Jewelry ECOMM Tech

Best SEM Practices For Jewelers March 12, 2018 (0 comments)

Selling online can be intimidating. There are so many platforms, rules, and best practices, that it can be hard to keep up with while taking care of other daily business activities. To make matters worse, the online marketing game is constantly changing. What worked yesterday to drive sales might not work tomorrow. Fortunately, no matter how often things change, you can always rely on a strong knowledge foundation to serve as a guide to make online business decisions. Here you’ll find SEM practices that will enable you to lay down such a foundation to succeed online as a jeweler. Let’s get started!

What Is SEM? And What’s the Difference Between SEO and SEM?

We often hear about SEO or search engine optimization, but we hear little about SEM or search engine marketing. Often people use these terms interchangeably, but it’s important to note the difference between them. Think of SEM as the umbrella term for increasing visibility of a website online. SEO and PPC or pay per click advertising fall within this SEM umbrella. Thus, search engine marketing is more comprehensive than SEO and includes a much wider diversity of marketing techniques. Let’s dig into these terms a bit more … Search Engine Land defines SEO as the process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,” “editorial,” or “natural” search results on search engines. It involves optimizing onsite and offsite factors to get results. Onsite factors are the ones that can be managed on a site, such as site structure, headings, and keyword density. Offsite factors are the ones that live outside your website, but which can still influence your organic rankings. For instance, backlinks, social shares, etc. All that search engines like Google want is for users to have the best experience possible. Thus, it will give higher rankings to websites that seem relevant (thanks to offsite factors), and which are user-friendly (thanks to onsite factors.) Pay Per Click Advertising or PPC The term PPC advertising refers to online campaigns in which advertisers have to pay for each click received by their ads. The most popular PPC campaigns run on Google AdWords and social media platforms. AdWords campaigns can use keyword and audience targeting, while social media campaigns require a target audience. PPC campaigns offer advertisers a unique opportunity to reach their target audience fast. Unlike organic rankings which can take several months of SEO practices to work, PPC advertising helps advertisers gain visibility as soon as the campaigns launch. The key is to use both SEO and PPC strategies to maximize the chances of gaining conversions. While working on SEO, run PPC campaigns simultaneously to get best results.

Best SEM Practices for Jewelers

Now that we’ve laid down the basics, let’s get into specific SEM practices that can be used to generate sales online. We’ve divided the practices into different sections for clarity:

SEO

Although SEO is about getting “free” traffic, you’ll find that some of these techniques may require some type of investment in terms of labor and hours. Let’s dig in! Create Content Strategically It’s never too early to start blogging. It will help your eCommerce store in many ways. To start, it will help you with SEO by allowing you to rank for content that is relevant to your site. Also, content can help you convince potential customers that your store is the right choice for them, and it will provide validity to your website. For instance, if you sell engagement rings, you can write an article about How to Select the Perfect Engagement Ring. That article will allow your website to be found for related searches. This will increase your organic ranking and allow your website to be found online. See below how the jewelry brand Brilliant Earth used this concept to create an engagement ring guide targeting men: There are certain points you must keep in mind when developing your content pipeline:

• • Create content that speaks to your ideal target buyer. In the case of engagement rings, decide if you are going to write for the guy or the girl. Each audience will require a different tone and will be interested in different types of content. If you don’t keep your target buyer in mind, you’ll end up creating content that is not relevant, and it can generate low-quality traffic to your website, which can be useless.
  • Be consistent. Creating just a couple of articles and hoping for the best won’t cut it. You have to plan your content calendar in advance and release content in a timely manner for best results.
  • Be strategic. Make your content calendar surrounding relevant keywords you’re looking to rank for. This requires doing some research to find out what topics people are interested in, and what the search volumes are associated with specific keywords. You don’t want to waste time writing about a topic that nobody searches for!

For strategy, use tools such as Google Keyword Planner to find out search volumes, and Google Trends to find out topics that are trending in the industry. Optimize Your eCommerce Site Another SEO best practice that should be implemented on your site is a clear website structure. A website structure refers to how the website is set up—i.e., how the individual subpages are linked to one another. It is particularly important that crawlers can find all subpages quickly and easily when websites have a large number of subpages. Menu organization and product hierarchy are the keys to having an organized website that Google will love and reward with good rankings, in turn improving your overall site’s user experience. We won’t get into technical details about website structure, but you can read more about it in this awesome website structure article. Another simple SEO service strategy you can implement is image optimization. Make sure your product images are not too big; otherwise, it can slow down your site and affect your organic rankings.

PPC

Pay per click advertisements refer to any campaigns that require payment for clicks. Some of the most popular ones are Google AdWords and social media ads. Set Up a Smart Social Media Campaign Structure The challenging thing about social media is that its users may not be looking actively for services or products like yours. They are just on social media for entertainment and staying on top of the latest trends or posts. Therefore, is recommended to take a less aggressive sales strategy approach. This is especially relevant for fine jewelry stores that, due to their high-ticket items, may experience longer purchase-decision timeframes. Taking this behavior into consideration, think of your social media campaigns as a slow introduction to your jewelry for new audiences:

• 1st – Discovery – Where you introduce your brand and value to users that are not aware of your brand
• 2nd – Engagement – Trying to get engagement from the previous audience
• 3rd – Encouraging the Sale – More direct sales ads focused on driving sales
• 4th – Remarketing – Ads that retarget previous website visitors that did not convert

These campaigns have to have a connection and flow among them. The idea is to simulate a sales funnel, taking the lead from awareness to conversion. Create Campaigns Based on Strategic Objectives For the Discovery stage, you can run Likes campaigns on Facebook, targeting people that fit your ideal buyer profile. Just choose the “Page Likes” objective on Facebook: For engagement campaigns, select the “engagement” Facebook marketing objective and use video views (if you’re using video) or a custom audience for targeting. The idea is to get engagement in the form of likes, comments, or video views, so users can be more aware of your business. The custom audience can be composed of users that have interacted with your account in the past x days. To create this audience, simply go to the Audience section, click Create New Audience, and select Custom Audience from the dropdown menu. Then select Engagement and fill out the rest. For the third step in the funnel, encouraging the sale, use the conversion marketing objective on Facebook. This type of objective will allow Facebook to optimize your ads based on conversions, so the platform can show your ads to the users who are most likely to convert. For eCommerce companies, dynamic remarketing is a must. This type of ad allows users to see the last products they added to the cart or viewed. Being more relevant to their specific website visit, you’ll increase the chances of conversion. To set it up, you’ll first need to create a catalog on Facebook, then select the catalog marketing objective under Campaign. Notes: Remember to set up your Facebook pixel to track the performance of all your campaigns and be able to run remarketing ads—you won’t able to create remarketing campaigns without it! Hope you found these practices helpful! Let us know your thoughts in the comments below!