Usually a website with a high number of visitors is an indicator that the retail store also has at least a satisfactory level of sales. Those sales could be online or they could be in-store but the website is certainly contributing to those sales.So what's a high number of visitor traffic for a retail jewelry store? Independent retailers should strive for 1100 visitors per month. It might take a while to get there, but you should see a good change in sales once you do, well, assuming you are doing everything right.
When things don't go right you will have a large number of website visitors without a positive effect on your sales. This is when you need to closely examine what's wrong with your website.
A website with 1100 monthly visitors probably has a few dozen blog posts and a few thousand products in online inventory. The 1100 visitor count also indicates that the website is highly ranked.
So what's wrong? Why are the sales low? Here are some potential reasons:
1. the design of the website makes it difficult to use
2. the design of the website is ugly and people don't stay long
3. photography of the product you sell is poor
4. the way you write your online copy sounds bad for your audience
Breaking down the specifics of each one:
1. Difficult Design
Figuring out if this is your problem won't exactly be easy. You need to look at your website's Bounce Rate as reported by Google Analytics, but that won't give you a full idea of what's happening. Testing your design requires you to either hire a testing company or to pay for online tracking that monitors website users. Both options are going to be expensive, but probably not as expensive as the loss of business you are feeling and the cost of redesigning the website.
Once you get real user feedback you will know what to fix. It might be the navigation menus, or it could be how your content is laid out.
2. Ugly Design
This symptom is usually pretty easy to spot simply by looking at your Google Analytics. The bounce rate for the average retail jewelry store should be less than 51%. Anything higher and that should be a red flag. If the bounce rate is above 70% then you probably need to start over with your design.
With 1100 visitors per month you have about 36 per day. You could test a new design by changing all the main landing pages on your site. Design improvements will be reflected by a sudden drop in your bounce rate.
Whatever you do, while making alterations to your design you need to make sure to preserve your exact URL structure. Otherwise you will alienate the search engines and those 1100 visitors will evaporate.
3. Poor Photography
I think the title says it all. It doesn't matter how nice your jewelry looks in person. Website users expect crystal clear photos of jewelry. You are wasting visitor time if your jewelry is dimly lit, gray, and blurry.
Doing your photography right is a full time job, and then difficult to keep up with as your inventory turns. Once you put the time and effort into clean photography, you should see your sales improve.
4. Poor Writing
Successful websites require a lot of written content. Someone needs to do all that writing and it takes a lot of time. There are many companies that offer inexpensive content writing for blogs and product descriptions. Finding your own time to write or to hire an in-house writer is expensive. There are plenty of companies that offer outsourced writing services for $30 or less per written page.
If your goal is to bulk up website content you might be enticed to hire a company that offers $3 per blog post and only pay $300 for 100 blogs. That's surly a great way to bulk your website. However, most writers willing to accept $3 are going to be non native US English speakers with little writing experience and poor skills compared to US standards.
Sadly most website owners don't understand the difference between the quality of work between a $3 per blog writer vs. a $20 per blog writer, and most website owners would not be willing to spend $20 x 100 = $2000 just for blog writing.
Take a good look at how well the information on your website is written. Does it sound too salesy? Is it poorly written? Grammatical mistakes? Who wrote it? Are you proud of it? Answer each of those questions honestly and correct everything that's wrong. Sometimes it's just lousy punctuation and capitalization that can frighten away your customers.
So those are 4 initial things to look at when trying to figure out why your sales are low when you have high visitor traffic. There are actually an unlimited number of reasons why your website could underperform, but you'd have to invest into online measuring tools to figure them out.
