This is the Friday jewelry website review where I find a random retail jeweler and review their website for design, usability, and SEO. In each one of these reviews, my goal is to show how the information from my other Daily Golden Nuggets can be directly applied to a website.
This week, I'm using the Google Chrome browser in incognito mode to search for "jewelers st joseph mo." Here's a snapshot of the results:
Normally, I would choose the first independent retail store in the Google Local Pack, which would be Niche of Time Jewelry and nicheoftimejewelry.com. However, at the time of this writing, their website was programmed by GemFind and it's very similar to the Sam's Fine Jewelry website review I did in December 2014, so I'm going to skip it.
The next two in the list, Kay Jewelers and Gordon's Jewelers, are chain corporate stores, so I'll skip those too.
That leaves me with Adams Fine Jewelry. Here's their website:
http://adamsfinejewelry.com/
Here's what it looked like when I first visited:
(click to enlarge)
This is a very simple 5-page website. The design style looked very old to me so I quickly went to archive.org to see how long this has been here. This particular website version was first published in May 2013. They are using the services of hibu.com.
What's Hibu?
Hibu offers easy website options for the small business that's just starting out. Hibu no longer offers their free do-it-yourself option for building your website. At the time of this writing, they charged between $69.97 and $99.96 per month. According to the Hibu sales rep I just chatted with, the price range depends on your level of support, if you want a video ad, and if you want their social media plugin.
Although Hibu is mostly a do-it-yourself service, they have a setup fee ranging from $599 and $649 to build the initial website for you.
They call their social media plugin the "Wave product," which I don't see on the Adams Fine Jewelry website. Wave is only intended for brand new businesses because they will create new accounts for you on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Local. Let me repeat that because it was important... If you pay for Hibu, don't use their Wave product if you are already active on social media. They will create duplicate accounts that will work against you.
Hibu has positioned themselves as a website provider for small to medium businesses, but I find them as a provider for small startups only. They might be good for jewelry designers who work solo and just want an online presence while they develop their design voice, but not for retailers.
Retailers need to work their way towards the future of the internet with interactive websites that understand jewelry buyers. The services Hibu offers now are not forward-thinking and would be a waste of money for any retail jeweler.
Adams Fine Jewelry Design
Their design is very simple with a gray background, a static header with a large image, and a white body with small text. Their 12px text size is very small by today's standards.
They are losing a lot of SEO opportunity with the large header that you see here:
(click to enlarge)
That image contains their name, their slogan, phone number, and address. It would be much better to have that information written out so Google could read it and properly associate the name and address to the information in their pages.
SEO Setup
Whoever set up their website does know a little about SEO. Let's have a look at the SEO settings on their home page:
Title: Jewelry Shop Saint Joseph, MO - Adams Fine Jewelry
They chose to target the phrase "jewelry shop" rather than jewelry store. They correctly added their town, state, and store name into the title of their home page.
Meta Description: FREE jewelry cleaning on all merchandise purchased from us. Over 35 years experience. Purchasing scrap gold and silver, broken jewelry, more. Call 816-233-0955.
It might not seem like it, but this is a very skillful meta description. The person who wrote this understands that a meta description is an ad, and a call to action that is displayed in SERPs. Including the phone number is a great way to get attention in the SERP. The only problem here is that this description is 160 characters and the display limit in the SERP is 150 characters.
Headline: Saint Joseph, MO Jewelry Shop
They are correctly reinforcing what's important to them by closely matching the page title and the headline. Very well done.
Let's look at their Jewelry Repair page:
Title: Jewelry Restoration Saint Joseph, MO - Adams Fine Jewelry
Although the link on their menu says "jewelry repair," the page title is telling Google that this page should be explaining their "restoration" service. The information on the page talks about different types of repair service so perhaps the title should say repair instead of restoration.
Meta Description: FREE jewelry cleaning on all merchandise purchased from us. Over 35 years experience. Restore your tarnished or broken jewelry at our location. 816-233-0955.
This description is only 135 characters and should appear in the SERPs without trouble. They correctly rewrote the description to include details about repair and restoration.
Headline: Saint Joseph, MO Jewelry Restoration
Once again, they are carrying the word "restoration" through to their page headline. When you follow through in this way with a chosen keyword, you should also include that keyword on your page a few times. The word restoration only appears on their page 2 times while the word repair appears 5 times.
URL: saint-joseph-mo-jewelry-restoration.htm
This is the icing on the proverbial SEO cake! They even carried their chosen keyword into the URL. They really understood how to connect the SEO basics together. Notice that they also included their town name and state in the URL; that would not be necessary if their page header wasn't a big image. I've noticed better results when the URL is something short, like jewelry-restoration.htm, but that also means you should have the store address on every page as text rather than imbedded in an image.
Business Impact
I usually prefer to shy away from discounting statements or price competitions. With the slogan of "shop here before you pay too much somewhere else" Adams is clearly positioning themselves as a discounting store. Price competition only works if you can sell your product to the masses, like Walmart, but not for small businesses. Small businesses need to price themselves according to their knowledge, experience, and expertise.
With small text and a lack of photos, it's almost impossible to skim through this website like most people will. Adding a few jewelry photos on the website will show people the types of jewelry and services you provide without them needing to read all that tiny text.
Even though this site looks very simple it could turn into a better customer magnet for them as long as they continue to follow those good SEO practices they are using. To make things better they simply need to increase the size and leading of typeface, add some photos, and increase the number of pages they have on the site.
That's it for this week; I'll see you next time...
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.
