In this week's website review, I'll show you an example of how Google reads words on your website and how you can see those words for yourself. I'll also show you why you should host your blog within your own website instead of using an outside service, I'll even show you screen shots of how Google views a website when the blog is hosted outside.
It all starts with a Google search for "jewelers flagstaff az." According to these results, there are not many jewelers n Flagstaff:
Happy Holidays! There are only a few hours left in the 2016 holiday shopping season as I write this. Those still doing their last minute shopping are probably thinking a little outside the normal box in order to find something good for their loved ones.
For this week's website review, I will work through a search scenario in hope to illustrate how your customers use the internet and why it's so important for you to build out your online identity much further than you might imagine. For many businesses, this is the make-or-brea... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Throughout the past month, I analyzed different sets of keywords that I collected during the 2015 holiday season. Most of that research focused on overall analysis of the keyword data without breaking it down into the desktop, mobile, or tablet categories of devices. I chose that approach to save time, and quite frankly, so as not to bore everyone with too much similar information.
That said, in this edition, I am splitting apart the results to show you how the u... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the last Daily Golden Nugget where I'll dive deeply into specific keyword phrases I collected during the 2015 Holiday Season. I've presented a lot of information over the last 30 days and I could spend another month sifting through it, but this stuff does get boring after a while when there's no specific goal in mind. That's an important thing to remember; it's best to perform your keyword research when you have a specific goal in mind. Every time I grind through keyword data, I seem to lose an... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The difference between the singular and plural version of the same keyword phrase oftentimes represents a very specific consumer point of view. When digging into your website keyword data, it's very easy to arbitrarily group phrases together, but doing so will most likely lead you to the wrong conclusions, which translates to the wrong SEO advice, which leads to the wrong marketing advice, and eventually the wrong business direction.
You have plenty of opportunity to capture data from your websi... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm going to examine more of the keyword data I collected during the 2015 holiday season, specifically the phrase "fine jewelry."
Retail jewelers and jewelry designers like to think of themselves as being in the "fine jewelry" industry, and they might even use that phrase in their advertising, but the truth is that the general public doesn't think about "fine jewelry;" they just view all jewelry as jewelry. Website research and search engine optimization activities ra... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
What I'm presenting today is a continuation of the 2015 Holiday Season keyword data I presented yesterday. Today, I'm reviewing my findings about search queries that contained the phrase "engagement rings."
What I have here today is similar, yet very different to the "engagement ring" information I presented yesterday. Notice the difference in the query phrase between today's plural version an... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today I'm reviewing more keyword data that I collected during the 2015 Holiday Season, specifically some of my findings about search queries that contained the phrase "engagement ring."
Take note that I said the singular form of the phrase "engagement ring," rather than the plural form "engagement rings." Originally, I was going to review both variations in today's Daily Golden Nugget like I did for my VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today I'm reviewing more keyword data that I collected during the 2015 Holiday Season, specifically some of my findings about search queries that contained the words diamond and diamonds.
The typical keyword phrases I've reported on in the past have not changed much at all, and includes these examples:
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 ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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 month... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
With all my writing aboutcontent recently, it's easy to forget that the reason for all of that is to improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and thereby increase the number of people visiting your website.
The word "organic" is used to indicate something happening naturally in its environment, without outside influence that is deemed to be artificial or controlled. A quick look at the organic page on Wikipedia and you'll see that there are 28 different phrases for organic used in the English language.
All of the phrases refer to some type of natural growth or living thing that is grown according to certain standards. Orga... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google Image search has really started to mature. Not just in its ability to find and surface images, but also with the way that people are using it.
In fact, if you look at this Nugget from last week, you'll see that 75% of the search impressions are generated through Google Image Search and 57% of actual organic visitors come from Google Image Search too.
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'll provide some research based information about mobile keyword search data collected during the 2014 Holiday Season.
Cross reference your own sales figures and website analytics against this data, and use it to improve your future marketing. The findings here should be useful to you all year long, but especially as you start planning your website content and marketing for the 2015 Holiday Season.
When using Google Webmaster Tools, you can view which search queries will trigger your website to appear in search results. In the past when we SEO guys would spew the phrase "search queries" it was just a fancy name for saying "keywords." In fact, you can say "search queries," and "keywords," and "search phrases" and mean the same thing.
Regardless what you called it, all you wanted to do was put the right words on your website that correspond to what people search for in the dif... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
No matter your best efforts, your customer simply do not care about your bridal line. For them, you might as well be the Invisible Man.
You probably think I'm nuts when I say that, especially since you sell engagement rings all the time. The fact is that most jewelers are incorrectly trying to target "bridal" customers when they should be targeting "engagement rings." Even the phrase "wedding ring" is better than "bridal" or "bridal ring."
This short post is part of my "Grains of SEO Gold" series covering basic SEO topics and how to apply them.
Today's SEO Topic: Keywords
Once upon a time, if you wanted your website to rank for a particular keyword, you would simply include that word on your web pages a specific numbers of times in order to get top ranking in the search results.
For many years, it was a competition of keyword density between different websites that wanted to rank higher.
Sometimes we go months without thinking about a topic and then twice in a single day something comes up, like today when in depth conversations about keywords and SEO blossomed...
Tuning your website for keywords can be tricky. If you had a choice of tuning your website for only 5 phrases, what would you choose? Do you sell just 5 types of jewelry in your store? If you wanted to tune your website for "engagement rings" and "diamond engagement rings" that would already be 2 phrases. You could easily end up with a list of 20 or 30 desired keywords and phrase permutations.
From our point of view you should not be trying to narrow down SEO to a limited set of keywords, simply because that's not natural. Imagine if you were told to have a conversation about the rain storm outside, but you were not allowed to use the word "we... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We've analyzed a small part of our collected keyword data from January 2012 and have some results to share with you today.
The list below has 19 keywords ranging from the most to least popular. We've adjusted our numbers to present them on a scale of 0 to 100. The keyword "engagement" occurred the most in our tracking so we're putting that at 100 and measuring all other keywords against it.
As we navigate through the murky and expensive waters of Google AdWords during the holiday season, there are a few other things that could help close that sale.
Have you ever seen those holiday gift baskets at your favorite big box store? Here in New Jersey we have several Costco and BJ's stores. Right now, in the middle of October, they already have shrink wrapped holiday gift baskets for sale. There's a basket bundle of video games, another for movies, and of course a basket of edible goodies.
These baskets present the gift buyer with a perceived greater value. Among those bundled items is probably one quality item and then the rest are lower cost to produce or perhaps even closeout items from the manufacturer.
The movie "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" had its ups and downs in the ratings a... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Over the last 2 days we've given you ideas for targeting Pandora jewelry in your AdWords ads. Since the price point on Pandora is so low, the product lends itself nicely for gift givers on a limited budget. We're going to continue talking about Pandora today but before we give you specific ad ideas, we need to offer you some advice on Google AdWords trademark policies.
The procedure explained below will work for any vendor, not only Pandora.
Google AdWords monitors ads and will automatically disqualify and disable them when found to violate a trademark. It doesn't matter if you are a Pandora "Gold Store" or a "Silver Store," you are still not allowed to use the name "Pandora" in your AdWords ads without some type of permission.
Permission is easy to achieve if, and only if, you have a written contract with Pandora.... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Speaking of budgets, let's talk about your holiday AdWords budget. From January through October you should be spending your advertising budget on targeting keyword phrases that return the highest ROI. Perhaps these are long tail phrases like "pandora rose bead," but certainly not simply "pandora bead." The long tail phrases (those 3 words or more) are usually much less expensive than the 1 or 2 word phrases.
Here's the cost as of today's measurements:
"pandora bead" Extremely high search volume and competition Top ad position costs $3.29 per click
"pandora rose bead" Extremely low search volume and medium competition Top ad position for less than $1.50 per click
During December you should expect to see the AdWords click prices to spike up to $35 for most generic jewelry phrases. Last year we mea... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Every few months we like to remind you that the internet is not just about your jewelry website, or about Facebook, or Twitter, Google+, or any number of blogging sites, etc., etc., etc... It's also about video.
Where would our Holiday 2011 Run-Up be without some new information about video? So let's get to it.
In the past, we heavily recommended the Flipcam as one of the best portable video cameras. Even though these hand held video cameras are still available today, Cisco has officially discontinued the product line and will not support it after December 2012. These are still fantastic cameras and if you can find one in a store lower than $150 you should surely grab it.
Those who are video camera challenged might have video capability already hidden in their pocket, that is, if you have a smartphone. Most smartp... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Every page of your website has a page title. It's one of the most important ranking qualities for every page of your website.
The page title shows up as the most prominent words in blue on every SERP, and it's usually these words that will entice your potential customers to either click your link, or take a moment to read the description right below it.
Composing the perfect page title is not something you will learn overnight. Many people will write long page titles that mention all the topics appearing on that page. Some people will only write a few words.
Here are the guidelines that we follow when writing page titles: 1. No more than 67 characters 2. Try to write a page title that is as short yet informative as possible. 3. Try to mention a single topic in the page title. 4. If you must mention more... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We spend a lot of time and resources providing educational content for our members and the customers of Sapphire Collaborative (www.sapphirecollaborative.com), but the time we put into our research is minuscule compared to the total amount of time and money all SEO professionals worldwide have spent researching and writing similar educational material.
The SEO training industry is a multimillion dollar industry. Greater than that is the amount of money SEO professionals make to do the work instead of their clients.
Would it surprise you that Google is already in the process of creating ways to rank all websites correctly regardless how good or bad the search engine optimization is?
The sum of Google's knowledge and research into human patterns and behavior is enormous, and just gets bigger every day. When you allow t... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
What is the one keyword phrase that you would love to rank #1 for above all others?
If you can answer that question in less than a second, then either you've already done your homework or you're wrong.
Truthfully, no one can ever claim they know what keyword phrases are best for their website unless they've done a lot of homework. Sure, you might want to say "engagement rings," but we'll tell you to go back to the beginning and look for something different.
The phrase "engagement rings" is what we refer to as a "trophy phrase," in that it's the trophy you see and hope to win. However, it's very unlikely that "engagement rings" will be your "money phrase," which is the actual phrase that brings you the most traffic and the most sales.
The only way you can figure out the money phrases for your website is to do... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
"...articles are easy to follow and seem to have information one can use right away." -Ann, Gallery 4, Hamden CT
"...serious kudos to you. We love your straight talk, pertinent information and plain language. I don't know how many industries have something of jWAG's caliber available, but I learn from the emails every day. Really, really nice work, and very appreciated." -Cheryl Herrick, Global Pathways Jewelry
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