After many years of talking and teaching about it, I'm finally starting to see retail jewelers embracing the reality of catalog and ecommerce websites. The reality I'm referring to is the tedious process of photographing your inventory, maintaining a website, and handling all aspects of order fulfillment.
Within the jewelry industry, there are several ways to mimic an ecommerce website without actually setting it up or managing it yourself. Many large man... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Retail is being redefined every day. Everyone still looks at their bottom line sales, but it doesn't matter anymore if the sales are from foot traffic through the front door or via shipping boxes out the back. While most retail businesses are still struggling to figure out how to bring foot traffic back in the front door, I submit that it's probably easier to learn what it takes to build your ecommerce business and increase the flow of shipped product instead.
Over the last 6 years, I've subscribed to more jewelry email lists than I can remember. Whenever I do a website review, I look for the newsletter signup and add myself to their list. Most of the time, I never hear from those retail jewelers because they don't follow through with their email list.
Amidon Jewelers, in New Hampshire, is one of the few independent retail jewelers that I know that has consistently sent me emails since I signed up to their list way back in 2012. Years ago, they were sendi... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The internet of things (IoT) now connects so much of daily life it's hard to remember what things were like 23 years ago when it was just in its infancy. New internet connected devices are announced every day that will undoubtedly shape our futures of personal life and how we reach customers and conduct business. Although there are plenty of new tech toys announced every week, it's the smartphone which has changed how we manage our daily lives.
With all these changes happening in the world around us, it's hard to im... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Reading the latest website optimization and marketing methods online, and putting them into practice on your own website is a daunting task for most business owners. Many question their own actions and simply don't know where to start. For this reason, every Friday I present these mini case study website reviews. My goal is to find a website that has a few obvious (to me) problems, or flops, and then I suggest first steps fixes to get them on the right track again.
Searching for a website candidate for this week's Friday Flop Fix was a little challenging. I began my search, as usual, looking for a random website candidate in a random city in the United States. My randomly chosen city this week was Orange, CA. My specific Google search phrase was "jewelers Orange, CA" for which I was given the search results you see below.
I've included my commentary in the screen capture:
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, I introduced 4 SEO issues that harm product catalogs that are usually correctable with a little bit of work. There's another, more technical SEO issue that often runs wild on many product catalog and e-commerce sites that must now be addressed.
Although all evidence says that e-commerce and online product catalogs are the future of retail business on the web, many jewelers have been slow to deploy those types of websites. In preparation for this current holiday season, I was working on the search engine optimization (SEO) settings for several sites that either launched e-commerce sites or large product catalogs. I'll explain a few of those settings in this Daily Golden Nugget.
When was the last time you read your own website? Even though that seems like a simple, even a silly question, can you remember when you last read through your entire website?
If you're like most business owners, you probably haven't read through your website since the last redesign, or worse, since you first launched it several redesigns ago.
No doubt that your business has changed since your website was last launched. Here are some simple examples of things that might have changed in your store that you neglected to change online.
This is Part 7 of a multi-day Daily Golden Nugget series packed with tactics to help you in your 2015 holiday marketing. The series started with the overview of 2015 holiday marketing strategies and has continued since.
In this edition, I'll explain ways you can plan your product content to correspond to the holiday ads you have ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back, almost to the beginning. My 8th Nugget was a really good idea for writing good online jewelry sales copy that I want to revisit today.
This is the Friday website review where I dissect a random retail jeweler's website to find the good and bad that we can all learn from. Although I write about website design, search engine optimization, and online marketing every day, sometimes all that stuff doesn't make any sense unless you see exactly how it applies to a real website.
That's why I dedicate one day every week to these reviews of randomly selected jewelry stores.
Normally I ask someone on my team to give me a random city name, but this week's review c... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Do you have them on your site? I'm not talking about links to offsite vendor catalogs, or even iframe widgets either. You need to have an honest-to-goodness product catalog on your website that you control.
During the days of the Internet Bubble of the late 90s, everyone would flock to your website to see what you sold. There were many early attempts at e-commerce and online shopping, but setting up an e-commerce system yourself is co... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I decided to give myself a little challenge today with this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, Friday Website Review. I'm back in Bordeaux, France today, and in honor of that I decided to search for any town or location within the United States that was named after Bordeaux, France. I only found one, and apparently it's a small settlement in the US Virgin Islands, so I decided to check it out.
Sadly, it really is just a settlement without a large town, and certainly no jewelers. Accordin... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
A few years ago, we could easily rely on a large collection of existing blog entries or educational articles to rank you higher than newer websites with less information; but that just doesn't seem to be the case anymore.
To maintain more stable ranking, you really do need to keep adding new information and even update the same few pages on your website often, like your home page, events, and special offers. An easy page to update monthly is your "birthstone of the month" page, just be creative and tell people about popular birthstone jewelry and how to match it with clothing fashions.
Google uses a very fast method to check the last update time of one of your web pages. It does this instead of spending the time to re-read your whole page. If they find a new page timestamp they send the Google spider to fetch the page.VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
We're continuing our topic of Black Hat SEO techniques that will cause your website to be banned or seriously penalized by search engines. Today's topic is about "Thin Content".
The highest ranked websites usually have the best original content, and a lot of it. Typical well ranked websites have a lot of interesting information on every page. The exact amount of interesting information is unknown because Google won't tell us. Many SEO experts say you need at least 250 words of unique content, but we feel you need at least 400 words.
"Thin Content" is the phrase given to a website, or a web page, that has very few words on it, say less than 250 words per page. We're going to review the common thin pages that so many jewelry stores have created without even realizing.
"...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
