In these last-minute days before the holiday season kicks into high gear, several jewelers have asked me what they can do to boost their website ranking without going through the process of blog writing. The jewelers who have asked don't have active blogs but they have hundreds or thousands of products on their website.Here are a few simple things you can do to try and boost your own local ranking:
1. Create a Google Sitemap.xml file that include all the pages on your website AND all the products in your product catalog. Submit this file to your Google Webmaster Tools account.
2. Review your website structure. How many levels are there in your navigation tree? There shouldn't be any more than 4 level from the home page because the Google spider will never read that deep into your website. Here's an example of what a level looks like:
Home Page
-- > Services Page (landing page, level 1)
------ > Appraisals Page (sub page under Services, level 2)
------ > Pearl Restringing Page (sub page under Services, level 2)
-- >Product Catalog (main product catalog landing page, level 1)
------ > Rings Section ( sub page under Catalog, level 2)
---------- > Men's Rings (level 3)
---------- > Ladies Rings (level 3)
------------ > Fashion Rings (level 4)
As you can see it does take quite a bit of navigation to site structure to build 4 levels of page groups. You need to restructure your website if you have more than 4.
3. Write longer product descriptions for as many products as you can, starting with your top sellers or products you know will be highly publicized this year. Include the designer name and designer style number which could be written into a verbose description or listed as bullet points.
Don't use the generic product descriptions provided by your vendor, and don't copy them from another website either. They have to be unique. We all know that jewelry is made from precious metals so saying "14K White Gold" is a worthless description for attracting customers. Your product descriptions need to dazzle the reader.
As an example, you can describe how the designer came up with that particular style, or where they drew their inspiration from. If the style is more popular in some far off land then you should say something like "This is a popular style worn by the elite of ______." Of course that "far off land" only needs to be further away than Google's Local Search results. You could also name check any large city from around the world... as long as it's true of course. Name checking celebrities only works if its true and they're in the vendor's literature.
Bulking up your product descriptions is a creative task, but when you are short on time, it should be easier to add a few sentences of descriptions to your products than to develop will rounded blog posts.
