Every website I track has its own set of unique referral sources. Even so, there are a few referral websites that always appear in the list of common referral sources.The last time I took a close look at the common referral website numbers was March 2012 and I'm including them here for your cross reference. This is my list of the most common referral websites to send visitor traffic to jewelry websites and the percentage of the referral traffic as a whole.
Yellowpages.com
August 2013: 34.44%
March 2012: 13.04%
Facebook.com desktop
August 2013: 13.33%
March 2012: 34.27%
Yelp
August 2013: 11.11%
March 2012: 5.12%
August 2013: 9.63%
March 2012: 75
YellowBook
August 2013: 5.37%
March 2012: 4.48%
Yahoo Local
August 2013: 5.37%
March 2012: 4.48%
Facebook Mobile
August 2013: 5.00%
March 2012: 4.09%
Superpages
August 2013: 2.78%
March 2012: 6.14%
YellowPages, Yelp, and Pinterest have gain considerable amount of visitor referrals while Facebook has lost more than half of its referral visitors. Before you run out to pay for another YellowPages ad you should consider the SEO of your own website. Yes it's true that YellowPages has a high referral rate but that's only because most jewelers at one time paid for YP ads but don't spend any money on properly SEOing their website. Thus YP ranks higher because they are a lean mean SEO machine.
The drop in referral from Facebook desktop is seriously bad news because it shows that Facebook advertising is losing its effectiveness. This hard number contradicts what other industry experts say about the power of Facebook marketing for bringing visitors to your website.
As I said, the statistics shown above represent the common referral sources, but every local jeweler can acquire referrals from other sources that are unique to them. Some examples include:
* business directories for the county
* local newspaper listings, usually as a result of print advertising
* business directories that cater to tourists
* membership websites like JA, AGS, RJO, or IJO
* designer websites, usually from a zip code search
* the Wedding Wire website
Acquiring referral links from other websites is an important part of building your online reputation through link building. The more links you have, the better off you are at ranking well in search engines. With this in mind, you should think about every organization that you are a member of and make sure that your business is listed in their online directory of members.
This includes your local Chamber of Commerce, LeTip, BNI, or any other membership organization that you pay dues to. In exchange for your dues, you should at least have a link from their website to yours.
After digesting all these numbers today, you can see that it's important to still have inbound links from other referral websites, but don't concentrate on any one particular site.
I'm tracking 446 different referral sources but most of them are local organizations that are unique to each retail jewelry store. The best strategy for building links and acquiring referrals is to build a network with other local businesses in town.
