I'm taking a quick trip down to Florida this week for this edition of the Friday Review. Just west of Miami to a city called Hialeah.As usual, I started off my search for the term "jewelers hialeah fl" using the Chrome browser in incognito mode.
Oddly enough, the first jeweler listed in the results is ABC Jewelry with their Yelp profile and a 4-star rating. But they don't have a website. Moving on...
The Second jeweler in the organic listing is Ray's Jewelry Inc. They also appeared in the #1 spot for the +Local listings. Let's check them out and see if we can learn a thing or two...
Here's the website: http://www.raysjewelry.net/; you might want to open it up to follow along as you read this review.
Usability Issues:
* They have a Categories menu that expands sub pages to the right. It seemed a little cumbersome and the option for Men's Fashion didn't work the same way the others did.
* There are 4 photos with headings just below their header graphic to represent their primary jewelry categories: Rings, Watches, Necklaces, and Engagement. Those 4 words were clickable, but I didn't realize that at first because they were bold and looked like headers rather than links. On jewelry websites, people like to navigate by clicking on photos but those photos weren't clickable. Don't hide links on your website; always make them underlined or otherwise clearly indicate that they are clickable.
What I Didn't Like About the Site:
* The overall design is too cluttered. Their website is designed with a width of 890px. That's pretty thin by today's standards. They used 390px for the static navigation on the left side and only 510px for their content area.
* The header area of the website is also a static size, 500px tall. When viewing this site on a laptop you have to keep scrolling just to click on the navigation and then see the content.
What I Liked About the Site:
* My Grandmother once told me that if I have nothing good to say I shouldn't say anything at all. Wherever she is, I hope she's not disappointed with how aggressive I am in these reviews sometimes.
Incorrect SEO Issues:
* Typical issue #1: Bad Meta Descriptions - All the pages on the site have the same meta description. When you do a site:raysjewelry.net search in Google, you can see that their description is being ignored. Instead, Google is excerpting information from each page. Even if you do take the time to write correct 150 character meta descriptions, Google does not guarantee that they will use them all the time. Regardless, it's always better to write them yourself than to leave it up to a machine to do it for you.
* Typical issue #2: Bad Page Titles - It seems like all the pages of the site start with the title "Rays Fine Jewelry in West Hialeah and West Miami" followed by the page name. The only pages that's different is the Engagement Ring page which says "Engagement Rings in West Hialeah and West Miami - Rays Jewelry." Perhaps they were attempting to SEO that page? It didn't work out too well. As always, every page of your website should also have unique titles. These are the main keyword matching and ranking factors in Google.
That's it for this week's basic review.
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.
