On Thursday last week I presented the top 6 landing pages for retail jewelry websites other than the home page. In reality, the home page accounted for 62.96% of the landing page traffic for the sites I monitor. Other than the home page I tracked 27 other pages of significance, giving you the top 6 in that previous Nugget.Knowing which landing pages are most popular helps you understand what content your website visitors are looking for, which in turn helps you build a better website.
Let me review again how I came up with the percentages below... I aggregated more than 20,000 landing page results from the last 30 days and organized them into meaningful groups. I'm showing you the percentages and my interpretation of them.
1.53% About Us Page
Jewelers tell me that they don't want to include their store history or any details about them at all because (to them) it's boring or unimpressive. Apparently 1.53% of visitor traffic is interested enough in this information to click on it first. Your website needs to be an extension of your store and it needs to establish you as a real business with real people rather than a cold website that's just trying to sell dirt cheap merchandise.
1.52% Store Hours Page
This is an unusual page to find on any jewelry website unless the jeweler following previous suggestions I've made. About four years ago I did a study to see how effective a dedicated store hours page would be on a site. Even though store hour information is usually found on the Contact Page and the Directions page it seemed logical to put a dedicated page on the website to help people who need fast hours. The initial study showed very good results and I had it set up on all the websites my company manages. Google seems to really like this page and it often appears as a Site Link within search results. Even though this page has pretty thin content, it's still drawing 1.52% of all inbound traffic.
1.39% Educational Information
This is a broad group of pages that includes every type of jewelry related educational information. This includes the 4C's, the differences of precious metals, pearls, proposal ideas, and a lot more. This type of content is common all over the internet and you might not think it's important for getting people to your website but apparently 1.39% of visitors believe it is.
1.29% Services Page
I admit that I dislike the generic "service" page that appears on most jeweler's websites. This page is usually nothing more than a bulleted list of all the different things that a jewelry store does. Some of the things included on a typical services page are ear piercing, pearl restringing, custom design, jewelry cleaning, and appraisals. I much prefer that the individual pages be split out but for the jewelers who take the generic approach they attract 1.29% of visitor traffic.
On the other hand, when you do split out the specific services you can provide people with more specific landing pages which will better satisfy their needs. Here's how the landing page percentages worked out for specific service pages:
0.53% Custom Design
0.41% Repairs
0.32% Engraving
0.31% Appraisals
That's a combined total of 1.58% which is greater that the generic services page. If this is not compelling enough then think about it another way... Google wants to lead people to specific pages that answer specific search queries. Therefore specific services pages have a greater chance of ranking and will always attract more people to your site
1.18% Gold Buying Pages
I'm still surprised to see this page appear in the landing page popularity list. Customers are still selling their old, unwanted gold jewelry and this proves it. Every jeweler has their own method of explaining how they buy gold, so sit down and write this out in detail and add it to your website.
There are several more pages in my tracking list that are below the 1% level. Combined they account for 3.53% of the total visitor attraction to your website but individually they really don't plan an important role in bringing visitors. Here's a few:
0.43% Directions Pages
Of the entire set of pages below 1% it's the Directions Page that I often see in listed as a site link in Google search results. For sites that have a Contact, Hours, and Directions I'm seeing the Directions page dropping in landing page popularity. Don't get me wrong; this is still important o have on your website.
0.42% Diamonds Pages
I find this one a little surprising. Most of the jewelers I track have some type of dedicated page about their diamond service. This includes diamond-buying trips to Europe or Africa, specialty diamonds, on-hand loose diamond inventory, and any other page that talks about how the jeweler stocks/acquires/sells their diamonds. With a large variety of information to pull from Google has plenty of opportunity to match customer queries. But it's not happening. This tells me that customers are not searching for diamond as their main search term, or at least the typical jewelry store customer does not care about the price of the diamond.
Hopefully this information will help you better structure your site. There are a lot of additional pages I didn't mention but that's not because they are not important. Your website needs as many ancillary pages as you can possibly create. Between the 11 pages I mentioned today and the 6 last time I've given you the basic sitemap of how to structure your website. Keep building out from there.
