From our own measurements we know that the average number of organic visitors to a non e-commerce jewelry website are about 45 people per day. When we say "organic" we mean purely found from a search engine without any outside influence. In other words, that's 45 people without factoring in any SEO efforts, social media, or paid ads.
45 is a pretty dismal number and yet many jewelers don't know where to start to increase that number. Sure, you can create a Facebook Page, a Google+ Page, pay for ads... but really it should start with bulking up your existing website content and adding new pages to your site.
Haphazardly adding content to your website will probably waste a lot of unnecessary time. More visitors will find you through organic search engine results in the month of December during the holiday buying rush, and therefore it's a good time to take notice of visitor clicks and usability trends. It's important to note that the increase in visitors is not because your organic listings suddenly got better, but rather because there are more people searching for random phrases that trigger your website in unusual ways.
Let's take a look at Google Analytics to find out what these unusual ways are; this will give us a good starting point for what should be bulked up on your website. These directions will assume you are using the new Google Analytics version.
If you have one website in your account you should land on the "Home" tab after logging into Analytics. In the new interface the large orange bar at the top is actually a "tab" menu. You will need to click on the words "Standard Reporting" to activate that tab.
Once looking at the Standard Reporting screen you will see a menu on the left, listing the following:
> AUDIENCE
> ADVERTISING
> TRAFFIC SOURCES
> CONTENT
> CONVERSIONS
Click on Traffic Sources and you will then see this sub menu:
> TRAFFIC SOURCES
--Overview
--Sources
--Search Engine Optimization
We have to keep drilling down, so click Sources and you should see this sub-menu:
--Sources
---All Traffic
---Direct
---Referrals
---Search
---Campaigns
We're almost there, so click Search and then the Organic link under that to finally see the prize we are looking for: the Organic Search Traffic list of keywords.
Many of the top keyword phrases this screen shows will probably include your store's name, domain name, and your town. These are quite common and expected and each one probably has a few dozen or maybe even a hundred visitors. What we want are the diamonds in the rough that are all the way at the bottom of this list.
Reverse sort the list according to the number of visitors; click on the column heading marked "Visits" to do this.
Now look through this list for common, but unexpected phrases. Here are a few from our sample set of data:
18k gold halo engagement ring
best place to sell gold jewelry
anniversary ring trends
In your own data set you should see your town name appear many times in association with other random jewelry phrases. As you keep track of these phrases you should start to get a sense of what your customers are expecting to find on your website.
Take note of the far right column; that should be your Bounce Rate. For each keyword phrase you find appropriate, you should look at the Bounce Rate. Each keyword phrase with a bounce rate of more than 50% should be reviewed and more content added to your website where appropriate.
If you sell Elma Gil in your store, you should have that mentioned on your website. But if you see the phrase "elma gil diamond semi mount" with a 100% bounce rate then you know your Elma Gil information is seriously lacking. Add a few more paragraphs to your Elma Gil page or, even better, add another page with specific information about those semi mounts.
The bottom line for today's Daily Golden Nugget is that December is not just your busiest time of the year for sales, but also the best time to collect data for your future website revamp. You don't necessarily need to monitor your analytics data every day, just make sure it's being tracked and be ready to look at it in January when the website revamp starts.
