Bring up the topic of smartphones with your friends and the conversations will soon turn into a debate over the reasons why some think the Android OS phones are better than iOS phones. While the iOS phones are only available in a limited number of models from Apple, the Android OS is available on dozens of different models from dozens of different phone manufacturers.
Regardless what your personal smartphone choice is, knowing what your customers are using will help you design a ... 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 the 2015 Holiday Season at an end, let's take a look at some website tracking results from the Thanksgiving week through Christmas.
I have a lot of data to from various retail jeweler websites. The set of data I'm referencing below was recorded across retail jewelry websites that have been active with updating their website regularly over the last 12 months. These same websites are also mobile friendly. This includes a combination of retail jewelers and ecommerce sites. Remember, the results show... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Social media is bringing to light something that retail jewelers have known since they started selling jewelry: Christmas is when "everyone" gets engaged. According to the Chillisauce Marriage Proposal Survey, the most popular day to pop the question is Christmas Eve. Here's the bar graph with their findings:
I recently did a comparison of the total user sessions between November 2014 and 2015 including a breakdown of usage on mobile, desktops, and tablets.
I'm continuing my analysis of the same data as measured across retail jeweler websites; this time I'm comparing the increase or decrease of new users between November 2014 and 2015.<... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Since 2010, the predicted website and internet usage trends right before the holiday season have suggested that more people will use their smartphones to pre-shop retail stores and to look up product information while in a store. What better way to save time during the busy holiday shopping season than to look for online product information and find stores that carry the items?
Internet technology and search engine optimization changes continue to affect small businesses and the marketing methods they use. Google forced everyone to think seriously about their mobile website in April 2015 with #mobilegeddon, creating a surge in businesses that finally took mobile websites seriously.
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to a year ago to the last time I updated my report on the most popular smartphone resolutions used by visitors to retail jewelry websites.
The last time I reviewed smartphone screen resolutions was only a week after the iPhone 6 had been released. For several years, the iPhone has been the most... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The web browser wars rage on. Internet Explorer, Chrome, Firefox, Safari... Which one do you use?
It's time to check in again on the current state of affairs of website browsers usage. Since I started tracking this data several years ago, I've been surprised with the popularity growth and decline of my personal favorite web browsers. The informed internet user will use the web browser they like the most, downloading it from whatever default brow... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
September has a strange place on my yearly calendar. I view it as a month that tries to maintain a death grip on the hot days of summer while also revealing the temperatures and colors of the fall. I remember how it was to dread the beginning of the school year, and now, even though I'm not a parent myself, I can appreciate how parents feel now to have their children occupied all day again.
For this week's Throwback Thursday, I'm jumping to April 11, 2011 and my topic of speeding up your website images. This is an important topic that never gets old.
The internet has sped up tremendously since the days of dial up 14400 baud modems. Back then, it would take 45 seconds to download a 62K image; today, it takes only 1 second to download through cable and 4G connection spee... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It's officially been one month since Google Mobilegeddon on April 21, 2015. I've been eagerly following the blogs and new channels of several companies that are tracking the results, and they all seem mixed.
Google started showing mobile friendly websites in search results earlier than April 21st. Reports from Search Engine Land stated that the mobilegeddon rollout seemed to be slo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
For as long as the World Wide Web has been around, there has been competition over the most popular web browser. Many web browsers have joined the extinct software list, or at least become endangered as technology changes.
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.
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm exploring keyword data collected between November 1 and December 31, 2014 from many retail jeweler websites.
I collected a large amount of keyword data from people using Google's desktop search, mobile search, and image search. The mobile search data is very interesting. Last week, I presented th... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
Throughout 2014, Google made several advancements in their search engine and gave us some new reports in Google Webmaster Tools to see the results of those advancements.
Specifically, from within Webmaster Tools you can easily see when your website appeared in web search results, images search results, and mobile search results. During the first quarter of 2014, I started noticing retail jewelry websites appearing in image results more than ever before, and the Webmaster Tools ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
With the 2014 Holiday Season at an end, let's take a look at some website tracking results from the Thanksgiving week through Christmas.
The following data was recorded through more than 100 jewelry related websites. This includes a combination of retail jewelers and e-commerce sites. Results shown here only apply to the jewelry industry.
Holiday 2014 Sessions
Here's a screen shot of my Google Analytics tracking across the retail jewelry websites I'm tracking:
The 2014 Holiday Season has come to a close and it's time to review your marketing strategies and record the results for next year's season.
I've compiled some email details that you can use as a benchmark for your own strategies.
I've subscribed to hundreds of email newsletters from retail jewelry stores, large and small e-commerce jewelry sites, and a few chain stores. This is a graph showing the quantity of emails I received from all those senders from November 1, 2014 through December 26, 2014: ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Here are the website tracking statistics from mid-November through mid-December 2014. As usual, these results are pulled from the group of 100+ retail jewelry websites that I monitor and the results might not apply to any other industry.
4-Weeks of Holiday Data
Here's the graphical representation of the sessions I've been tracking:
Here are the website tracking statistics from Thanksgiving Day through Cyber Monday in 2014. As usual, these results are pulled from the group of 100+ retail jewelry websites that I monitor and the results might not apply to any other industry.
November 2014 Sessions
Let's first take a look at this chart from Google Analytics:
We're not going to talk about anything new today. Instead, we wanted to share industry statistics and our own findings for this 2010 holiday season. Everything reported is for online sales or statistics.
These statistics were reported from comScore.com Thanksgiving Day (Nov. 25) $407M, up 28% Black Friday (Nov. 26) $648M, up 9% Cyber Monday (Nov. 29) $1,028M (that's a Billion!) 16% Green Monday (Dec. 13) $954, up 12% Free Shipping Day (Dec. 17) $942M, up 61%
The week of December 17 (Free Shipping Day) saw 52.7% of online transactions with free shipping. comScore also reported that there was a greater trend for online buyers to wait until Free Shipping Day before making the final sale. This is a clear indication that free shipping is a deal winner when selling online.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
In yesterday's Nugget, I explained 
