It's time for the weekly case study of a website that's pretty old and in desperate need of a makeover. I call these weekly posts my Friday Flop Fix review. During these reviews, I look for websites that are implementing search engine optimization strategies poorly, or have poor website designs and I suggest ways to make them better.
This week, I searched Google for the phrase "jewelers Zanesville, OH" and was shown these results:
Last month, I spent a lot of time analyzing the keyword data I collected during the 2015 holiday season. The information that surfaced was just the tip of the iceberg that I had, but it would take months to go through and write about it all, so I limited my analysis to the list this list:
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
Today I'm stepping back into 2015 to review the top 10 Daily Golden Nugget posts according to my Google Analytics account. Take a quick look to see if you remember them, and if you were able to put any of this information to use:
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 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
Today's Daily Golden Nugget comes from a question I received last week to explain the difference between ad targeting on Facebook and Google AdWords. In simple terms, the AdWords targeting can use a really sophisticated way to target what people are searching for. On the other hand, Facebook uses a really sophisticated way to target the demographics of the people themselves.
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to May 2, 2011 the Daily Golden Nugget on hidden text on a web page that is not considered Black Hat SEO.
I haven't mentioned Black Hat SEO in a while, so let me briefly explain what that is. Google ranking algorithm was less complicated prior to 2012, and many people figured out simple ways to exploit that simplicit... 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.
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
You probably already know that Christmas is the most popular day of the year for a marriage proposal. No doubt you've been helping with the selection process for the past few months leading up to tomorrow's inevitable day of celebration for many couples.
As I mentioned in yesterday's Nugget, you can't use brute force SEO procedures to get your website ranked any more. This means you can't pay someone to set up a lot of inbound links to your site, and you can't set up several pages which overuse specific word phrases so you can rank for them.
As of today, the recommended strategy by Google is to create content and post it as blogs to your website an... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google changes the way AdWords works all the time. I'm continually reviewing all their changes just to keep up with the latest features. It's not easy.
Regardless of the new features Google AdWords has, the first thing you need to decide when setting up your new AdWords campaign is the list of keywords to target.
What keywords are best? That's a real tough question to answer since Google hides them from you in your Analytics reports.
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.
In today's Daily Golden Nugget I want to explain how you can take a bunch of keyword phrases and expand upon how you attract customers who are interested in buying. This is a type of customer targeting and even customer segmentation.
I'm going to start with this keyword list for Le Vian jewelry that I build in yesterday's nugget:
In today's Daily Golden Nugget, I want to explain how you can make your website appear in the search engine results for any keyword phrase. I'll give you some steps to break it down.
I'm going to use the designer Le Vian as my example, but you can use any designer name as you follow these steps.
Step 1: Assume that you have the designer line Le Vian in your store, but your website doesn't appear in the search engines for that name. A Google search for "Le Vian" along with your town name produces zero results for you. The... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In yesterday's Daily Nugget I explained what steps to take to boost ranking for specific keywords based on their current ranking as reported in your Google Webmaster Tools account. Several of my suggestions included the need to write stories or blog posts.
Over time, Google Analytics will report every time visitors read your blog, and you will be able to track when those blog posts brought visitors to your site... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
I'd like to refer back to Google Webmaster Tools again and take a close look at the average position of the keywords listed on the Search Query report and compare them to the importance for your business. Keyword ranking will has a direct impact on your sales, which is why everyone is always clamoring to achieve first place ranking on Google.
But what does it take to move a keyword's ranking from down in the mud to one that's top ranked? The keyword ranking scale is from 1 to 1000 with the highest rank at 1 and the lowest ran... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
If you have a specific question about your website, or online marketing, please send it in via any of our channels. We're here for your Q&A as well as these Daily Golden Nuggets.
One of the questions we received this week lead us on a path of research into the keyword "pave," and we'd like to share what we found.
When looking at the keyword "pave" we wanted to figure out what the best phrases would be for some blog posts and educational articles.
Some initial findings from our logs showed that we might want to write a few blogs using these 3 phrases:
pave engagement rings pave engagement ring pave diamond engagement ring
We then took these phrases and plugged them into Google Insights to see what the results might be.
We found that since 2006 the number of people using those search phra... 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.
We've covered a few different topics about meta descriptions and meta keywords over the past few days. Today we'll continue with some ideas how to avoid keyword stuffing.
Month after month our own compiled research always shows these keyword phrases among the most frequent searched:
jewelry store jewelry stores engagement ring stores wedding ring stores
Basic SEO strategies dictate that you must include the words jewelry, stores, engagement, wedding, and ring on your website if you want to be found. But don't over use the words; otherwise you might look like a spammer. An overused keyword is one that appears unnecessarily on the page. Imagine the English language without pronouns; how annoying would it be to keep repeating someone proper name over and over again while talking to them? If you can imagine ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Here's some keyword research data that might help you.
Recently, while reviewing collected keyword data, we noticed a large occurrence of the keyword phrase "yellow gold" for December 2011. For the past 10 years, jewelers have told us that white gold jewelry is much more popular choice than yellow gold. Regular keyword research and traffic monitoring seems to agree with what we are told.
That is, until now.
So what are your latest sales figures for white gold vs. yellow gold? Have you noticed?
According to Google Insights for Search, the phrase "yellow gold" is steadily on the rise every year since 2004. Take a look for yourself at this link: http://bit.ly/yellowgold
Eight tall spikes stand out on the graph, which correspond to the last 8 holiday seasons. But that's not what we want you to notice. ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As we close out another holiday season, we at the Jeweler Website Advisory Group hope that all our readers experienced a successful holiday season.
How were your bridal sales this season? A recent study shows that only 51% of Americans are married, and that number is declining. The study also shows that other countries around the world are seeing a decline in the number of married couples. Visit this Bitly link to read more about this study: http://bit.ly/vR22pz
With this marriage study in mind we took a close look at trends for "engagement rings" this season to see if we could find any correlation of online interest that agrees with the study.
Online interest in engagement rings shows a slight rise in from October 2011 to December 22, 2011, and there's certainly more interest than Q2 and Q3 of 2011. When looking ... 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
Google has incorporated a massive dictionary into their functionality. After years of watching users, they were able to take that dictionary and create an automatic spelling correction feature called "Did You Mean."
The "Did you mean" feature showed up in November 2008, and it has a profound impact on SEO. Let's investigate why...
Whenever Google recognizes what it decides may be a misspelling, it will not return search results for that misspelling, instead it will correct the spelling and display a message saying "Showing results for {corrected spelling}. Search instead for {incorrect spelling}." This is a failsafe in case you really were searching for something with that incorrect (read: unpopular) spelling.
Prior to this automatic spelling correction, it was important to include misspellings on your website just... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Google has been making a lot of advancements in its paid search features recently. Honestly, they roll out new improvements every week, which becomes frustrating for us since we always need to replace the screen shots we have in our AdWords training courses.
In the past few months we've seen the following changes to AdWords: * Keyword Research Tool * Negative Keyword Matching for Campaigns * Keyword Opportunity Suggestions * Limitations of the number of URLs used in Ad Groups * +1 Recommendations by your friends was launched earlier this week
The latest new feature will completely change the way the SERP page 1 functions because Google will now offer paid inclusion in the organic listings to qualified advertisers. The trick is that Google won't identify a "paid inclusion" like it clearly identifies the "Ads"... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Trying to figure out the best keywords for your online marketing campaign can be pretty tricky, especially if you have a brand new jewelry website.
We know that all jewelry stores want to advertise "bridal" or "engagement rings" but those phrases are so tough to conquer. You're better off permutating those phrases into "local" versions by simply including your town name.
For example: "engagement rings in springfield" or "springfield engagement rings"
As you write content on your website, as long as you add your town name right next to your money phrase, you will be able to tackle the local market.
While we're on the topic of "bridal" we 'd like to give you some valuable advice. Don't try to target the keyword phrase "bridal jewelry." This is a worthless phrase for jewelry stores because it triggers SERP mat... 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
Every software program has bugs because it's simply impossible to find them all without thousands of people testing it.
Microsoft was criticized in 1997 for delivering Windows 98 with so many bugs it wouldn't work on most computers. It wasn't until Windows 98 Service Pack 1 (Win98 SE1) that people started to adopt the system.
Today, it's a common strategy of software developers to cut costs by just sending software out into the market without heavy testing. The "market" is, of course, the world. They then sit back and wait for customers to report bugs (or complain) and software patches are offered daily.
How many times a day do you get an update pop-up from Microsoft or Adobe or Java? Ironically, just as this sentence was typed this computer popped up the message "Java Update Available." The computer is mocking ... 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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In today's Daily Golden Nugget I want to explain how you can take a bunch of keyword phrases and expand upon how you attract customers who are interested in buying. This is a type of customer targeting and even customer segmentation. 
In today's Daily Golden Nugget, I want to explain how you can make your website appear in the search engine results for any keyword phrase. I'll give you some steps to break it down.
In yesterday's Daily Nugget I explained what steps to take to 
I'd like to refer back to Google Webmaster Tools again and take a close look at the average position of the keywords listed on the Search Query report and compare them to the importance for your business. Keyword ranking will has a direct impact on your sales, which is why everyone is always clamoring to achieve first place ranking on Google.
