Talk to any search engine marketing professional and they will say that you need good content on your website in order to rank well search engines, and engaging content on social networks if you want to interact with your existing audience, and gain new followers.For competitive industries, like retail stores and retail jewelry stores, there's so much stuff being published on the internet daily that your website can fall behind in its search engine ranking for generic phrases unless you update the website often.
Two common generic phrases are "jewelry stores" and "engagement rings."
Common methods of updating a website and keeping it current include posting the latest store news on the home page and posting something new to your blog regularly.
On the other hand, I noticed something recently that was rather interesting. I'm working on a website for a jeweler that provides a specialized type of service. I have to leave the specifics out so as not to identify the jeweler, but just let me explain...
Google uses some method to determine if your website has evergreen content or if it's simply updated frequently. Again, highly competitive industries usually have to update their website often in order to maintain their high ranking.
Scientific and encyclopedic websites are usually considered to be evergreen content, and usually carry a lot more weight in Google's results for their specific topics. Information on a single scientific topic doesn't change and therefore Google doesn't measure their value based on the timestamp of the last update.
Getting back to this website I was analyzing, I noticed that over the last few years my employees have built up a set of pages in a silo architecture that focused on a single topic. Above everything else, this jeweler was undeniably a subject matter expert on this one topic, and they wanted to make sure it was properly represented on their website.
Well, it paid off, but it took a long time for me to realize the results.
After careful analysis of the website data from the last year, I realized that website visitors were spending as much time looking through that special topic as they were looking through the jewelry catalog that was on the site.
Honestly, these results were apparent months ago; I just wasn't looking for them. This is a common occurrence with all data tracking, in that you sometimes don't know to look for results even though they are right in front of you. It's easy to miss a conclusion in your data analysis when there's so much other stuff to analyze. Even the best analyst can miss something they are not actively looking for.
The next step in analyzing this data is to go back to the store sales and see if the interest in that area of the website is driving traffic to the store. However, that might be difficult to determine because this jeweler is a well known expert in this one area already. If nothing else, that single preserved, siloed area of their website reinforces their expertise.
As you're reading this I'm hoping you are thinking about your own personal area of extreme expertise. What are the 100% best at? Resizing rings? Putting heads on rings? Working with trilliant diamonds?
Sorry to say that custom designing all types of jewelry is not specialized enough. On the other hand, a specialty in custom designing grandmothers rings would be.
Figure out your extreme expertise and write a few pages of content about it. Put together at least 3 pages on your website dedicated to it. Make sure to include a link to these specialized on your main navigation.
After that, just let the pages site there and don't worry about promoting them too much. There's no guarantee that Google will treat those pages as evergreen content and give you high ranking. If nothing else you can always refer your own customers to the pages on this specialized service.
