This is the Friday Jewelry Website review where I randomly find a retail jeweler's website from a random city to dissect and review. When I start this journey every week, I never know if I'm going to find a great looking website, a poorly functioning website, or something that's embarrassing to even look at.
Every review has a chance to touch upon topics of SEO, SEM, aesthetics, and usability. These reviews are usually not too in-depth, but just a cursory review that usually only reveals the most obvious issues.
The conclusions of evaluations are based on my previous research and my collection of Daily Golden Nuggets, and are similar to how I evaluate every website when someone calls upon me for a private, 3rd party review. As a 3rd party review I also don't have access to the analytics or search results tracking for these candidate sites, so all my conclusions are drawn from previous experience.
To find this week's review candidate, I searched for "jewelers in Brockton, MA" and saw this search result:
(click to enlarge)
I normally don't include the entire SERP in my review, but this one was impressive. Between the paid ads, business listings, and organic results, there were 24 possible things to click on and Romm Diamonds occupied 8 of them.
Going counter clockwise through the SERP they had:
1.
An ad showing their Yellow Pages account; technically this is Google AdWords, but this type of YP ad only appears when you are paying for advertising through the YellowPages.com website as shown here:
There's an unusual duplicate business profile for Romm Diamonds in the YP system. If you're going to pay for YP ads, then you should make sure to clean up their business listings before spending your money. I have a suspicion that the duplicate listing was created when they started paying for YP ads.
2.
The second item in the above SERP is the Google AdWords ad at the top of the page. This type of ad appears when you are paying Google directly through your AdWords account. You see how their address appears in the ad? That's because they are using the AdWords "location extension" feature. Now look at the second ad down, the one for Long's Jewelers. It shows an A+ BBB rating, some extra links inside their site, and the address. Each of these extra lines are created with AdWords "extensions" that help make the ad taller. Google says that the taller ads command more attention because they cover more screen real estate.
3.
This is the Romm Diamonds Google+ My Business listing. Local businesses usually appear here as long as Google has confirmed that the local business exists. Although they did claim their Google+ My Business listing, they are not sharing content from their website to Google+. Even though they are occupying 8 of the listings in the SERP, they could dominate even more if they simply start sharing their blog posts to Google+.
Also, they currently have 4 reviews on Google+. It only takes one more review for the average star rating to appear right there in the SERP like it does for the YP ad and the Yelp ad (explained below). All they need to do is ask happy customers to write a review.
4.
The forth item in the SERP is their website's organic listing. The green link shows the home page and then there are sitelinks for their Engagement, Jewelry, Services, and Gold Buying pages.
5.
This is the organic listing for their Yelp account. It's always a good idea to claim your business listing on Yelp because those listings appear in the search results so easily. The Yelp listings always attract attention in the SERPs because of the average star rating that appears.
This is their Yelp listing:
The area I circled in blue, shows where two other local jewelers are paying for Yelp ads. Those ads from other jewelers would be hidden if Romm Diamonds was paying for their own ads. As of July 2014, Yelp was charging $350 per month for a paid listing and ads. Considering that Romm is paying for YellowPages and AdWords, I wondered why they were not also paying for Yelp. After all, Yelp is usually more promising than anything YellowPages provides.
Then I noticed that they have 246 photos in their Yelp photo album. Seeing that makes me think that they previously paid for their Yelp listing, but decided not to renew. Consider their dominance in the Google search results, I was surprised to see how they are allowing other jewelers to advertise on their Yelp listing.
6.
The sixth item in the SERP is an online catalog from Jewel Connect. Seeing this also surprised me. This is the automatic website tie-in for the Diamond Counter POS and inventory software they are using in their store. I wrote an extensive review of this Jewel Connect website last month.
The Romm website has a full online catalog of its own, with very nice photography, so I'm not sure why they would muddy their online appearance with this additional online catalog. Although it does help them command a lot of extra attention in the search results, the JewelConnect.com website creates a split focus for customer's attention.
7.
I don't often see Better Business Bureau listings in the search results, and I usually worry when I do. For better rather than worse, this extra SERP listing appears because Romm Diamonds is an accredited BBB member since 2004. They have an A+ rating and only 1 complaint. That looks very good.
Take another look at No. 2 above and notice how I pointed out the A+ BBB rating that appeared in the AdWords ad for Long's Jewelers. I have to wonder why Romm Diamonds isn't using the same AdWords extension to pull in their own A+ BBB rating. The likely answer is that the AdWords agency Romm is using isn't keeping on top of the latest AdWords features. This AdWords stuff changes so fast that you need an agency that's willing to pay attention to it, but that also means you're going to pay more money for their work.
8.
This last item in the search results is the Romm Diamonds listing on the AGS website. I recently wrote a Nugget about the benefits of referral websites and this AGS listing is the perfect example of one. You should check with every membership organization you belong to and make sure that your business is listed on their website somewhere.
Although I didn't actually review the actual Romm Diamonds website this week, I think this SERP analysis pulled together a lot of things I frequently write about. This is a good example of how several components work together to command attention in local search results.
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.
