Have you ever seen Best in Show? Clematis growers, gardeners and enthusiasts take this flower or “queen of the vines” very seriously. We worked with Roseville Farms in Apopka, FL, the largest producer of the flower in North America, to help put their direct-to-consumer website, clematis.com, on the map.

Roseville Farms supplies most of the major, national home and garden chains with clematis bulbs. Their operation is so enormous that they decided to take their premium stock of flowers direct to the consumer with clematis.com making this lovely plant available without the middle man and direct to the grower or gardener.

The Power of a URL

Roseville procured buyclematisdirect.com to build their ecommerce site and sell their flowers, both cut clematis and bulbs, directly to the consumer. This is not a bad URL at all. BUT as part of our “deep dive” to understand the client, their business goals, and their audience we uncovered the fact that they owned clematis.com. This was an informational site that was no longer maintained and just left there to “wither on the vine.” We commandeered some of the site’s informational content and worked it into the new site to help strengthen the website’s overall page copy. Next, we changed the site from buyclematisdirect.com to the grandaddy, clematis.com. Immediately putting the company at a great advantage.

Search Engine Optimization

We continued our search engine optimization project by working with the web agency to:

• Revisit and refine the sitemap and information architecture
• Basic keyword research
• Refresh page titles, URLs, and page headings
• Look for internal linking opportunities
• Edit and revise copy for hundreds of products
• Build a succinct and clear meta copy strategy for every page by using the keyword research to inform the meta page titles and meta descriptions
• Relabel nearly all site images and apply keyword research to alt titles and image descriptions
• Google Analytics implementation
• Submission to Google Webmaster Tools

Outcome

Clematis.com went from low to no rank on search engine results to showing up on the first page for more than half a dozen clematis-related queries. Even more queries returned second and third page listings. As a result, unique queries, web traffic, and overall online sales increased sharply.