This is the Friday Jewelry Website Review to help you learn more about your own website by looking at a review from another jeweler's real website.This week I decided to test the latest voice search features in Google's Chrome browser. These features are supposed to allow natural speech requests like what's already available on the Google smartphone apps.
Using the Chrome browser's incognito mode I clicked on the little microphone to the right of the search box and spoke aloud "give me a jeweler in casper wyoming."
I didn't expect the results I got back. I really expected to see a local results SERP like the one you get when you search for "jewelry stores casper wyoming." Instead, Google returned this list:
1. Okes Jewelers, Facebook Page
2. Fagan Jewelry, Facebook Page
3. Casper Jewelers, Yellow Pages
4. Ayres Jewelry Co, Yelp listing
5. Ayres Jewelry Co, their website
6. Fagan Jewelry, Superpages
7. Yahoo local listing of jewelry retailers
8. Riddle's Jewelry, their website
9. Angies List of Best Casper Designer Jewelry
10. Okes Jewelers, Manta listing
Of those 10 listings, it's the 4th listing; Ayres Yelp listing that stands out because they have a 5-star rating. This is the Yelp listing: http://www.yelp.com/biz/ayres-jewelry-co-casper
From there a customer would click on the website link and eventually get to their website. It seems a little convoluted that someone might click on the Yelp review only to eventually click on the website link, but those 5-stars in the SERP results really do stand out.
Here's the website: http://www.ayresjewelry.com; you might want to open it up to follow along as you read this review.
Usability Issues:
This website is really old looking even though the time stamp is from February 25, 2011. I would have guessed this was designed in the late 90s. The website is so simple and easy to navigate that I don't really have any usability comments.
Incorrect SEO Issues:
They actually have a lot of text on the website. Every page tries to tell a story, and it looks like they were attempting to provide some search engine optimization. In fact, it looks like they hired someone who attempted to write their pages using the correct SEO techniques. This type of strategy doesn't work anymore. Instead of bulking up every page like this, they should have used those stories for different blog posts. That would leave the rest of the pages of the site to explain what they do as a store and the products they sell.
Another issue is with all their website page titles. Every page uses the company name "Ayres Jewelry Co." as the first words of the page title, followed by a 2 or 3 word name of the page. I wouldn't include the store name in the page title for all the pages, and if I did, I would have the name of the page first with the company name after it.
Every page of the site has a unique set of meta keywords. Someone took the time to write unique keywords for each page. That takes some effort, but sadly meta keywords are not used any more.
I also noticed that the meta descriptions are unique, which takes a lot of time. They did this correctly.
What I Didn't Like About the Site:
I was a little disappointed that they don't have a jewelry catalog on their website. All retail jewelry stores should have jewelry catalogs in today's world. Unless you're the local corner convenience store, every retail store should have an online product catalog, even if you don't directly sell from it.
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.
