What type of jewelry website would you prefer? One with a product catalog on the home page and no jewelry store details other than online selling? Or would you prefer a website that has detailed store information in addition to a full catalog of all the items you carry in the store?
It really doesn't matter which you choose, just as long as you take the time to learn what will attract buyers to your site. What attracts buyers? Words do.
The more words you put on your site the better the chances are that you will attract random organic traffic to your site. Yesterday we explained the value of adding a blog to your site. But what if you simply didn't want to do that?
One common strategy for optimizing large e-Commerce sites is to create dedicated landing pages for sections of the catalog. Another common name for these landing pages is "doorway pages."
In many cases these doorway/landing pages are poor-quality pages that are optimized for a specific keyword or phrase. The hope is that they will rank for a specific phrase then funnel customers to other product pages on a site.
Unfortunately, this strategy usually backfires for everyone who attempts it. Why? Because jewelers never write enough information on the landing page. Let's explain...
The typical doorway page will have one photo for each of the sub sections it represents. If it's a doorway to rings, it might have a photo of a solitaire ring, a 3 stone ring and an eternity ring. Next to each of these 3 photos will be a very terse description of that class of products.
What use is a terse description? Actually, it's no use. It doesn't answer a full question, it adds no value to the internet, and usually it doesn't help the consumer at all.
Instead of that typical landing page, you should write long enough descriptions for each section to bring your word count to 400. With 3 sections that would be at least 133 words each.
Then, next to each photo, you should also include quick links to price sorting or characteristic sorting. For example have "$1000 - $2000" as one link, "$2000 - $3000" as another. You could also have a link for "less than 1ct" and "1ct to 2ct" as another. These links will help the customer find what they want faster, and improve customer experience.
Hopefully after implementing these landing page adjustments you will actually start noticing your doorway pages in your analytics more often.
