Things change; they always do. That's the nature of the world, of business, of life, of love. Sometimes things get better and sometimes the unexpected happens. A gift of jewelry is given during the best of times, during the worst of times, to signify a new beginning, and to bring an event to a close. Pandora Jewelry built an entire business around life's precious moments. Perhaps it's this close connection to the human condition that motivates you, the independent retail jewelry store owner.
Change is also the nature of the internet. We estimate the best practices of website design change about every 18 months, and search engine optimization techniques change every 2 months. In fact, today we're expecting that Google will announce the 30 to 50 changes they made to their search algorithm in April 2012.
Every time Google announces these changes, all the SEO experts scramble to check their website stats. Even we do it, and this is how we found out last month that the word "bridal" is now disassociated from jewelry.
As a jeweler, you learned your trade through apprenticeships, formal training, or just from being in the family business. Your skills are honed over time.
A career as an SEO professional is very demanding, requiring a lot of reading, experimenting, relearning, failure, and little bit of success. The SEO re-education process is ongoing, and everything learned each month needs to be immediately applied to customer websites in order to keep them at their top ranking.
This continual process involves careful strategies, implementations, and measurement. Measurement is vital otherwise you won't know if your SEO strategies are working each month.
It takes a lot of manpower to manage a good SEO campaign. Someone needs to gather the raw content, then write the blog entries, feed the social media, recode the website, and then read the reports 30 days later.
Hiring an SEO professional requires a monthly commitment, and that commitment will be expensive because you need to pay for all the manpower that's needed to make SEO work.
Additionally, if you live in a metropolitan area you should expect to pay more for your local SEO efforts. This is not simply because it's more expensive to live in or near a city, but because your competition is also trying to reach #1 in the ranking results. More competition means more manpower is needed for your own SEO strategies.
The bottom line of today's Daily Golden Nugget is that SEO is not something you learn today and know forever. Two months from now something will be different, and someone will have to learn a new technique. If you're serious about attracting customers through organic search you need to budget big for your SEO campaign.
