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
What started as email spam years ago has turned into an ever-evolving monster of internet spam that permeates our emails, Google search results, automated telephone sales calls, and nonsense in our social media feeds. No matter how hard we try, marketing companies find new ways to put their message in front of us whenever we don't want it. This type of marketing is called interruption marketing, and it really has become an annoying interruption in everyday life as well.
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.
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
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
Every Friday, I venture out into the unknown to find a website that needs some help; I call them flops that could use some fixing. My hope is that you, the reader, will be able to learn a thing or two from someone else's mistakes, so that's what I look for.
This week I searched Google for the phrase "jewelers in Chapel Hill NC," and got these results:
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:
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 Friday Website Review. In honor of Halloween, I went searching for a spooky or horror related city name in which to find a candidate jeweler to review. Sadly, populated places like Devil's Peek, Hells Corner, and Pumpkinville are nothing more than tourist traps in the middle of nowhere with nothing more than a general store.
I then tried a search for Haddonfield, Illinois, the city portrayed in the Halloween movie series. But as it turns out Haddonfield, Illinois is a fictiti... 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 Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. The purpose of this website review is to look over a random retail jeweler's website to evaluate if they are correctly applying what we know about the internet, online marketing, and business. We'll see if improvements can be made, or if we can learn something from them.
Each week I start by searching Google in a random town for a typical phrase that a consumer would search for. This week the search phrase is "jewelers logan ut," and he... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
This is the Friday website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each week, I dig down into a random retail jewelry store website to discover the good and bad of what they've done with their online identity. The goal is to learn something that you can also apply to your own online identity.
This week I've decided to search San Luis Obispo, CA for my candidate jeweler. I'm starting my search with the phrase "wedding rings San Luis Obispo, CA." This is the Google SERP that was returned:
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 weekly website review edition of the Daily Golden Nugget. Each Friday, I work through these reviews to help you understand the good and bad ways a retail jewelry store website works. I look for good and bad website design, content, photography, usability, and search engine optimization in hopes that we can all learn something new.
Each week, I use Google Chrome in incognito mode to search for review candidates. Incognito mode allows me to hide potentially personalized search results ... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
As I quickly approach my 1300th Daily Golden Nugget, I find myself pondering my existence. What else could I possibly write about that I haven't already?
Truthfully, a lot, but I'm also realizing that's I've never created a series of simple examples or how-to's for typical search engine optimization tasks. So, starting today, I'm going to work through several days (however many it might take) to show you how to tie together simple SEO procedures.
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.
In this edition of #ThrowbackThursday, I'm jumping back to the topic of "thin content" that I first explained back in September 2011.
Thin Content Explained
In simple terms, thin content refers to a web page that has very few words on it. Google likes to refer to this content as pages "with little or... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
The internet has become a very visual place, especially on social media. While blog content may thrive with well written information, as of today, on Facebook and Google+ you won't get noticed without some type of visual. This is especially a complete change for Facebook because in 2013, they lowered the visibility of status updates with images because they were combating meme over usage.
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 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
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
What a fantastic weekend at the JCK Las Vegas show! We gathered many new questions and got a lot of new information to report to you over the coming weeks.
Many jewelers are asking if it's important to have a product catalog on your website, and we'd like to report on some things we heard, and tell you our opinion.
If you have an online product catalog, you have the choice to sell through full e-commerce, or just show products. Our opinion is it better to not activate e-commerce unless you are ready for the extra expense of PCI compliance security, and as long as you realize that you won't have tons of online sales unless you also have a marketing budget. Also, you need a staff that can handle online orders.
On the other hand, with e-commerce you can track your ROI from the first click all the way through the sale,... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Cyber Monday is the Monday following US Thanksgiving holiday. After a long weekend of shopping consumers eagerly take to their computers seeking the best online deals. So much online shopping transpires that day that it's hard to believe people get any real work done.
This year Cyber Monday falls on November 26, 2012, just 196 days from now. That's not a lot of time to get your e-commerce jewelry website up and running.
HOLIDAY WARNING: If you don't start working on your e-commerce website by June 1, 2012 you probably won't have it live in time for this year's holiday season. From our experience, it just takes too long for a jewelry e-commerce website to be designed, programmed, photography, and product upload.
According to comScore, the 2011 Holiday season was 15% higher at $37.2 billion than in 2010. Cyber Mond... VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
On Friday, we told you that it was safe to have more than 100 links on a single web page when using them within your primary navigation. You could also hide several links within CSS dropdown menus.
The use of advanced CSS techniques in your website design allow for features that are very nicely user interactive.
CSS, which stands for cascading style sheet, can be used to create new types of interactive features that previously would take a lot of JavaScript programming. Some of the features in CSS can even contradict what some people know about SEO.
Hiding text on a web page is an old black hat SEO technique. Some people would disguise keyword rich text in black color on a black background. You could also use white text on a white background. The effect is that the text is invisible to users but not to Google.VIEW FULL GOLD NUGGET
Some time ago, we heard a rumor that you couldn't grow your website too big, too fast, otherwise it would look like a spamming website to Google. The year was 2007 and this made us wonder if it also hurt your website to launch a new product catalog with 3000+ products, or if you should slowly add them to the site.
Fast forward to today. We now know that putting a large jewelry product catalog online overnight produces interesting, reproducible results that we have witnessed several times now.
When Google first finds your new product catalog it will spend the first day or two reading and rereading all the pages inside that catalog until it's satisfied. Then, on the third day, it throttles back to only a few pages visited regularly.
It seems like it will rush to read all your newest information (in this case, product... 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