Website review and analysis are part of my everyday job. I've been actively analyzing and making suggestions on improving traffic acquisition, user flow, SEO, and usability for several years. I've shared this analysis process and the tips for improvement in my writings for the last few years to provide an insight into how you could do it yourself.
Today, I'll share 6 of the most frequently broken or missing website features that I have seen over and over again, and provide some suggestions for maki... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Online referrals are starting to make an impact on local businesses, but not in the way we all expected them to. A few years ago, the buzz within the online marketing community was that social networks would become a referral engine for people to ask advice through. Facebook even attempted to create a new type of social search engine to capture that referral service. Google also struggled with the idea that the internet would become a big referral engine, and they tried to capture a piece of it through Google+.
This is my weekly website review where I search for a retail jeweler at random through Google and pick apart what they are doing online. I try to uncover the flops that are being made so I can suggest the fixes needed to improve what they are doing.
This week, I started my Google search with the phrase "jewelers Brookline, MA" and quickly found myself heading down a rabbit hole after viewing these results:
I don't often write about LinkedIn because it's considered a business-to-business social network and my educational focus is helping entrepreneurs connect directly with consumers. That said, today I'm going to share how you could use this network to your advantage.
What is LinkedIn?
LinkedIn is a professional social network. The goal of this network is to allow you to maintain your curriculum vitae and connect with those you've worked with throughout your career. You can conn... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Within the jewelry industry, I often hear about jewelry designers who take a break and put their business on hold while they reconsider their artistic direction or go back to school for additional training. Although it might seem like a simple idea to put a business on hold, how you present yourself online during your hiatus could have positive or negative ramifications on your future livelihood.
I've spoken to many jewelry designers who had a rough start with their busines... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is a pretty sad edition of #ThrowbackThursday. In fact, it's not even much of a throwback since I'm only jumping back 3 months to September 2015 to my explanation of how to share Google reviews to your website.
Testimonials and online business reviews are an important part of a customer's pre-screening process of you. While every online directory has a review system, arguably Yelp a... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
What is the real value of the content you produce? Should you be creating your own content or hiring someone to do it for you? What about content curation?
This is part 2 of my in-depth answers to those questions. I've identified 6 levels of content and list them here in order of their most valuable to least valuable:
1. Business Owner Creates Content 2. Business Owner Curates Content 3. Business Owner Socially Engages 4. Hire Content Creator or... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is not my typical Friday Jewelry website review. I started out the normal way by opening my Chrome web browser in incognito mode, and I searched for the phrase "jewelry stores" followed by a town name.
I found a good candidate for a review, and I even browsed around their website and Facebook page for a while to find out a little more about them before I started to write.
As it turns out, I'm not doing a review of a website today, but I'm going to cover an extremely sensitive topic that was mentioned in their online Google reviews. ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today I'd like to tell an interesting story about websites and customers service that you might be able to learn a thing or two from. It's not about jewelry, but about websites and business in general.
And honestly, it's a business disaster.
There's a costume and magic shop not too far from my home in New Jersey. It's been there for at least 35 years. My mom took me there as a young boy and bought me lots of fun magic tricks, professional quality, like bags that make things disappear and scarves that change color, oh and card tricks that would ch... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Before we close out this week's discussion of online reviews, let's reference back to the study we gave you in Monday's Nugget: http://bit.ly/oVuu21
Since it accounts for 57% of your online reputation visibility we need to talk a little about Yahoo! Local and how to manage your business listing there.
Yahoo! populates their listings with a phone book database. Unless you manage your own listing, any information you find there will be limited to that found in public phone records.
Only registered Yahoo! users can write reviews or edit listings on Yahoo! Local. You will first need to create a Yahoo! account to edit your own business listing.
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget we told you about Citysearch.com and presented a case study of Roslyn Jewelry in NYC who has bad reviews dating back to 2002 and obviously spammy reviews in the past two years.
Citysearch requires a monthly PPC advertising commitment of at least $299 before they allow you to rebut your reviews. Instead of paying, Roslyn took the frugal approach by creating 4 bogus user accounts each with 1 review. These reviews were posted on the same date, which is a red flag for bogus reviews.
As we said a few days ago, online reviews are forms of user generated content that will help or hurt your business. On the other hand, if done correctly they are also forms of direct marketing.
If you find yourself in the same unfortunate Citysearch position as Roslyn, and you want to take the frugal appro... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
From our recent research study we've found that online review sites account for a lot of your business visibility.
Citysearch.com might show a 5 star user rating for your business and no one notices you because the 5 stars are almost expected now. But there can be a particularly devastating effect to your business if your ratings are low, and you would feel it.
Several members of our team are currently working with a large supplier that has a disastrous online reputation. Every review site has dozens of complaints about them, but until we got involved they simply didn't know how to fix the problem. Let's use our experience and give you some ideas that will help in your own reputation management.
Sometimes those online reviews can illustrate a long standing probl... 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
This is not my typical Friday Jewelry website review. I started out the normal way by opening my Chrome web browser in incognito mode, and I searched for the phrase "jewelry stores" followed by a town name.
Happy Halloween!
