In honor of Independence Day in the USA, I've decided to take a visit to Independence, Missouri to search for a local jeweler.
When using the Chrome browser in incognito mode to search for "jewelers independence mo," I saw these results:
The top organic and the top Google+ Local listing are both for ESKEW's Fine Jewelers, so let's use them as the review candidate for today.
The website is http://www.eskewjewelers.com
The first thing I noticed about their site was the home page title. In the above SERP screen grab you can see it says "Jewelers | Independence | Lees Summit | Kansas City | MO". This was a near perfect match to the "jewelers Independence MO" that I searched for.
As I browse through their website, I see that every page has a unique title that correctly matches the content on that page. They are also including the same "| Independence | Lees Summit | Kansas City | MO" on every page of their site.
According to my recent experience, I would not recommend them to include the 3 city names in their page title like that except for their home page and a few other pages around the site. From my point of view, the city names in the title is overkill since they also have their address, telephone number, and store hours for both stores included in the footer of every page on the site.
Some of the SEO reporting tools I use would report these page titles as too similar, and I agree. I like that they changed the first phrase in the page title, but they probably didn't need to include the rest of it so repetitively.
Another thing I noticed right away was the speed of the website. My connection to the internet at the office is a dedicated fiber line, and website usually load fast for me, but this site is loading faster than any small business website that I've ever seen before. BLAZING!
Their website has a rather simple format with limited JavaScripts. It was created by a WSI franchisee using the WSI software (wsiworld.com), but this simplicity didn't account for the amazing speed.
So I back tracked their hosting provider and found out they are using the Amazon.com hosting service. Amazon's hosting network is well known in the enterprise world and WSI is one of their enterprise customers. Combining the simplicity of the Eskew site with the speed of Amazon makes for a very enjoyable experience.
I'm not recommending that you sign up with your local WSI franchisee. In fact, even though WSI put a lot of effort into creating a good website software system, the local franchisees usually don't know much about internet marketing.
My real recommendation would be to sign up with Amazon's hosting service if you are interested in a very fast and stable hosting environment, but it won't be easy to set up unless you know what you're doing.
Overall, I don't like the design of this website at all. Honestly, it's an older style that reminds me a lot of something my own team created about 8 years ago. The time stamp on their website says September 2012
Here's a screen shot of their About Us page, click it to enlarge:
I do like the concept of, but not the implementation of the Customer Feedback page here:
http://www.eskewjewelers.com/customer-feedback
There's a lot of missing potential from this page. They should add the Schema.org/Review markup code to all the reviews on this page. Using Schema.org/Review will allow Google to understand what these reviews are, and that there are star ratings attached. Very few websites employ the Schema.org code even though it's been recommended by Google for several years.
They have a "News" section of their website that you can't seem to get to unless you click the small "View All" link in their footer. It brings you to this page:
http://www.eskewjewelers.com/eskews-news
It does look like they only use this area for press release type news, but they don't publish something new every month. My suggestion here would be to publish something at least once per month to show more consistency in the website updating.
My overall recommendation is to redesign this website and update it more often. They chose an old website design when they made their site 2 years ago and it already looks like it's several years older.
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.
