June and say, okay, we this is a slow month. I should probably start marketing.

SPEAKER_03 41:58

Yeah, right, right. Right. Exactly. Uh but what I really want people to walk away with is don't be fearful. Get the knowledge you need to make an informed decision. Because so many times we make those gut decisions going, oh my gosh, I gotta do it and I gotta do it now because that they say this, they say that. Get the information and make that informed, confident decision. And there are people that will help you do that, like Ryan. And we'll help you with anything with your website, as you know, and and what we can do to make your website look better. And then Ryan will drive the traffic to it.

SPEAKER_00 42:31

So great teamwork. Well, thank you so much for this. A lot of fun as all.

SPEAKER_04 42:36

Thank you so much for listening to our podcast. We hope you enjoyed spending time with us because we enjoy spending time with you. If you did, make sure you hit that subscribe button or add the business and pleasure of flowers to your Google morning routine or your flash routine on Alexa.

SPEAKER_02 42:57

So please come back and join us to discover a little bit of knowledge and one small change in your mind that can take you to new levels in your life and business.