Jewelry ECOMM Tech

SEO Tips For Jewelers Who Aren’t Tech Experts: The Basics September 19, 2018 (0 comments)

Getting listed properly and found on Google is one of the most important things your jewelry store can do for it's visibility and success. The proper term is "Search Engine Optimization" - or SEO for short.  I think a lot of jewelers view SEO as some magical, unobtainable thing unless you spend lots of money. Should you hire an agency to handle your SEO? Yea, probably. It's an extremely in-depth skill set that takes a long time to master. Given how important it is for your store's success, I'd say hiring an expert far outweighs the cost. However, maybe you don't have the budget, or you'd prefer to do it in-house and manage it yourself. This article is the first in a series of SEO articles, reviewing simple things you can actually do yourself to improve your Google rankings - even if you're not great with tech. This "SEO Tips For Jewelers Who Aren't Tech Experts" series will likely be published each week for the next month.

How does Google work?

The ultimate goal is to do all the things that Google deems beneficial for it's users - the searchers. The reason Google is such a powerhouse is because searching on Google usually gets searchers the exact results they want - it's so accurate! So everything Google does is designed to help searchers find the information they need as quickly as possible. Google essentially judges every website on the web and "ranks" pages based on how helpful they'll be to the searcher. They do this by sending little scanners and pieces of code around the web - "crawlers" - to scan the content on all the websites online. If your website has lots of content about "diamonds" and "buying jewelry", Google's technology understands what your website is about.

No Guarantees

Whether you hire a fantastic digital agency or decide to manage your Google presence by yourself, there are no guarantees that any of it will do anything. You see, while you're undergoing all these changes to your website and digital strategy to improve your SEO rank, so are your competitors. So everyone is constantly competing for the highest Google rank possible. Your agency may be the Lebron James of SEO and your competitor may have hired Michael Jordan for their SEO. You're both competing for the same thing. The benefit? Most jewelers simply aren't doing much SEO. Likely the big stores are. But from what I've experienced and the conversations I've had, its doubtful that many smaller jewelers have a handle on this. This means you may be able to see great results - even managing your SEO yourself - simply because you may not have much competition.

White Hat vs Black Hat

"White Hat" SEO strategies are tactics that Google deems ethical. This includes:

• Securing quality inbound links. Backlinks should be on relevant sites and act like a “vote” for your site.Creating original, long-form quality content. Add in associated social and email campaigns to spread awareness and book visibility and traffic to content.
• Use of keywords and keyword analysis
• Great site organization. You want to make it as easy for search engine bots to crawl your website as possible, so a clear site architecture is important. Also, search engines prioritize information (e.g., headers and titles) so ensuring the most important keywords are in the header tags is important.

Black Hat SEO is most commonly defined as a disapproved practice that nevertheless could increase a page's ranking in a search engine result page (SERP). These practices are against the search engine's terms of service and can result in the site being banned from the search engine and affiliate sites. This includes things keyword stuffing, link spamming, duplication of copyrighted content, page hijacking and more.

Two main areas of SEO - "on-page" and "off-page"

There are two main areas of SEO - "on-page" and "off-page".

1. On-page SEO looks at what your site (or your page) is about
2. Off-page SEO looks at how authoritative and popular your site is

Both areas play huge roles into how your website will rank on search engines. In a general sense, what you rank for is largely determined by on-page factors, while how high you rank in the search results is largely determined by off-page factors. This is a quick run through of basic principles. In the next article in the series, I'll teach you how to increase your Google rank with On-Page SEO factors. Hope this was informative!