This is a continuation from yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget on the topic of how to better monetize the website traffic you have now in the wake of Google's Penguin filter.
There are different sources where your website visitors will come from: Organic, Direct, Referrals, Paid. I covered Organic and Direct traffic on Wednesday, and began explaining Referral traffic yesterday.
I've accumulated some interesting statistics about Yelp that need sharing. In case you don't know, Yelp is one of many online business directories that allows you to create your business listing, or manage the one they created for you.
Consumers like Yelp because they make it easy to write online reviews through a smartphone/mobile application or through a PC's website. You should keep on top of these reviews and respond to them, especially if they are negative.
Yelp also has a Yelp Deal feature where a consumer can purchase a special offer through the Yelp system and redeem it in your jewelry store.
What I'm seeing now is that 59% of all referrals from Yelp occur because consumers simply see the Yelp Deal. Naturally if they are offered a deal they will want to see the merchandise you carry, and therefore they click over to see what you've got.
It's a good idea to set up one of these Yelp Deals for yourself.
On average, even if you don't set up a Yelp Deal you will get at least 2.5 more referrals per month. So it's still a good idea to take the 30 minutes or less to verify your jewelry store's listing on Yelp.
Another strong, but varied, referral source are your jewelry vendor sites. Kirk Kara and Mark Schneider are two vendors that always appear in my reports, in addition to many others that also have dealer locators or zip code searches.
The popularity of vendor referrals seems to have a direct correlation to whether or not they have their own offline marketing campaign, like a magazine.
I'm seeing two potential trends right now. The first is a strong customer referral happening on Wednesdays. Again, since Wednesday is also a consistent Organic traffic, and blog traffic day I have to conclude that Hump Day is the day when people like to shop online.
The other trend I'm seeing is a strong customer referral happening between the 20th and 25th monthly. This matches up with the distribution days of many fashion magazines. The correlation I have here is that consumers see the magazine ads, browse the vendor's website, then search for their local dealer.
To maximize the effect of these dealer locators you should give each of your vendors a dedicated URL for their search result. That dedicated URL would redirect to whatever page you designate.
As an example, if I were a dealer for Kirk Kara I would ask them to put www.perosijewelers.com/kk into their zip code search. When a consumer clicks that link I would program the website to recognize the "kk" link, but then redirect the consumer to www.perosijewelers.com/kirk-kara-june-2012-special.html as the special offer for this month.
I would change the "kk" destination URL monthly to better align my website ads with the official Kirk Kara ads for the month.
I have one more type of traffic to tell you about: Paid sources. On Monday I'll tell you about paid traffic sources that will get you banned by Google's Penguin and those that won't.
Have a good weekend.
