Every year, our eCommerce SEO agency release a report on the plant sector to see who’s performing the best with their online marketing.
In the 2020 report, one brand caught our eye. It was performing incredibly well and had seen a couple of serious upwards jumps in terms of visibility.
That site was Patch Plants.
Take a look at their search visibility over the course of a year:
We decided to jump in and root around their site to see what they’re doing to see such positive growth.
Let’s jump in…
Product Pages that Rank and Bank
When it comes to SEO, every focus is on the big-time category keywords.
In the plant industry, this would include keywords like “indoor plants” and “hanging plants”.
Now, although Patch Plants ranks well for these terms, they’re performing a hell of a lot better on specific plants types.
And they’re achieving this via extensive product pages that both rank and convert.
From a conversion POV…
The above fold content is pretty standard.
You have a sliding picture gallery, a few options, and a big CTA. Nothing too out of the ordinary here.
It’s when you move down the page things start to get exciting (well, exciting for a marketing nerd like me).
They present you with some plant care education and a helpful video with a real human being!
I can’t tell you enough how important it is to actually include a human persona in your marketing and conversion process. It makes the journey feel more personal and authentic.
It also means there is another form of media present on the page, which may or may not have an impact on how high-quality Google perceives the page to be.
The fact there’s information detailing how to look after the plant is also a good objection battler. Some people might be concerned they’ll kill the plant. These facts and tips help allay any fears and anchor expectations for the viewer.
Right at the bottom of the page, there is a section containing some historical context to the Peace Lily and some more facts the viewer could be interested in, including whether or not the plant is toxic to dogs or children.
Now this is both good for conversions and SEO.
Not only are you providing more information about the product but you’re also providing more content for Google to understand what the page is about.
With that being said….
Let’s Look at these Pages from an SEO POV
One thing is for certain…
They’ve clearly built these pages with ranking in mind.
Take the title tags and heading structure, for example.
Despite the title containing “Pippa”, it isn’t actually the H1. The words “Peace Lily” are marked-up as the H1 despite being lower down the page.
It’s a bit of a goofier setup but it means Google has a better understanding of how to rank this page. The last thing they want to have their Peace Lily page ranking for the word “Pippa”!
Aside from the smaller tweaks like the heading mark-up and title tags, the extent of content on the product pages helps Google understand more about what it’s about.
Especially when the page discusses what a Peace Lily is, how to care for it, and information about its history. All this merges together to create comprehensive content that gives Google more of a justification to rank it.
From a simple keyword frequency POV, the main keyword mentioned 6 times throughout the page. Plenty for Google to know what to rank it for.
In terms of semantic keywords, they also reference the Peace Lily’s nicknames and alternative names. Another good way to let Google know what their page is about.
What Does all these Optimisations Result in?
So, all this seems like a lot of work. What exactly is the payoff?
Let’s take a look at the keywords and rankings.
As you can see, they rank ridiculously well for specific plant keywords.
What’s even more awesome is, because these pages are conversion-focused, I would be excited to see what they’re conversion rates are from organic search.
Even better, because these are specific plant searches, the intent is a lot clearer. The people searching these terms know what they want and are being delivered the perfect result from Patch.
If you’re an online plant brand looking to one-up the competition this year and beyond, building out your product pages and drilling down on specific plant types is a good way to go.
A Library of Plant Care Advice
Aside from the product pages doing bits on SERPs, Patch also have an extensive library of plant care advice that is sure to satisfy plant lovers – novice and expert alike.
They have full courses for both indoor…
And outdoor plants.
These courses are awesome.
On a quick note, I love the option to send the course. This is a subtle but effective way to get email addresses to use for follow-up, retargeting, and audience building.
As Google reviews your website as a whole, comparing your pages against each other, having this additional content is great for ranking/SEO.
Supplementary content is something we recommend to all our clients and we find ourselves building out editorial plans for sites on a weekly basis.
The fact that each video is only a minute or so long is great as well. Some people don’t have time to sit down for hours.
So How Does This Content Hub Perform?
Aside from acting a good source of supplementary content, in terms of raw organic performance, I wish I could offer praise.
However, from what I can see, this side of their site doesn’t perform as well as I thought it would.
Although many of the pages are on the first page of Google for the respective keywords, they’re lower down the page. In some cases, important keywords are on the second page of Google!
On face value, I think this could be a result of a lack of content on the information pages.
Take their small guide on watering plants whilst on holiday. The content is quite thin…
If they were to flesh this out, add in some headings, and format it into an article, I’m sure they’ll see some growth.
I also see no internal links. This could be another problem.
However, the internal linking problem isn’t extensive. Other guides seem to link to product pages fairly well.
There is a lot of potential in the plant care hub. Pages like their growing herbs guide are sitting on page two yet have the potential to rank for lot of search terms with good volume.
As you can see, this guide is sitting on page 2 for some pretty lucrative terms.
We optimise content like this all the time and I’m positive with a bit of TLC, these pages could do drastically better.
That’s all folks
Patch Plants has seen some serious growth this year. They saw big jumps near the end of December and saw further jumps in October.
They’re definitely a brand to be watching. Especially if you’re looking to boost your SEO performance and borrow some tips.
If you want us to perform a similar audit of your site, digging into your strategy to see what we could improve, get in touch today using 0800 122 3530.