How to choose the best keywords for your garden center

Keywords help people to find your garden center online and improve your website’s ranking on local Google searches. But how do you choose the best keywords for your garden center or plant nursery?

Believe it or not, choosing the top keywords for garden centers shouldn’t be random.  Here are some keyword explanations and keyword strategies to help you.

What is a keyword?

A keyword is a word, phrase, or acronym that people type into a search engine to find relevant content.  For example, if people are looking for garden centers in Ohio, then they may type “garden centers in Ohio” or “Ohio garden center” into a search.

The effectiveness of keywords relies on monthly search volume, competition/difficulty, and intent/relevance.

• Monthly search volume is the number of times people search for a specific keyword each month.

• Competition/difficulty is how difficult it is to rank highly in a search for a specific keyword.  A common keyword, such as “garden,” is difficult to rank well in search results because of its widespread use on the Internet. 

  A less common and more specific keyword phrase can rank well in search results.   For example, “garden centers that sell purple flowers” may be easy to rank highly in search results because there are not many instances of it online.

  The difficulty lies in choosing popular keywords that people use often (but that are difficult to rank highly for) and specific, niche keywords that people use infrequently (but are easy to rank highly for).

• Intent/relevance refers to how closely related the keyword is to the content that it’s attached to.

Now that we’ve covered the three main parts of a keyword, let’s discuss why keywords are important.

Why are keywords important?

Keywords are important because they help people to find you on the Internet.  You could have a beautiful website filled with important and valuable information.  But, without keywords, it’s unlikely that many people will see your website and, in turn, visit your garden center.

Keywords are also essential to creating an effective search engine optimization (SEO) strategy.  You can read about how to create a garden center SEO strategy that actually works in our post, “How to Win Local SEO for Your Garden Center.”

Search engines rank your content higher or lower based on your keywords as well.  If the keywords are not deemed effective, then search engines will rank your content low in their search results. This could determine if your website shows up on the first page or the fourth page (where people rarely go) of a Google search.

Keywords are also important because they tell search engines that you are:

• an expert in the garden center industry,

• an authority in the garden center world and in your local community, and

• a trustworthy source for garden center information.

Four Strategies for How to Choose Keywords for Garden Centers

There are about a million words to choose from in the English language.  So, how do you choose keywords for your garden center?  Here are four strategies that you can use.

1. Think about the user’s intent for searching.

Why is the user searching in the first place?  Consider the following questions:

• What do many of your customers ask about?

• Why would someone want to find your business?

• What is your content about?  What does it explain?

• What is your content selling?

• What are the needs of the searcher?

• How does your content meet the needs of the searcher?

• What would you put into a search engine to find your garden center?

2. Have a mix of short and long keywords.

For short words, keep the keyword to one or two words.  These should be about broad topics such as “gardens,” “flowers,” “shrubs,” “flowering trees,” etc.

For longer keywords, try to stick to three or four words for each keyword phrase.  These should be about specific topics, such as “Ohio fall flowers” or “best soil for vegetables.”

3. Be selective.

Selecting specific keywords makes it simpler to monitor their performances compared to using many keywords at once.

Choose 1-4 main keywords for each webpage or social media post and keep them focused on a single topic.  Use variations of the main keywords as secondary keywords, and place them in your header tags and content.

4. Make your keywords local.

“Local” means that the keywords connect to your specific location.  This will help your garden center to appear in search results for people who can physically visit your garden center.

It’s great if people can find your website halfway across the world.  But if they can’t physically visit your store, then they probably won’t bring you revenue unless you have an online shop and can ship products to them.

As an example, if you live in Ohio, then one of your keyword phrases may be “gardening in Ohio,” “growing tomatoes in Ohio,” or “Ohio marigolds.”  These keyword phrases include “Ohio” because you want to speak to your Ohio audience in the hopes that they find you through their Internet searches and visit your garden center.  

Bottom line: local keywords get customers to visit your garden center.

Where do I put keywords?

There are three main places to put your keywords.

1. Meta descriptions and URLs.  Your webmaster can help you in putting keywords into your meta descriptions and URLs.

2. Titles. Put your best keywords into your title. A title should tell the audience what the article or blog post is about with a little tease built in to entice them to read the full post.  You can also put keywords into your subheadings.

3. Content.  It’s great if you can have your keywords occur about 7 to 10 times in a 1,000-word blog post.

However, there’s a balance between sprinkling your keywords throughout your content and still having your content feel natural.  You don’t want your reader to feel as if you are shoving your article full of keywords like you shove stuffing into a Thanksgiving turkey.  You also don’t want your content to feel contrived or awkward.

When in doubt, prioritize clarity and sounding natural in your content. 

When you first start working with keywords, it can feel overwhelming.  But if you keep practicing, researching, and analyzing the performance of your keywords, then you’ll:

• increase the effectiveness of your garden center’s SEO marketing,

• appear higher on search engines, such as Google,

• position your garden center as a trustworthy authority on gardening in your local community, and

• reach more people in your community, thereby increasing your foot traffic and revenue.

How to Select Keywords for Your Garden Center

To start selecting keywords for your garden center, consider typing in a keyword into Google’s search bar.  Note what suggestions pop up while you type.  This is a free and easy way to get keyword ideas.

Some other tools you can use to generate keywords are Google Keyword Planner, SEMRush, and Moz Keyword Explorer. You can also check out some of the most popular plant keywords.

Need Help?

If you need help with finding keywords for your garden center, creating a consistent newsletter, or with other garden center marketing, then feel free to reach out to us at McCusker’s Marketing for Garden Centers.  Garden centers are our specialty!

McCusker’s Marketing for Garden Centers provides high-quality, custom marketing to family-owned, independent garden centers.  We specialize in getting our garden centers more foot traffic, helping them to compete with big box stores, and telling our garden centers’ unique stories.

We at McCusker’s Marketing for Garden Centers love garden centers, we love making America more beautiful by uplifting local garden centers, and we’d love to help you in your garden center marketing journey.  We can’t wait to meet you!

Phone: 440-822-9260
Email: Rebecca@McCuskersMarketing.com