The Flower Guy.Com

My interest in looking at theFlowerGuy.Com website was sparked by a discussion over at FlowerChat.com. In that regard, some florists have noticed that TheFlowerGuy is ranking in Google for their own shop names and even phone numbers. The questions being asked are: 

1. What are the motives behind the use of real-florist addresses & phone numbers on TheFlowerGuy.com? 
   
2. How are they ranking so well? 
   

Before we take a look at that however, here are some tech specs of the site:

Whois Record Registrant for TheFlowerGuy: 

Send Flowers Today

Jamie Doverspike

508 Suite D East Mountain Street

Kernersville, NC 27284

SEO Consultant for TheFlowerGuy.com:

Brad Henry of SEOSLAP.Com (as gleaned from here & here) 

Other current info: 

Google PageRank Value: 2

Current Backlink Count: Under 200

Age of website: March 2002

Current .EDU Backlink Count: N/A

Current .GOV Backlink Count: N/A

DMOZ: N/A

Yahoo! Directory: N/A

In reviewing the specs nothing unusual stands out as a website that might be involved in an aggressive offsite SEO campaign (e.g. paid link-votes). Instead, its strong web-presence in search engines seem to stem from good old fashion onsite optimization.

The current SEO for TheFlowerGuy.com, Brad Henry, apparently has had experience working with YellowPages.com. According to his SEO site:

“While doing online marketing sales with YellowPages.com, I was able to see the value of having a listing in a website that could potentially deliver qualified leads and wanted to take marketing a step further.”

Brad seems to be aware that the online florist world suffers from a lack of unique content. So in an effort to make TheFlowerGuy.Com a little different and pedal toward what Google and other search engines are looking for, the site plays into elements of both the Yellow Pages feel & florist online ordering. 

As is well known, Google favors websites that lean in the direction of "information," and TheFlowerGuy.Com website fits the mold. If you browse deep within their pages to a particular city, you will notice that the website not only lists real flower shop addresses and phone numbers, but it also lists the same information for Hospitals & Funeral Homes.

While Google may like the combo, as probably the Hospitals & Funeral Homes (who probably don't care), many florists arn't so keen to find their address and phone numbers on a competitors website. 

If I were one of those florists who had an issue with TheFlowerGuy's ranking in my area, I would see to it that my floral website out ranked TheFlowerGuy, and then I would create pages on different websites and/or blogs about my floral shop and rank those pages beneath my own in an effort to push TheFlowerGuy down in the search results. 

The best way to fight SEO is with SEO.