Remember my blog entry titled “Where art thou FTD.com”?

Well guess what? FTD.com is climbing the results really fast right now with a johnny-come-late SEO campaign that may land the floral giant in the top 5 with just days remaining before Thanksgiving.

For those just joining my blog, I noted last week that FTD.com was missing in action for the search phrase “Thanksgiving flowers”; and by missing in action, I meant that they did not rank in the top 1000 results.

But in the last few hours they have made considerable head way in an effort to be apart of the top 10 entourage. Currently placing in the upper portion of the 2^nd page, their revised SEO strategy looks pretty strong this time around.

In that regard, they’ve recently changed their title tag to reflect “Thanksgiving flowers” as we see here: [note: three or four days ago the word “flowers” was not present in both their title area or on the header of the actual page]

 Thanksgiving Flowers, Gifts, and Thanksgiving Gift Baskets

Enjoy Thanksgiving flowers on your table or send Thanksgiving flowers and gifts to a loved one at FTD.com.
www.ftd.com/thanksgiving-11-22-ctg/occasion-thanksgiving/ 

And they strategically placed a strong link-vote directly on the lower half of their homepage. Since their homepage carries a PageRank value of 6, Google is interpreting that vote as being weighty. Hence, it is boosting their Thanksgiving page into position in the Google results.

I hope my little 5-page $10 dollar website holds its own all the way up there on top as the big boys try & muscle their way in for my spot.

With all this sudden movement from FTD.com, you'd think they were reading my blog or something......nahh ;-)

Why am I so focused on Thanksgiving? And why post stats for my Thanksgiving website?

Well, over the last 5 years or so our family flower shop (we have two of them) has experience a significant decline in local sales for the Thanksgiving holiday. What used to be an exciting and fast paced holiday with lots of planning related to staffing, ordering supplies, ordering enough flowers to get us through, and the positioning of flower delivery vans with full tanks ready to go, has turned into nothing but an ordinary day at the flower shop.

My thinking behind ranking our Thanksgiving website was to put our flower shop at center-stage globally. I figured that if Thanksgiving was going to happen at all in the retail sense, it would likely happen at our flower shop as we send flowers thoughout America.

Any way, now that our Thanksgiving website is strategically positioned I thought I would share near real-time stats that may be useful in understanding possible trends for Thanksgiving as it relates to the floral industry. I'm hoping that other florists will find this process interesting and useful as you interpret these stats on your own.

Feel free to comment and leave your own reflections of these stats in the future. 

thanksgivingflowers.net - Search Volume for 11/12/08

Today’s rankings for thanksgivingflowers.net in Google: 

"Thanksgiving flowers" ranking 1st

"Thanksgiving flower" ranking 1st

"Thanksgiving flower arrangement" ranking 1st  

"Thanksgiving flower arrangements" ranking 1st  

"Thanksgiving flower centerpiece" ranking 1st  

"Thanksgiving flower centerpieces" ranking 2nd

 Traffic overview pie:

Search Engines91.00 (89.22%) Referring Sites10.00 (9.80%) Direct Traffic1.00 (0.98%)

What people actually typed to reach the site:

Dimension: Keyword		Visits	Pages/Visit	Avg. Time on Site	% New Visits	Bounce Rate
1.	thanksgiving flowers	48	1.29	00:00:19	89.58%	79.17%
2.	thanksgiving centerpieces	11	1.00	00:00:00	100.00%	100.00%
3.	thanksgiving flower arrangements	9	1.11	00:00:10	100.00%	88.89%
4.	flowers for thanksgiving	3	1.33	00:01:37	100.00%	66.67%
5.	thanksgiving flower	3	1.00	00:00:00	100.00%	100.00%
6.	thanksgiving floral arrangements	2	1.50	00:00:08	100.00%	50.00%
7.	"thanksgiving flower arrangements"	1	1.00	00:00:00	100.00%	100.00%
8.	"thanksgiving flowers"	1	1.00	00:00:00	100.00%	100.00%
9.	+thanks +giving flower arrangements	1	1.00	00:00:00	100.00%	100.00%
10.	best flowers for a thanksgiving centerpiece	1	1.00	00:00:00	100.00%	100.00%
11.	discount thanksgiving flowers	1	1.00	00:00:00	100.00%	100.00%
12.	flower arrangements for thanksgiving	1	2.00	00:01:13	100.00%	0.00%
13.	flowers thanksgiving centerpieces	1	1.00	00:00:00	100.00%	100.00%
14.	thanksgiving arrangements	1	1.00	00:00:00	100.00%	100.00%
15.	thanksgiving centepieces	1	1.00	00:00:00	100.00%	100.00%
16.	thanksgiving centerpiece flower arrangements	1	1.00	00:00:00	100.00%	100.00%
17.	thanksgiving flower arragement	1	2.00	00:00:10	100.00%	0.00%
18.	thanksgiving flower centerpieces	1	1.00	00:00:00	100.00%	100.00%
19.	thanksgiving funeral flowers	1	1.00	00:00:00	100.00%	100.00%
20.	thanksgivingflowers	1	1.00	00:00:00	100.00%	100.00%

Over the years I've observed patterns of onsite activity before a floral holiday and this holiday appears to be no different. Typical patterns include short stays on the website which indicates a lot of browsing and surfing due to the general interest of Thanksgiving. As we move closer, search volumes will increase and stays will be much longer as searchers will become more serious.