I’ve been lucky enough to work with Petalhead, a dried flower wedding florist based in Cheltenham.

Whilst doing some research for my own upcoming wedding (!!!), I came across Petalhead’s site through an affiliate link. Upon looking at the website to get a feel for what Petalhead offers and whether I’d like to go down the dried flower route for my wedding, I noticed that some of the pages were missing, incomplete, or it wasn’t entirely clear what I was looking at - especially as someone who hasn’t really researched dried flowers before!

I reached out to Alex at Petalhead, after which we had a lengthy conversation - which was easy to do as Alex is so lovely - and outlined what needed to be done on the website. After this conversation, we decided the best course of action was to split this project into two phases.

Alex is Petalhead, simply put. Due to the seasonal nature of weddings, her workload can vary massively throughout the year. As she is working solo, Alex needed to add more of a self-serving function to the website to educate site visitors, answering questions that would otherwise come to her inbox - especially when she’s got those gorgeous arrangements to be working on!

We agreed that the best place to start (phase one of the project) would be with the missing FAQs page, adding in some more information about who she is - as when you’re running a small business it’s nice to put a name to a face - and distinguishing between the different products she offers. We also developed a more comprehensive contact form so that Alex has more information to work with when suggesting flowers to prospects, and added a page outlining the Petalhead approach.

Using Alex’s input, based on questions she regularly receives from prospects or during her initial calls, a Frequently Asked Questions page was developed. This encompasses questions around dried flowers, their longevity, how to take care of them, the types of flowers that Alex uses, and high-level information around payment and delivery.

Adding information about dried flowers makes the website more accessible to people who haven’t purchased dried flowers before, or might be unsure as to whether dried flowers are the right choice of decor for their wedding day.

Alex’s ‘about’ section was previously at the bottom of the FAQs page (see image above), and was a very brief introduction to herself. Using this information, as well as some snippets from captions of Instagram posts, the ‘about’ story evolved to include more about Alex’s journey and why she likes to work with dried flowers, as well as some information around her style of work.

It was suuuper important here that, when updating the ‘about’ story, it felt like you were listening to a person. When chatting with Alex, she has a very bright, energetic, and enthusiastic personality and I wanted to make sure you still got this feeling even when reading words from a page.

An approach - or process - page isn’t always necessary. However, when working with smaller businesses, it can be useful to understand what the working relationship will look like. Alex noted that this topic often comes up in her conversations, but it felt like too much information to put in the FAQ section of the site. Therefore, sitting in the about section, Alex now has a new page about her approach to make it clearer to prospects on how she likes to work, further educating the reader and helping their decisions in their buying journey.

Alex previously had several basic contact forms on different pages of her site, comprising name, email, and a short message. After speaking to Alex, she highlighted that her initial conversations would be easier and more fulfilling if she knew some more information from the outset as it would give her time to come up with ideas and suggestions for the newlyweds to be.

Alex was very understanding that not everybody knows exactly what they want their wedding day to look like, but advised that even some inspiration pictures or a link to a Pinterest board can make a big difference in guiding her conversations.

I then created a more comprehensive contact form to include answering options for colour scheme, budget, items interested in, and a section for inspiration pictures and links. I hear that filling out forms can be quite arduous when planning a wedding, so many of these fields are optional to avoid form fatigue!

Looking at the wedding flowers and subpages for Alex’s products, I noticed that the images (and whilst they do speak for themselves!) weren’t massively descriptive.

The copy on the parent wedding flowers page has since been updated, adding in SEO keywords and amending any incorrect heading tags so the page flows better. This includes adding in more benefits of having dried flowers and descriptions of each type of product.

There are three different types of wedding bouquet style that Petalhead has to offer, which was previously displayed only through headings and images. I have since added descriptions, again whilst considering SEO keywords, for the three types of bouquets and updated the heading tags.

I replicated this for the hair accessories page as it follows the same format as bridal bouquets, so it is clearer for the reader to work out which accessory is most suitable for them.

Within a week of making the changes to the Petalhead site - including making sure all the slugs and heading tags correctly correspond, using long tail keywords to improve SERP rankings - there were some great results!!

Really exciting to see Petalhead's SERP rankings improve despite the website not needing to boast lots of supporting content. Do bear in mind that Alex isn't looking for major growth at this stage so that she can manage her workload effectively, especially when it's peak wedding season, but it's good to know her online visibility is already improving.

If this is what can be achieved in a short timeframe, then I'm really looking forward to seeing what more Alex and I can achieve together longer term!