Today's Jewelry Website Review comes from Freemont, CA. To find this week's review candidate I used Chrome's incognito mode and searched "jewelry store freemont ca." The top 3 answers for that post were from Yelp, followed by the Google+ Local stores. The first store in the +Local list is Chris's Jewelry and their website makes for a good review this week.I hope you will learn something about this jeweler's website that you can apply to your own...
Here's the website: http://www.chris-jewelry.com.com; you might want to open it up to follow along as you read this review.
Google+ Naming Issue:
There are 7 jewelers listed in the Google+ Local list on my search results page. The listing for this store shows this:
Chris' Jewelry
www.chris-jewelry.com
4.8 stars, 5 Google reviews
As I review this, I see that the Google+ Page was not claimed by the store owner. Google does try to accurately fill in whatever information they can data-mine from the internet and official sources, but it looks like they got the store name slightly incorrect.
The name of the store is Chris's Jewelry, with an apostrophe s. I had to look at the Google Street View of the store to make sure that's what the store sign said. The website even says "Chris's," which means Google got this wrong.
I realize there's going to be some debate over the possessive Chris' vs. Chris's, and it doesn't matter what you learned (or learnt) in school because they chose the store name "Chris's Jewelry."
Someone from their store needs to claim the Google+ Local account and correct this. This simple name issue is appearing in all Google properties and applications. This is a big problem that you shouldn't let happen to you. Make sure you claim your Google+ account.
Go here to do that: https://www.google.com/business/placesforbusiness/
Usability Issues:
I see a problem with their navigation that got a little confusing. They have basic content areas of the site and they have a large product catalog. When you are on the content pages, like Home, About, News, and Contact, there's a product category navigation menu across the top. Then when you click one of those category links, you jump into the catalog where that same menu now appears in the left margin.
I'd rather see the category navigation only appear on the left side. You should never move or modify your navigation menus or list of links unless the user's attention is focused on it while it changes, e.g. an expanding submenu after clicking a heading. Never ever make a navigation element jump from one area of the screen to the other unless you clearly show where it jumped to (neon sign anyone?).
Incorrect SEO Issues:
There's a NEWS link at the top of their page that leads to a large set of articles. The subdirectory/page is /ArticleSubscription/ArticleSubscription.asp.
From what I can tell, their website company is providing them with an ongoing article writing service. Those same articles are appearing on several other websites.
This article about the world's largest diamond is on Chris's website here:
Largest Diamond
But the same article is also on these 3 sites:
Murphey The Jeweler (compare this design to Chris's... *sigh*)
Diamond Guild
Spectrum Jewelry
What we have here is duplicate content. There might be other websites with this same article on it, but this is already bad enough. Google doesn't like when you copy information from another site. You won't get any ranking credit for it; in fact you might even be penalized. In 2012 Google said they would penalize all websites with duplicate content, but recent reports say that the website that posted content first will still get the ranking credit.
Never ever pay a company for editorial content creation unless their contract specifically says they are writing unique articles for you.
Another SEO issue I see is the list of town names at the bottom of all the pages of the site. This is what it says:
Chris's Jewelry is located in Fremont, California and has satisfied customers all over the San Francisco South Bay & East Bay, including Fremont, Union City, Milpitas, San Jose, Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto, Cupertino, Dublin, Pleasanton, and the Silicon Valley
I recognize that as obvious black hat SEO. To correctly associate your store with those 12 towns then they should have written custom jewelry design case studies for people who live in those towns, mentioning the town in the post.
What I Didn't Like About the Site:
* I was disappointed when I found out that the website is completely boilerplate. Their website company, Bizzuka.com, blatantly reused this exact design for MurpheyTheJeweler.com. Chris's website was built in 2009 and the Murphey website has a time stamp of March 2013. Truthfully, this website design was good for mid 2000's but Bizzuka has a lot of really nice looking sites shown in their portfolio. It's very possible this design was part of a low cost package plan for retail jewelers.
*I do not like that the home page of Chris's website says "Welcome to our new website! Now you can browse our inventory and read about all of our great services from the comfort of your home." The time stamp on the website is from May 27, 2009. The lesson to learn here is that you should never post date or event specific messages if you never plan to update your website.
* I found a broken links on their home page that says "CHECK OUT OUR NEW BLOG WITH DAILY POSTINGS!" which links to http://chris-jewelry.tumblr.com/. Somewhere alone the line, their Tumblr account was deleted but their website still links to it.
* I found a broken link on their Custom Jewelry page here:
http://store.chris-jewelry.com/store/c/203-Custom-Jewelry.aspx
That page explains the Matrix software and has a link to a Matrix video on Gemvision.com, but that pages doesn't exist any more.
* Take a look at this page:
http://www.chris-jewelry.com/AboutUs.asp
There are large icons for Facebook, Twitter, and Yelp. All 3 of those icons have broken links. Those same 3 icons are also at the bottom of the page, but this time the Facebook and Yelp links work. The Twitter is still broken. These icons were added to their website in February 2012. That's a long time to have broken social links.
An Extra Comment About Social Networks:
If you are going to link from your website to a social network, then you should make every effort to keep that social network updated. Social networking allows you to post information out there so your customers can read your information using the method they most prefer.
For Chris's Jewelry, they have a Twitter account with only 7 tweets and a Facebook page that is rarely updated.
Their Facebook page shows only a few updates over the last 18 months. Once upon a time it looks like they were posting blogs to their Tumblr account and then sharing those to FB. This was a really good strategy but they didn't keep doing it. Even worse, they deleted their Tumblr and created broken links from their Facebook page.
That's it for this week's basic review; there's a lot to learn from this one.
FTC Notice: I randomly choose this website and won't be telling the retailer jeweler that I'm doing a review. Unless someone else tells them, they will only find out about this review if they examine their Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools. I'm not doing this to solicit business from them, but rather as an educational exercise for everyone. This review is completely impartial and all my comments are listed in the order that I discovered them.
