Now that we closed the book on the 2015 Holiday Season, it's time to review the results. Over the course of the holiday season, I captured more than 47,000 different keyword queries related to retail jeweler websites. I'm sifting through all that information to find something actionable for retail jewelers. I've been looking for things like a list of good keywords, or popular designer brands to carry, or even where to focus your energy over the next few months.
As I write this, I've already invested more than 6 hours poring over the data to produce the simple charts you see below. There's too much information to report on in a single day, which is why I'm going to work through it over the course of a few days.
Where the Data Comes From
Keyword research isn't as easy as it once was. In an effort to combat keyword spam, Google has taken a lot of keyword tools away from us. Even though Google would rather have us focus on keyword topics instead of individual keywords, we all still seem to be crazy for keywords.
My approach to keyword research is to simply data mine all the captured information from the jewelry websites I manage. The data samples I collect are large enough to identify trends and show you what types of queries customers use to find your site. You could gather similar information from your own Google Search Console account, but oftentimes, the data from a single website can't reveal what's happening in the industry.
Here are a few other ways to do your own keyword research:
Google AdWords Keyword Planner
Once a free service of Google, by signing into your AdWords account here, you can access the built in Keyword Planner tool. This tool allows you to find potential keywords to use in your paid advertising campaigns by feeding it a page on your website, or providing a few keyword ideas. The tool then returns a list of keywords people are currently searching.
Google Trends
It's easy to get lost for hours looking at the data provided by the Google Trends website found here. Although the information is good for showing you historical keyword query usage, it's only as good as your own guesswork. This tool is not good unless you have an idea of the initial keywords you need to research.
Bing Ads Intelligence
Microsoft has their own version of the Keyword Planner tool that you can download and run on your computer. It's called Bing Ads Intelligence and you can download it here. This tool works in conjunction with your Bing Ads account.
Wordtracker
I'm sure there are a few gurus out there who will swear by the paid Wordtracker service found here. They use a keyword scraping service to collect and report on millions of keywords. This is probably the easiest method to get keywords if you can afford their minimum monthly charge of $27 (at the time of this writing).
Moz Resources
Moz also has a plethora of posts about keyword research with new ideas all the time. This is the link to the keyword research section of their blog.
Image Search vs. Web Search Jewelry Queries
Google's Image Search usage has grown to unbelievable heights. According to what I'm tracking, there are more people searching Google for images than for web pages. All those photos posted to Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, on your website, and on every other online photo sharing service are getting pulled into Google's image search.
This pie chart shows the percentage of organic impressions for image search compared to web page search:
As you can see, image search accounts for 76% of the Google search impressions. This data is only for images found on retail jeweler websites, like all those images in a product catalog.
As a reminder, an "impression" is simply the appearance of your website in Google's search results. You can use your impression reports to see how well your website ranks for a particular keyword phrase, but when it comes to making a sale, we really need to see how many people are clicking on your search listing, which is where this next pie chart comes in:
The above chart shows the percentage comparison of how many people click on results wound in web page search results compared to image search results. As you can see, the web page search results account for 85% of all the garnered clicks from Google search. Although Image Search attracts 76% of the impressions, it only accounts for 15% of the clicks a jewelry website receives.
Mobile, Desktop, Tablet Results
Generally speaking, mobile became the dominant device platform for internet usage in the year 2015, although the jewelry industry is still lagging a little behind.
Here's the percentage breakdown of the three types of devices used when searching for retail jewelry websites during the 2015 Holiday Season:
According to the above pie chart, 65% of people search for jewelry from their desktop computer, 30% from their mobile device, and only 5% from their tablet. Once again, I'll point out that this chart is showing impressions, which are a good way to gauge if your ranking is going up or down, but not a good way to gauge your sales.
This next pie chart showing clicks is a better reflection of website visitor traffic and potential sales:
In this one, we see that desktop users account for 53% of average website traffic to retail jewelry sites, mobile traffic accounts for 37%, and tablet is 10%. What we can infer from this is that, although it seems like desktop users are still doing most of the searching, it's the mobile and tablet users that have a growing interest in jewelry websites.
I'll continue my analysis of the data tomorrow with some specific keyword queries from those desktop users.
