As a local retail jeweler, you are faced with many advertising difficulties compared to large jewelry chain stores like Jared, Zales, Kay, JCPenny and so many others. They have millions of dollars to throw at their national advertising and branding.
These large companies create buzz around their brands and consumers naturally remember the ads, slogans, and jingles that are repeated effectively in large, unified branding campaigns.
The word of mouth alone creates online interest and random link sharing to all of these big brand websites. As a result of this link sharing, these companies gain incredibly super ranking in the search engines that will easily bury your search engine efforts as a local jeweler.
So don't fight those big brands. Instead, you need to compete on your home turf.
The local brands will not spend advertising money to compete within the local internet arena. Sterling Jewelers operates 1,414 jewelry stores and JCPenny operates 1,107, but they are not foxing to optimize their websites and online marketing for the local town of Springfield.
This works especially in your favor because you can include town names, zip codes and other local geographic landmarks on your website. Those large brands would never do that. The closest they will come to local optimization is including a zip code search on the main corporate site.
While you work on your organic search engine optimization, make sure you include your town, zip code and state on many pages of your website, if not in the footer of every page.
As your customers become more savvy with new Internet developments, their searches for "jewelry stores in Springfield" will increase. This is the SEO arena you should be fighting in.
