We're deep enough into January now that you shouldn't have holiday related marketing appearing on your website any more. The holiday season is over, post-holiday sales are completed, and it's time to pack away all those store and decorations for another 10 months.
Although it might seem intuitive that you need to take holiday ads off your website, there's another similar and common website problem that many jewelry store owners fall into.
In a recent Daily Golden Nugget we explained that your SEO will improve if you put coming soon pages on your website with a message that says more than just "coming soon." Once found, Google will revisit these empty pages on a regular basis. When you finally do add content to the page, it will be found by Google much faster than creating a new page and publishing it the same day.
There's a drawback to this approach though. Unless you intend to add content within 30 days, don't create those coming soon pages. This does not represent you well, and it makes your website visitors think you really don't care.
As we research the web of online jewelry we see these coming soon pages all the time. There's a little tell tale sign that shows when the jewelry store doesn't care... the Copyright date in the footer.
It's pretty aggravating to find a "coming soon" page when the copyright says 2009. This tells the modern day consumer two thing:
1. You have not updated your website in years; therefore nothing here is current. Out of date information is always misleading and incorrectly priced.
2. You don't care enough to let your customers know what you have in your store, so why should they bother to make an in-person visit. You might not even exist anymore.
If you do not have the time or the money to update your website then you need to at least make it appear to be long term sustainable. Here's how...
Ways to make your website look current even if you don't plan on updating it:
1. Remove all items with date references.
2. Take out dates shown on photo galleries.
3. Take the year out of your copyright statement in your footer.
4. Remove any indication of dated store events.
5. Hide the dates shown in your posted blog and newsletters.
6. Write your store hours in an evergreen way, e.g. "Jan - May & Sept - Nov: Tuesday - Friday 10am-5pm, Saturday 10am - 2pm; June - Aug: Tuesday - Thursday 10am - 5pm, Friday 10am - 4pm, Saturday 10am - 2pm; December: Open 7 days 10am - 6pm"
Each of these tricks will hide the fact that you've not updated your website in a while. It doesn't matter why you haven't updated the site; the point is that you don't want to lose a customer because your website appears out of date.
