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
Has the search ranking on your website plateaued or declined over the last 12 months? It might be because you've fallen behind with adding new content and products to your website. Content is any type of written description, story, PDF document, photo, and even a video. The more you add the better your chances are to help increase your organic search results, which can lead to more traffic.
The depth of the content you have on your website doesn't just help with overall ranking, it becomes really ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In honor of the jewelry shows taking place in Miami this weekend, I've chosen a Miami Beach jeweler for this week's website review. It all started with a Google search for "jewelers miami beach, fl" and these search results:
My website reviews every week usually start with the random selection of a town, but this week, I didn't find any jewelers when I selected Jurupa Valley, California. If there are jewelers in Jurupa Valley, then they probably don't have a website or a large enough digital footprint for Google to find them.
With the lack of any real local results, Google returned store listings from surrounding towns and a bunch of directory sites, like Yelp. Here's what Google gave me:
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
Can you learn from someone else's mistakes? That's exactly what I hope you'll get out of this Friday Flop Fix. This week, I'm venturing over to Tupelo, MS in search of a retail jeweler that might be making a mistake with their online presence.
This is the result I saw when searching for "jewelers tupelo ms" in Google:
Last week, I went shopping for a water proof iPhone case; something that would be good enough to protect the phone while canoeing on a river. After a bit of searching at the local mall, I found a potentially good case made by THULE. Due to its price, the THULE Atmos X5 case was locked in one of those anti-theft store packages that covered most of the important details. Before buying it, I needed to make sure it was really waterproof rather than just splashproof, and to what dep... 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.
Welcome to my weekly random website review. In these reviews, I search for website candidates that have problems (aka flops) with their website, and I suggest fixes to make them better. This week, I'm taking a drive down to Accomack County, Virginia in search for a jewelry store. Accomack is near the famous Route 13 Chesapeake Bay Bridge-Tunnel that I once had the pleasure, and slight fright, to drive over. There are fewer bus... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this week's #FridayFlopFix website review, I'm heading over to Hawai'i in search for a jeweler who could use some website help. Every Friday, I search for a website that's not quite doing the best they could. I want to point out the flops on their website, and suggest some fixes.
I started my review candidate search with the query "jewelers waimea hi." Waimea is a town on the Big Island of Hawai'i. Instead of choosing from the websites that appeared on the first page of Google's results, I looked throu... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
A reader recently wrote in and asked if they should archive their sales notices on their website, or just delete them. There's no easy answer to this question because it all depends on how you made the announcement. Let's explore some of the reasons when and why to archive those notices.
Types of Notices
The question at hand is very general and does not specify if they wanted to archive a web page, a social media post, an email newsletter, or a sales email so I'll cover all three fo... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
There was a lot of marketing buzz around QR codes when they appeared in the USA in 2009 and 2010. Marketers thought they would be a hot sensation for smartphone users and started slapping them on all their ads. Even though QR codes began to appear everywhere, their usefulness and marketing success rates were small. What marketers didn't realize was that QR codes must be utilitarian, but most were gimmicky. I wrote this Nugget about... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the #FridayFlopFix edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each week, I look for candidate websites that are not ranking very well in Google search results and dissect them to figure out why they are ranking poorly.
This week, I searched for "jewelry stores Florence, SC" to find that poorly ranked site. I found an interesting situation with the store Fisher Jewelers & Silversmiths that I'll investigate today. I first noticed the AGS listing for the store shown here:
Don't want to read? This week you can also watch the video recording of this review here!
This is the #FridayFlopFix website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. This week I've randomly chosen Santa Clarita, CA as the city to search for my review candidate. When I searched Google for the phrase "jewelers Santa Clarita, CA," I saw these three Google business listings:
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping way back to September 2010 to the topic of landing page planning, although I didn't specifically call it landing page planning back then.
Planning your landing page long before you need to use it is an important part of a successful online marketing strategy, but before I get in too deep of how to help with the success, let me just briefly explain what a landing page is.
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
I've previously estimated and explained that the customer cost of acquisition for a retail jeweler is somewhere around $75. You can calculate this number by summing up your advertising expense for a campaign and dividing that by the number of new customers you've acquired during that period.
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.
Welcome to the #FridayFlopFix website review. During this holiday season, I'm shopping for a few websites that have problems: websites whose features could easily turn them into a flop and hurt their business.
I started my search with the query "jewelry gifts in huntington wv" and was given these results from Google:
Do you have a specific question about your website or want more details about something I've previously written about? Don't be afraid to write in and ask; you might just see your question in an upcoming Daily Golden Nugget.
Today is Thanksgiving Day in the U.S., the only national holiday that transcends all races and religions. The holiday is typically celebrated by gathering together with friends and family and enjoying an elaborate meal. The next few weeks will see huge spikes in retail store sales, and today is probably the last day off most retail store owners in the U.S. will have until Christmas Day.
I'm mentioning this because a recent review of my own Google Analytics revealed that 47% of... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Every business experiences some type of growing pains; these usually have something to do with lack of time, hiring the right employees, and supply and demand of products, but there's also a website growing pain that's very real.
For this week's #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to my August 2011 topic of Landing Pages that I explained here and here.
Website redesign and ad specific landing pages are more important than ever. I use video and heatmap tracking on several of my customer websites to... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As I write this, I'm indulging in a very large pumpkin muffin. It will quite possibly be my lunch for today even though I know it's just a quick fix of food and not the type that could sustain me for more than a few hours.
Our lives are filled with quick fixes of one type or another. Many advertising tactics feed into the need to satisfy the human nature for a quick fix. In the website and e-commerce realm, we of... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
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
This is the weekly random website review where I search for a website candidate in a town near you and review how well their website is put together.
I never know what I'm going to find. Sometimes I find great sites and sometimes I find sites with a lot of problems. I do my best to write down my first impressions of the sites in an attempt to illustrate how a consumer might be reacting.
No matter what, there's always something to learn from.
To kick off the review, I'm searching for "engagement rings ho... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. I'm always on the lookout for a jewelry website we can learn from, both good and bad. In honor of my visit to St. Louis, MO this weekend I'm going to look for one of the retail jewelers in St. Louis to review.
Using Google Chrome in incognito mode, I searched for "jewelry stores st louis mo." This is the SERP that was returned to me:
This Daily Golden Nugget is part of my Practical SEO Guide series with the goal of giving you quick, actionable information to make the search engine optimization of your website a little better.
Today we're looking at the Landing Page Report in Google Analytics. Log in to your Google Analytics account and navigate your way over to Behavior -> Site Content -> Landing pages as shown in this animated screen grab:
This is the weekly website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each week, I work through these website reviews to give you real examples to learn from. It doesn't matter if the website is good or bad, there's always something to learn from.
I'm changing it up a little this week. Normally I search for the phrase "jewelry store" and a random town name, but not this week. In honor of this weekend's official kickoff of the Jewelers Equality Alliance<... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Welcome to the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The goal for today is to find and perform a usability review of a random jewelry store mobile website. I'm performing the review on, and taking screen shots with, my iPhone 6.
The first review for today is to see if a google.com search through the Safari web browser would yield the same results as a search using the Google search app on the iPhone. Here's a side by side comparison of the two methods:
This is another edition of the Friday Website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each week, I use Google Chrome in incognito mode to search out a random retail jeweler from around the U.S., and then I review their website.
I never know what I'm going to find when I start these reviews. My hope is that I can illustrate one of my previous Daily Nuggets with a live example.
My search began this week with the phrase "jewelers in Evergreen, CO" and saw this as my search results:
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.
I remember back in the late 1990s when I was helping people set up their first email addresses and told them that email would eventually be more important than their telephone number. Since then, the internet evolved in ways we never imagined and, although email didn't cause telephone obsolescence, some say that both methods of communication are going away.
A jeweler wrote to me the other day asking for help with their Mother's Day contest promotion. The promotion is being advertised through the local papers but the contest takes place through their website. To enter the contest you need to fill out the online form and agree to sign up for their newsletter.
Because the contest is centered around creating a custom design, this jeweler wants to send out a series of additional custom design em... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Popular pages on your website are often called "Landing Pages." That popularity can be measured as the number of people who click on a page while browsing around your site, or the number of people that Google and Bing send to your site.
When you place an ad in the newspaper or send out a direct mail piece, you usually include a website address on that ad. Most of the time, that website address will just be your domain name, like exampledomain.com, in which case the... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Success often leaves footprints. If you want to achieve higher success rates in your business, you can attempt to copy the strategies that similar businesses are using to achieve their apparent success.
As a retail jeweler, you would have to closely examine what your local competitors are doing, particularly if you feel they are more successful than you are. You could study their websites and marketing, but many times the success of a store also depends on the customer service provided by all the staff.
We know from yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget that people who browse jewelry websites prefer the iPhone over the Android. In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm investigating exactly what mobile visitors are searching for.
During the month of September 2014, I collected and analyzed all the landing pages for mobile visitors across m... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
There have been a few special number nuggets so far, like the 100, 200, 404, the 505, the 970, 1000, and now the 1099. What's so special about 1099? Well in the United States, that isn't just a number; it's also the tax form you give to your freelancers and subcontractors at the end of every year instead of a W2.
Although the US employment rules say you should hire employees and put them on payroll, there are times when you might want to only hir... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In today's Daily Nugget, I'll show you how to read one of the important Google Analytics reports that will help you understand how people found you during the holiday season.
Although this Nugget can stand on its own, this is actually the next part in a longer joined series of topics to prepare online advertising content for the holiday season. Launch it, then track it. I've included links to the previous Nuggets at the end of today's newsletter.
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm outlining a potential marketing plan for the upcoming holiday season. My example will focus on specific items which we will build content around and share socially.
What I've written out in this guide will be good for anyone looking for a different approach to marketing for this upcoming holiday season. There's a lot of detail for the setup, implementation, and then the post-analysis of the entire campaign. You'll do the setup... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
It seems like every day I see not one, not two, but perhaps more than a dozen different online marketing campaigns that make me scratch my head wondering why they bothered.
I'm not only referring to the jewelry industry either, but all types of online marketing. It just seems like so many businesses don't understand the larger view of how intertwined the internet is to everyday life and the expectations of their customers.
How deep is your website? The depth of a website is measured by the number of times you would have to click on a navigation link in order to reach the most nested areas of your website.
I've read website design recommendations stating that every page of your website should be reachable within 3 clicks. Anything more than that supposedly won't be of interest by website users.
But when it comes to a product catalog, it's very easy to dive down into 4 levels very quickly. <... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm returning back to the topic of Landing Pages to give you another easy example of how to set one up.
A "landing page" is usually single web page that you create for a specific purpose. Many times, a landing page is used in online banner ads, shared links to social networks, and pay per click advertising like Google AdWords.
A landing page should be designed to get someone interested in your product or service, but then give them links to additional inform... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In September 2013, shortly after Google announced their new Hummingbird algorithm, I decided to set up a special website test to see exactly how organic traffic and paid traffic would differ on a unique landing page.
On one of the website I manage I set up a landing page with 1469 words of content, 16 photos, and 37 links to other pages on the website. Indeed, this was a very complicated page that fully explained the business, all the services they provide, and the products they sold.<... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Today is Patriot Day in the United States--the day America thinks back to, and in some ways relives, the infamous events on September 11, 2001. Twelve years have passed.
Being only 15 miles from Ground Zero and living through the unfolding events of that day and months after was... well... I now assume it was akin to how many Americans felt after the attack on Pearl Harbor. I'm not a historian by any account, but I have to imagine that the attack on Pearl Harbor lived on in the memories of millions o... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
On Thursday last week I presented the top 6 landing pages for retail jewelry websites other than the home page. In reality, the home page accounted for 62.96% of the landing page traffic for the sites I monitor. Other than the home page I tracked 27 other pages of significance, giving you the top 6 in that previous Nugget.
A 'Landing Page' is what we call the first page that people see when they arrive on your website; in other words, this is the page they 'land' on.
Most people believe that their main landing page is the Home Page of their site. Truthfully this is not always the case because the landing page is actually any page that someone sees in the search engine results. Since those results change depending on what keywords are searched for it's very likely that Google will not retur... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The ranking results for your listing on Google+ Local have probably gone up and down in the past year since "Places" was converted to "+Local." During that time Google has spent a lot of time trying to improve the overall way that things relate to one another online, and it's those relations that might be hurting your +Local listing.
Your Google+ Local business listing appears within the Google+ network now. Some of you might remember that before 2010 the Google Places system was part of Google Search. The same information in your +Local listing also appears within the Google Maps system on de... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
In Yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget I listed the 9 popular pages that people were reading on independent retail jewelry store website throughout the 2012 Holiday Season. Today I'm looking at the popular Landing Pages.
The term "Landing Page" refers to the first page a person visits when they arrive at your site. This is the page you link to from Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or a blog post. More importantly, it's the page that people see when they search for something in Google or B... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Including today there are 19 more shopping days before Christmas. By now you probably have all your ads out there doing their job; the only thing left to do is help the customers as they walk into your store and use your website.
Handling the in-store customers should be second nature for any retail employee; otherwise that employee wouldn't be on a selling floor. The typical salesperson will greet a customer as they walk into the store and attend to their needs. Customers will probably ask for a specific item if they were... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
How big is your sheet of paper? How big is the direct mail post card you send? How big is the newspaper ad, or the billboard you paid for?
The answer to each of those questions will always include specific dimensions, but the answer I'm actually looking for is "finite."
Each of these advertising mediums has a time and a place, but they all need to attract attention. Most of the time the best attention-getters include good artwork, good layouts, and just the right amount of information. Too much informat... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Converting website visitors into customers requires an understanding of where your customers came from, and what page they arrived at on your website.
When analyzing a website we call that arrival page, or point of entry, a Landing Page. The place the visitor came from is called the Traffic Source.
Here's a list of common sources:
Google SERP Google AdWord Ad Google Places Listing Google+ Page Email Newsletter Facebook News Feed Facebook Ad Yelp Listing
Understanding the content of each of these sources will help you convert your website visitor into a paying customer. Was the person reading your email newsletter, or did they click on a Facebook or Google ad?
The context of each traffic source changes what the person expects to see when they arrive on your website. Let's break do... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Last week, while analyzing a new website for a jeweler, we came across a duplicate content situation that we'd like to share with you.
Large websites are tricky to manage and organize. Customers will find your website more user-friendly when you split your content and product catalog into useful subsets of pages rather than creating a single long list of links. In fact, a study published in The Net Effect magazine in 2009 revealed that the average person only sees the first 2 and the last 2 links in any link list.
The average person looking at a list of 4 links will be able to read all 4 without problem. Now give that same average person a list of 5 or 6 links to read and the human brain switches into what we will call "scan mode" and they uncontrollably skip the 3rd and 4th links.
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 "Doorway Pages".
A Doorway Page is any page added to a website simply to target a specific keyword phrase, but instead of being useful to the reader it usually has very little content on it and leaves the visitor feeling dissatisfied.
Some SEO companies have automated software that will create dozens of doorway pages for your site. For this process you only need to plug in your list of keywords and the software will search the internet for brief information or definitions of those keywords and create these nonsense pages.
For example, an automatically created doorway page for the phrase engagement rings would have your store name, address and then might scr... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Every so often someone asks us how we can keep producing educational material on jWAG yet we never ask for money. Other internet marketing training companies for jewelers charge something monthly, so how do we do it? jWAG is funded by the web services company Sapphire Collaborative (www.sapphirecollaborative.com). Almost all the educational info presented here is put to use inside every website they create. Mobile websites, SEO, e-commerce, Facebook marketing, Google Places... The Sapphire Collaborative staff handles it so you can keep running your store. Give them a call today at 888-872-0274.
In yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget, we covered the topic of writing quality descriptions on your product pages. Today we're taking a step back and would like to talk about the category/section landing pages of your online catalog... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
One of the more difficult tasks of SEO for e-commerce websites is getting your product catalog pages to rank anywhere in the SERP; getting them to rank on page 1 is even harder.
It's nearly impossible to rank a single product's detail page in the SERP unless you have a lot of detail that looks like paragraph content. For this Nugget we're going to ignore the product detail page and instead focus on the main landing pages for each product catalog category.
We're referring to the category landing page as the main page someone sees when they enter your online catalog and clicks on "wedding rings" or some other primary category. You might have subcategories for "princess cut diamond wedding rings" or "round diamond wedding rings," and each of those are considered sub-landing pages.
What type of jewelry website would you prefer? One with a product catalog on the home page and no jewelry store details other than online selling? Or would you prefer a website that has detailed store information in addition to a full catalog of all the items you carry in the store?
It really doesn't matter which you choose, just as long as you take the time to learn what will attract buyers to your site. What attracts buyers? Words do.
The more words you put on your site the better the chances are that you will attract random organic traffic to your site. Yesterday we explained the value of adding a blog to your site. But what if you simply didn't want to do that?
One common strategy for optimizing large e-Commerce sites is to create dedicated landing pages for sections of the catalog. Another common name for these l... 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
Don't want to read? This week you can also watch the video recording of this review 
I remember back in the late 1990s when I was helping people set up their first email addresses and told them that email would eventually be more important than their telephone number. Since then, the internet evolved in ways we never imagined and, although email didn't cause telephone obsolescence, some say that both methods of communication are going away.
In today's Daily Nugget, I'll show you how to read one of the important Google Analytics reports that will help you understand how people found you during the holiday season. 
In this edition of the Daily Golden Nugget, I'm returning back to the topic of Landing Pages to give you another easy example of how to set one up.
In September 2013, shortly after Google announced their new Hummingbird algorithm, I decided to set up a special website test to see exactly how organic traffic and paid traffic would differ on a unique landing page.
Today is Patriot Day in the United States--the day America thinks back to, and in some ways relives, the infamous events on September 11, 2001. Twelve years have passed. 
On Thursday last week I presented the 
A 'Landing Page' is what we call the first page that people see when they arrive on your website; in other words, this is the page they 'land' on.
The ranking results for your listing on Google+ Local have probably gone up and down in the past year since "Places" was converted to "+Local." During that time Google has spent a lot of time trying to improve the overall way that things relate to one another online, and it's those relations that might be hurting your +Local listing.
In Yesterday's Daily Golden Nugget I listed the 9 popular pages that people were reading on independent retail jewelry store website throughout the 2012 Holiday Season. Today I'm looking at the popular Landing Pages.
Including today there are 19 more shopping days before Christmas. By now you probably have all your ads out there doing their job; the only thing left to do is help the customers as they walk into your store and use your website.
How big is your sheet of paper? How big is the direct mail post card you send? How big is the newspaper ad, or the billboard you paid for?
