In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm continuing my analysis of a lot of keyword data I collected during the 2015 Holiday Season. Today's information is a continuation of the organic impression and click data I previously shared.
For today's Nugget, I sorted through the 16,000 keywords collected from desktop users. The keywords need to be organized into logical groups in order to surface actionable information. Over the last few years, I've been able to create groupings for queries using the words engagement ring, diamond, jewelry stores, jewelry services, watch, and wedding, but things seem a little different this year.
During my first pass through the keyword data I noticed a high number of birthstone queries, and then I started to notice several popular jewelry designer names. Furthermore, the number of jewelry store names seemed higher than usual as well.
Impressions from Desktop Search
This year I organized the data into 15 different query groups shown here:
Each group only contains phrases that include the words shown above. The visual representation of the pie chart shows that each of the groups was pretty evenly weighted this year with the biggest slice of the pie going to searches for specific designer names. The next largest slice went to queries containing the word jewelry.
The three smallest groups are "fine jewelry," "jewelry designer," and "jewelry design." The phrase "fine jewelry" is one that many retailers like to use to differentiate themselves from other local competition. I've included it in my analysis to simply show that consumers don't often use that phrase as part of their Google search. I decided to break out the "jewelry designer" and "jewelry design" groups because of the recent growing interest in custom designed jewelry. I was surprised how small both were.
As I was writing this, I realized I didn't break out a group for "custom design," so I went back real quick and figured out that most of those phrases were trapped in the "jewelry" group. The "custom design jewelry" group would be about 0.50% of the pie, lowering "jewelry" to about 13.16%.
Remember that this chart represents the impressions of Google search queries. Google tries to give everyone a fair chance of being seen in search results. Simply create a website that's easy for a customer to use and Google will give you an equal chance of appearing in the results. The pie chart certainly seems to show that keyword competition is pretty equal; however, convincing people to click on your website link is a completely different story.
Clicks from Desktop Search
Search engine results always include the title of your individual web pages and the meta description that you write for each page. Google has a way of measuring the overall effectiveness and ranking of your website, but the meta description is not used as part of the measurement. Instead, the meta description is what you need to use to convinced people to click your link. In effect, it's your marketing or sales message that jumps up and down yelling "click-me-click-me!"
Here's how the same keyword groupings converted over to user clicks to the websites:
The store name group is the dominant group with 73% of the clicks. The searches for specific designer names barely broke through 5% and the jewelry stores group struggles to just reach 4.97% of user clicks.
What does all this mean?
The goal is to surface some actionable data, so now I have the challenge of turning this into something usable for you.
The dominance of the store name group makes a lot of sense to me. Naturally if someone is directly searching your store name in Google they will click on your listing now matter what you have written as a meta description. It's quite common for someone to search for your business name in Google. It's always faster to use Google to search your site than to visit your home page and figure out how to navigate around. People also search for your name when they've seen one of your ads on or off line.
Even if someone has previously visited your website, most of the time it's faster to search Google for your site again than to guess how to exactly spell your domain name. We call it a "Navigational Search" when someone types your store name into Google to locate your domain name rather than trying to remember, or figure it out, on their own.
Don't question why your store name always shows the biggest results in all your website performance reports, that's just the way it works. On the other hand, you should be a bit panicked if your store name is not the biggest, because that is a clear indication something is broken.
With 5.37% of the clicks, the "designer names" group is the next largest piece of the clicks-pie. No matter how you slice that pie, adding a few pages of jewelry designer information to your website will attract the online attention of anyone in your local area looking for that specific designer name. If you're weighing your time and resource allocations between different online marketing options, I recommend you channel some of those efforts into designer descriptions or sections of your online catalog dedicated to a designer.
The "jewelry stores" group includes phrases like "jewelry stores near me" and "jewelry stores in Totowa NJ." To match your website with these phrases Google needs to be able to associate your address with every page of your site. This is simple to achieve by simply having your address in the footer of the site. Another way to establish this association is to claim your business listing on every business directory you can find. Simply search for your store name in Google and look at all the random online directories of local businesses. Make sure to claim and update your business information on as many as you can.
The "jewelry" group is our next largest click magnet. It attracts more than 1.5% more clicks than the "engagement ring" phrases, and it dwarfs the clicks for "diamond" related searches. The takeaway from this is that, although the impressions are high for diamond and engagement rings, the click through rates for general jewelry items are higher, and more likely to result in a sale. Therefore, you should not spend so much time focusing on simply selling engagement rings, instead, allocate a good portion of your marketing efforts to non engagement jewelry.
Points of Note
Notice how the birthstone phrase group, which includes queries like "birthstone for April 15th" and "what is the birthstone for September" accounted for 4.77% of the impressions but only 0.12% of the clicks. This is because most of the birthstone queries are actual questions. When Google recognizes a question it will surface the answer right in the search results so the user does not have to click further. Remember that you can try to write an enticing meta description for your birthstone pages in order to get the click, but it seems like most of this traffic can't be captured right now.
That said, if you do want to sell some birthstone jewelry, then you should be linking your birthstone information page, or blog post, to specific birthstone related online products in your catalog. This blog-to-product linking is helpful for your customers, and it should help get your birthstone jewelry images to appear in Google Image Search.
The other thing you should notice is the drop in click through for people searching for diamonds. The above pie charts show a combined 9.29% of users looking for diamonds, but only an average of 1.25% click through to a site. Once again, these numbers provide hints that you shouldn't spend too much time trying to capture those sales other than writing catchy meta descriptions.
That's it for this week's set of keyword analysis. I'll report on more of my findings next week.
