I've been thinking about this a lot lately. Probably too much.

A few weeks ago, sitting at the desk doing nothing particularly important, I picked up my phone and asked it to find a florist near me. Just to see. We're in Kingscliff, so I wanted to know what would come up. Who Google thought was the best answer to that question.

We weren't first. We weren't second either.

Now look, I know we're an online network, not a shopfront on Marine Parade anymore (haven't been since 2009), so it's a bit different for us. But it got me thinking about all the florists in our partner network, over 800 of them now, dotted around Australia in actual shops with actual doors. When someone in Toowoomba or Ballina or Hobart picks up their phone and says "Hey Siri, find me a florist", are our partners showing up? Are they the answer? Or is it some competitor down the road who just happens to have their Google stuff sorted better?

This is what keeps me up some nights. Not the flowers. The phones.

How We Got Here (A Bit of Context)

Back when we started, and I'm talking 2007, 2008, SEO was almost comically simple. We'd just bought a florist shop in Kingscliff, knew nothing about flowers or websites, and were scrambling to figure out how to get more customers through the door. Or at least on the phone.

The previous owner had taken out a Yellow Pages ad. The actual book. That's what brought us calls back then. Loads of them. 40 plus a day at one point, which was both a blessing and a headache because half of them wanted flowers delivered to places we couldn't reach. Taree. Townsville. Coffs Harbour. Random places.

* My flower shop in 2006 in Kingscliff just after we bought it, how about the Kodak sign - lol

Anyway, when we started building websites for those delivery areas (that's a whole other story, covered on our About Us page if you're curious), ranking in Google was dead simple. Write "Flowers Murwillumbah" a bunch of times on a page, wait a few weeks, and you'd be sitting pretty at number one. Google was, I don't know, more naive back then. Less clever. You could game it if you knew the basics.

That world doesn't exist anymore and TBH, I am glad as it was akin to the 'wild west' for a time there.

People Don't Type the Way They Talk

This is the bit that took me ages to properly understand.

When someone sits at a computer and types into Google, they write in this weird shorthand. "Florist Sydney CBD". "Same day flower delivery Melbourne". Clipped. Robotic. Search terms, not sentences.

But when someone picks up their phone and talks to it? Completely different. They ask a question. A real one. "Where can I get flowers delivered to my mum in Parramatta this afternoon?" or "Is there a florist open near me right now?"

The difference matters. A lot.

Google's voice assistant (and Siri, and Alexa, all of them) needs to match that spoken question with an answer. Not a list of ten blue links. An answer. One result. Maybe two. And if your website, your Google Business Profile, your whole online presence is still optimised for the old way, for those clipped keyword phrases, you're probably not going to be that answer.

I reckon about 3 in 10 of our phone enquiries now start with some version of "I found you on Google" and a fair chunk of those, when you ask, say they asked their phone rather than typed. That's not scientific. Just what we've noticed. But it's enough to make me pay attention.

The Google Business Profile Thing

For years, and I'm a bit embarrassed to admit this, I treated our Google Business Profile like an afterthought. Tick the boxes, upload a photo that wasn't completely terrible, move on to something more interesting. There was always something more interesting.

Turns out that was dumb.

When someone asks their phone for a florist "near me" or "open now", Google isn't reading your beautifully crafted About page. It's not parsing your blog posts or admiring your product photography. It's pulling from your Google Business Profile. That's the source. That's what the voice assistant reads out.

* Note: This image has been made for the purpose of this blog post only - as you would know by now, our shop is no longer located in Kingscliff, in fact not since 2009.

So if your hours are wrong? You're invisible. If you close at noon on Saturdays but your profile still says 5pm, and someone asks for a florist "open now" at 2 o'clock, Google skips you. Gives the enquiry to whoever's hours are accurate. Just like that.

I think about our partner florists with this. Over 800 of them. How many have their holiday hours updated? How many have actually checked their profile in the last six months? Probably not enough. And they're losing business to competitors who aren't necessarily better, just more diligent with the admin.

The unsexy stuff matters. It always does.

> Learn more about optimising your Google Business Profile here

Write Like a Human Being

Anna's been with us for 15 years now. Ex-florist. Started back when we were working out of a converted garage in Pottsville, juggling calls and packing orders and trying not to wake the kids with the sound of packing tape at 11pm.

She's brilliant on the phone. When someone rings up and asks if we can get flowers to their nan in Toowoomba by tomorrow arvo, she doesn't say "We endeavour to facilitate timely delivery to regional Queensland localities." She says "Yeah, no worries, order by 2pm and we'll have them there."

That's the energy your website needs. That's what voice search rewards.

Most florist websites I've looked at over the years (and I've looked at hundreds, trying to figure out what works) read like they were written by someone trying to sound professional. Formal. Business-like. "We pride ourselves on delivering exceptional floral arrangements to discerning customers throughout the greater metropolitan region."

Nobody talks like that. Nobody searches like that. And when Google's trying to match a voice query to a website, that stiff corporate language doesn't sound like an answer to a human question. It sounds like filler.

> Read my post on Ai content

The FAQ Page Nobody Reads (But Google Loves)

Something that's worked for us, and I'm still figuring out how well, is structuring content around real questions. The ones we hear on the phone every day.

"How late can I order and still get same day delivery?"

"Do you deliver to hospitals?"

"What if nobody's home when the flowers arrive?"

"Can I get roses on a Sunday?"

These are real. We answer them constantly. Anna could probably recite them in her sleep.

The trick, I think, is putting these questions on your website exactly how people ask them. Not dressed up in formal language. Not buried in a wall of text under a heading called "Delivery Information". Just the question, plain, followed by a straight answer.

Voice assistants love this. They can pull a direct response to a direct question. "Hey Siri, can I get flowers delivered to a hospital?" and if your FAQ page has that exact question with a clear answer, you've got a shot at being the result that gets read out.

I say "I think" because honestly, we're still testing this. Still tweaking. I don't have a neat case study with before and after metrics. Just a hunch backed by observation. Which is how most of this stuff works, really.

A Gold Nugget That Nobody Knows

Here is a tip that I can say with 100% certainty that nobody has done, ever, that I personally thought of but you will need Ai to help you with. Also, I strongly suggest using Google Gemini when you do it and selecting the 'thinking model' as per the below image.

There are times when using Ai can be very helpful, of course provided that you add your personal experiences, expertise and knowledge that you cannot fake!

Copy and paste all the important pages from your website into a Word Document. Like, your Terms page, About Us, Homepage content, privacy policy. 

At the very top of the doc, I want you to cut and paste this exact prompt.

"Using the information below I want you to put yourself into the shoes of a customer wanting to order flowers online and think of 7-10 FAQ's that address pain points when ordering flowers. I want you to do this by creating an empathy map that simulates those feelings so you can better come up with both the questions and their answers. Also ensure that the FAQ title is an H2 heading and the question that follow it are all H3 headings so I can easily paste to my website. Ensure that you write in exactly the same tone and style as my writing and never use an em dash"

Once you have done that, copy and paste all that into Gemini, then select the 'thinking model', then hit enter or the little right arrow - and presto! You will not believe what it reveals.

Being Specific About Where You Are

This one's for the florists with actual shops. Physical locations.

Voice search is local. Hyper local, the marketing people say, but I hate that word so let's just say very, very local. When someone asks for a florist "near me", Google's trying to figure out exactly where they are and exactly where you are and whether those two things match up.

So help it out.

Mention landmarks. Neighbourhoods. Suburbs. If you're two minutes walk from the train station, say so. If you're opposite the Westfield, say so. If you deliver everywhere from Mermaid Beach down to Currumbin, list those suburbs.

We used to write our location pages with one suburb name repeated everywhere, trying to rank for that keyword. These days I think it works better to write naturally about the area, mention the surrounding places, sound like someone who actually knows the neighbourhood. Because that's what Google's trying to verify. That you're real, you're there, and you're relevant to someone standing a few streets away asking their phone for help.

Speed Matters More Than You Think

I'll keep this short because it's technical and not particularly interesting.

If someone does a voice search and Google picks your website as the answer, but your site takes five seconds to load on mobile, you've lost them. They're gone. Asked again, or given up, or clicked the next result that loaded faster.

Compress your images. Make sure your phone number and "Get Directions" button are obvious. Don't bury the important stuff.

That's it really. Not glamorous advice. But neither is updating your holiday hours and that matters too.

Reviews That Actually Help You Rank

When we signed up with Feefo back in 2019, I was nervous. Handing our reviews over to a third party, completely independent, no ability to edit or delete the bad ones? With something as subjective as flowers? Felt risky.

Six years on, I'm glad we did it. Won their Trusted Service Award in 2024 and again this year. But more than the awards, what I've noticed is how reviews help with search.

When a customer writes "Best same day delivery in Newcastle, the flowers were beautiful" that review is doing double work. It's social proof (god I hate that phrase but I don't know a better one) for other customers, but it's also telling Google that you do same day delivery, you're in Newcastle, and you sell flowers. That's searchable. Rankable.

You can't script reviews and shouldn't try. But you can nudge people toward specifics. When you follow up asking how it went, they'll often mention the location, the occasion, the type of flowers. And that detail flows into the review naturally.

One thing I've noticed: recent reviews matter more than old ones. We've got thousands now, built up over years, but Google seems to weight the fresh ones more heavily. A hundred five star reviews from 2019 don't carry the same punch as twenty from the last couple of months. So it's not a "set and forget" thing. You've got to keep at it.

> Read my article on how to get reviews - for free

What I Still Don't Know

I want to be honest about this part.

I don't fully understand how voice search algorithms work. Not really. I read the articles, I test things, I pay attention to what seems to move the needle. But it's not like the old days when you could reverse engineer Google's logic pretty reliably. Now there's AI involved, machine learning, a black box that even Google's engineers probably can't fully explain.

So a lot of this is educated guessing. Pattern recognition. "We changed this thing and then that thing improved" without being certain about causation. That's uncomfortable for someone who likes to understand how things work. But it's also just the reality of running a business online in 2025.

What I do know is that more and more people are talking to their phones instead of typing. That's not speculation, that's just watching customer behaviour change over the years. And if you're not showing up when they ask, someone else is.

The Test

Go on. Pick up your phone right now. Ask it to find a florist in your area.

Did you come up? First result? Second? Third page?

If you're not there, or you're buried behind competitors you know you're better than, that's your starting point. Your hours might be wrong. Your profile might be thin. Your website might be slow or stuffed with language that sounds professional but doesn't sound human.

I did this test a few weeks ago. Like I said, we weren't first. Still not, last time I checked.

Still working on it.