The Location Page Strategy Most Florists (and SEOs) Get Wrong

Growing your florist business beyond your immediate area is one of the best ways to increase sales and reach new customers. Geo-targeted location pages are special web pages that help you rank in Google searches for specific areas where you want to deliver flowers. I have developed this guide to assist florists as I have over 15 years, not just writing, but also with hands on with the team at LIly's Florist. I am going to share some wins but also some really big mistakes too, and what I have learned.

I will also attempt to refute so called SEO's experts claims about how they can improve your business which will save you a lot of money, share insights into Australian Consumer Law (ACL) which is mostly overlooked by florists around Australia. 

Location Pages and Why They Matter

Location pages, or geo-targeted location pages as I call them, are web pages within your website that target specific suburbs, towns, or regions where you want to attract customers, ideally within your delivery area for the best results both for Google ranks and for your customers. For example, if you own a florist in Surfers Paradise, having a location pages for Brisbane makes no sense, as it's unlikely you will be able to delivery flowers there.

Let's pretend for a minute you are a bricks and mortar shop in Bondi in Sydney, Instead of trying to rank for "florist" everywhere, SEO experts will tell you to create separate pages for "flowers in Bondi," "flowers in Manly," and "flowers in Chatswood." 

This strategy works because people often search for services near them, even when ordering online.

The florist industry in Australia, the flower retail market reached $1.2 billion in 2024. With more people shopping online for flowers, especially after the pandemic, having strong location pages can help you capture this growing market.

Local searches are incredibly valuable for florists like you. For example, when someone types "wedding florist near me" or "flower delivery in [city name]," they're usually ready to buy, it could be an emotional purchase like for a funeral, or a last minute purchase for someones birthday. These searches have very high local intent, meaning the person wants a florist, in their specific area, or needs an online florist that can deliver flowers to that specific area.

Why Are You Giving Away Your Secrets to Other Florists?

I decided to answer this question, before anything else, and it's one myself, and the team anticipated florists, like you, asking. 

To our best knowledge, Lily's Florist was the first flower delivery business in Australian to create location based landing pages, the first one we built was way back 2008 making one for Murwillumbah to to support one of our foundation partner florists. That page now, looks nothing like it did 17 years ago. Over the years we have made many, many mistakes so we wanted to share what we have learnt over the years that can make a real and positive impact on your local florist business.

Step 1: Research Your Target Areas

Before creating any location pages, work out which areas offer the best opportunities for your business. My advice is to look at areas in a radius of your shop that fall within the standard delivery fee, whatever they be for you. If you choose to go beyond this radius the complexity of your website scales up enormously and the chances of losing money on orders goes up significantly. The only way to avoid this is by having dynamic delivery pricing based on postcode, which has huge challenges. Consider factors like population size, income levels, competition, and demand for florist services. But you should know all that given your intimate knowledge of the area. That said, people are becoming far more sophisticated with the way they use Google and other search engines, so if there is a town or suburb, say 10 kilometres away, that only has 100 people in it, in my opinion it's still worth targeting.

These are a little advanced but you could consider using tools such as Google Trends and Google Keyword Planner (within Google Ads as per the image below) to check how often people search for florist services in different areas. Focus on places with solid search volume but not too much competition from established florists. Growing suburbs, new housing estates, or areas with upcoming wedding venues often provide strong opportunities.

Research your competitors in each target area, what are other florists shops doing, what are online florist doing and targeting too. Take a peek at their websites and Google My Business listings to spot gaps in their services. If local florists like yourself don’t offer same day delivery or wedding consultations, you can use these as your competitive advantages.

Here is a really good tip that can save loads of time and research. It won't always work, but it most cases it will. 

• Find the competitor you want to look into
• Go to their homepage
• in the URL bar at the top type "sitemap.xml". So for example, myfloristshopishere.com.au/sitemap.xml
• Press enter
• A new page will load
• It will look a little weird, see below image example, but here you will find all their pages like about us, categories like rose, but you will also find all the areas they are targeting

Step 2: Creating Your Location Page Content

Once you have decided to create a new landing page your location pages, they should serve unique, helpful content that serves real customers - this is extremely important, in fact I cannot emphasise this enough but more on that later. At all costs, completely avoid copying and pasting the same content across multiple location pages. Google can spot duplicate content and may penalise your rankings, at least SEO's will tell you that, more likely is your simply won't outrank your competition. 

If you have been researching this yourself, you are going to read from 'reputable' sources saying things like:

• Write 300-500 words
• Make sure your keyword density is less than 10% of your total words
• Use landmarks, events venues
• List loads of postcodes
• List loads of other surrounding suburbs
• Write about the town
• Put a map on the page
• Put local weather for that town

Mark my words, they are all, emphatically wrong, and some of that advice may also have legal ramifications due to Australian Consumer Law, so beware.

The BIG Don't - What Not to Do

Geo-specific Location

Ignore the generic advice because as mentioned, there could be ramifications. Even though you are located in Bondi (I am using Bondi as most people will know it), and you deliver flowers to Clovelly, on that page, in no way, even in the meta title of your location page, are you ever allowed to say 'Florist In Clovelly'. If only one website user orders flowers from you, thinking you are in Clovelly, and you are not, this is a breach of the ACL.

Geo-targeted Content

In no way, on the Clovelly page, are you allowed to add generic Wikipedia style content about Clovelly, this could also a breach of the ACL. That is, writing about Clovelly, it's climate, what restaurants are in the suburb, that sort of thing. 

On a number of the pages we made carrying this type of content, a mistake we made, we were actually penalised by Google and we saw a rankings drop. In our opinion, it was possibly due to our pages starting to appear for searches for things in towns that were on our pages, that had nothing to do with someone wanting to buy flowers for 'said town'.

You could however:

• On a Randwick landing page: we delivery hospital to Prince of Wales Hospital (ensure you link to your hospital flowers category also, this is awesome for SEO)
• On a Bronte landing page: we delivery funeral flowers to Waverley Cemetery (again, link to a category that suits within the content like your funeral or sympathy flowers category)
• On your Bondi landing or homepage (as you are located there): we deliver flowers to Icebergs Dining Room and Bar

Write as a Florist With The 4 Pillars of E-E-A-T in Mind

So what the heck is E-E-A-T? I know right (IKR :)), it sounds like some weird acronym that my 14 year old made up for a quick Snapchat reply but it's not, I dare say it's the single most important thing you should be aware of when writing and you, as a florist with a shop, can share it more than just about anyone in the industry.

E-E-A-T simple stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoriaveness, and Trustworthiness.

Experience

How long have you been making flowers, where you trained to be a florists, what industry awards have you won, have you worked within the local community, do you have local business awards" That's experience - you've actually been in flower shops, dealt with customers, handled wedding disasters, probably stayed up all night making funeral arrangements, or stayed up until 7AM on the second Sunday of every May making Mother's Day flower arrangements.

Expertise

You know which flowers are in season at varying times of the year, you actually went to the effort of going to the markets and baying the flowers in Flemington, what works for different venues around Bondi, how to keep arrangements fresh during Bondis hot summer day. That knowledge is way more valuable and nobody knows your flowers and your area like you do.

Authoritativeness

This comes from things like:

• Are other wedding vendors recommending you (make sure they are, and try to get a backlink from their website to yours too - this is mega)
• Local Bondi venues like Icebergs Dining Room and Bar mentioning you on their preferred supplier lists
• Getting featured in wedding blogs or local newspapers
• Other florists referring overflow work to you, and online florists like Lily's Florist, Petals or Interflora

Trustworthiness

I would argue, the most important, at least from a customer conversion into flower sales point of view.

"Can customers current or new customers actually trust you with their important moments?" This is huge for florists because you're dealing with people's most emotional moments - weddings, funerals, apologies, celebrations. Here are a few tips:

• Show your 'real' customer reviews on your home and location pages
• On each location page, tell the customer when the flowers are coming from, that is, your shop in Bondi
• Where you are able to always show the customer first and surname initial, show the date of the purchase, what they purchased, and in a perfect world the order number of their purchase
• Ensure your website has an up to date SSL certificate
• On your about us page, have images of you and your staff, your training and any awards you have
• Have your shop address posted everywhere
• Show clear cut off times for same day delivery
• When writing try and use 'I' or we as much as possible, this gives the customer the feeling they are talking or hearing from you or the team
• Where possible, and if possible, try and use real images for product images
• Have your couriers take photos of handing the recipient the photos and add these to a gallery page

With all that in mind, I know, the thought of hand writing 10-20 pages seems like a drag, but I can say with absolute certainty that your content will win over the rest, especially with the emergence of Ai written content.

A win recently we had showing E-E-A-T what a blog post I wrote titled: How to Turn Blog Traffic Into Actual Sales For Your Local Florist Shop. We wrote this to share with florists our genuine advice from our 17 years experience in the industry and writing content. This blog post is now ranking 3rd in Google and already getting traffic which are very happy about. 

So, to Sum Up This Section

No, you don't need a page with 100's or even 1000's of words on it, you don't need to stuff the page with keywords, like Bondi Florist 50 times, you don't need 50 postcodes on the page nor do you need about each location, you just need honest, to the point, words, that come from your many years of experience, what makes you unique and more so that others, and why someone should order flowers with you. Share cute anecdotes and real stories on these pages that you and your staff have laughed about, about real conversations with real customers that brought a tear. Find out what your 20 best selling products are and write about why you think so. You get it right?

Step 3: Technical SEO for Location Pages

Technical SEO ensures search engines can find and understand your location pages. Start with your URL structure. Use clean URLs like yourfloristwebite.com.au/flowers-bronte/" or "/flower-delivery-bronte/".

SEO experts will tell you to create separate pages for "/florist-in-Bondi," "/florist-in-Bondi" and "/florist-in-Bondi"  Not only is this incorrect and very bad advice, like above, it's actually against the law according to the ACL. The reason, these urls infer to a customer that you are in those locations when you are not.

Your page titles and meta descriptions are crucial. Include your main keyword and location in the title tag. For example: "Wedding Florist in Bondi | Same Day Delivery | [Your Business Name]". Keep titles under 60 characters and meta descriptions under 160 characters. For landing page meta titles you may use some of the following examples:

• Flowers Bronte | Same Day Delivery | Your Business
• Send Flowers to Bronte: Daily For All Occasions
• Your Business Name | Flowers For All Occasions to Bronte

If you are unsure about the length of you meta title and meta description, you could use tools like the SEO simulator. You can see how it dynamically tells you how many characters you have typed in the meta title and meta description below.

Note, that some Ecommerce platforms may have built in mata simulators so you may not need to use online ones.

Use proper heading tags (H1, H2, H3) to structure your content. Your H1 should include your main keyword and location. Use H2 tags for major sections like "Our Bondi Services" or "Delivery Areas".

Step 4: Content Marketing for Location Pages

Create location specific content that adds real value, I have explained that well above. 

Write blog posts about local events in the suburbs you are trying to expand your reach to, seasonal flowers that grow well in the area, or wedding venues you work with or even hope you work with. This content should live on your blog pages, if you have them, then you should link back to your location page or pages. If done well, it should boost the ranks of your location pages.

Seasonal content works particularly well for florists. Write about the best flowers for local climate conditions, seasonal arrangements popular in each area, or local flower festivals and events. This type of content naturally includes location keywords while providing genuine value. I say it again, genuine value, that is tangible and engaging. DOn't write for the sake of writing, write with purpose, show your expertise, trustworthiness, experience and authoritativeness - again the main pillars or E-E-A-T.

Here is an example. Let's say you write a blog post on the Best Seasonal Flowers to Bondi:

• Don't just list the flowers, list them and tell your audience, in detail, why they are the best
• Give examples of flowers that don't suit certain times of the year, and why, from you expert experience
• Share real shop stories, things you have done, perhaps even mistakes you have made early on in you florist career

Common Mistakes to Avoid

• Don't create duplicate content across location pages, like I have mentioned, make each page, with the love and care that is needed. 
• Each page needs unique, valuable content specific to that location. Avoid keyword stuffing or over-optimisation. Focus on creating helpful content that serves real customers.
• Don't build 30 new pages in a week, build 1 a week for as long as it takes. This way not only will it give you time to really put in a huge effort for each page, it won't flag any Google spam content warnings.
• When using Ai, only use it to help you build the structure of a page, then you write the rest by hand. In a later post coming next month I will go into far greater detail on this.
• Don't create a landing page for the sake of it, only create landing location pages for areas that you can actually deliver flowers to
• When writing content don't make promises you cannot keep

Landing Page Creation FAQ

How many location pages should I create at once?

Don't try to build 30 pages in a week. We strongly advise creating just one page a week. This allows you to put the necessary love and care into making each page unique and valuable. It's a marathon, not a sprint, and this approach avoids any potential spam flags from Google.

Can I just copy my main page content and change the suburb name?

Absolutely not. This is a common mistake and the fastest way to have your pages ignored by Google. Each location page must have unique content that speaks to your connection with that specific community. Share real stories, mention local landmarks you deliver to, and write from the heart.

So, I can't say "Florist in Clovelly" if my shop is in Bondi?

That's correct. Claiming to be a "Florist in" a suburb where you don't have a physical shop is misleading and a breach of Australian Consumer Law (ACL). Instead, you should phrase it as "Flower Delivery to Clovelly" or "We Deliver Flowers to Clovelly". It's a small change in words but a massive difference in honesty and legality.

How long will it take for my new location pages to rank on Google?

Many SEO guides will give you a generic answer of "3-6 months," but frankly, we don't believe that. We have seen that pages built with true E-E-A-T—sharing real expertise, stories, and authority—can start seeing significant results much faster because they genuinely serve the customer better than the competition.

How many words do I need on each location page?

Forget about word count. The "300-500 words" rule is a myth. You need enough words to be helpful and to prove your E-E-A-T. A heartfelt, honest 150-word story about a delivery to a local hospital is infinitely more valuable than 500 words of generic fluff about the town's history. Focus on value, not volume.

What's the single most important thing to write about on these pages?

Your genuine connection to the area and its residents. Don't just list landmarks; tell a story about delivering wedding flowers to that venue. Don't just say you deliver to a hospital; mention how you can help a customer send get-well flowers to a loved one at Prince of Wales Hospital. Make it real, make it personal, and make it helpful.

Conclusion

Building effective location pages is a proven strategy for expanding your florist business beyond your local area like the Bondi examples I have used.

Success requires patience and consistency. Location pages typically take 3-6 months to rank well in search results but this is only general advice and I don't believe this for a second. Florists who invest in proper local SEO strategies that I have mentioned, like writing with high levels of E-E-A-T above often see significant returns through increased traffic, better rankings, and higher sales in far less time than that.

The key is providing genuine value to customers in each target location while optimising for search engines with great use of meta titles and meta descriptions, and some really great blog article. Focus on building real relationships in your target communities with venues and local businesses. When done correctly following my advice, location pages become a sustainable source of new customers and business growth.

View our Florist Lounge, where you can find all our articles that have a goal of helping florists and their businesses.