Jewelry is the sort of thing that has traditionally excelled in brick and mortar stores. Even in the digital age, people have enjoyed the act of going to a local Chicago jewelry store, inspecting each piece and hearing about the details, seeing the beautiful rings and necklaces. Since jewelry has always been such a niche item, they were sold in physical stores to help keep that reputation.
But as the digital age becomes more pervasive, people have begun shopping for more things online than they ever have before. This includes some niche items, such as jewelry. Because the safety of mail shipments has gotten better, the speed at which things can be shipped has gone up, and the cost of jewelry when cutting out the middle-man can go down quite a bit, more people are beginning to purchase jewelry online than ever before.
Unfortunately, not every jewelry store understands how to market online. They treat their online store as if it was a physical store, expecting word of mouth and the sale of a niche product to bring in customers. And while that’s one way to describe proper internet marketing, it’s not entirely correct. Internet marketing requires a certain amount of skill and talent at something that physical stores simply don’t need.
Mainly, SEO.
Search Engine Optimization And You
Some SEO agencies mentioned that search engine optimization is a blanket term for Chicago SEO marketing tactics that involve utilizing Google search algorithms and social media. There was a time when internet marketing was limited purchasing ad space on already existing websites, and hoping that spread around enough word of mouth to be worthwhile. But the internet evolved, and marketing had to evolve, as well.
They got the job done, but not very well. These were tactics such as keyword stuffing, which is when a website attempts to use specific words multiple times, whether the phrase makes sense or not, to make the site seem relevant to Google search. Google worked to get better and bring more consistent results, and soon the Google algorithm would ignore any site that used certain search terms too many times.
Another way Google made SEO tactics change was by giving higher relevancy to sites that were visited more often, stayed loaded for a particular length of time or were updated more recently. With that change, SEO tactics changed yet again. Many places created blogs, allowing them to publish new content on their site regularly while encouraging return readers.
With the advent of social media, SEO became more complicated yet again. Now, stores can once again bring in customers by selling to a niche market and relying on word of mouth. But they still can’t, because instead of being one of the only places in an area to sell the product, they’re competing with people across the entire world.
Organic Traffic And Being SEO Friendly
When people talk about a site being “SEO friendly,” it means the site is easy to share and more likely to trigger certain search terms in Google. It’s trickier than it may seem at first. Why?
Different forms of social media function in a variety of ways. Facebook is a site where you can build a small community of like-minded people, whereas Twitter is a place where you can send out a quick thought or image to as large an audience as possible. Because social media acts in different ways, it’s almost impossible to make something SEO friendly for every social media site.
Not only that, you have to have consistently relevant information. Just putting up yet another page about how you’re a plumber in Chicago won’t necessarily make Google think your site is worthwhile. So being able to create organic traffic, that is, clicks to your online store from naturally occurring ways such as friends sharing on social media or coming up on a Google search, is a skill that has to be honed over time.
Why Is SEO Important?
If SEO sounds complicated, that’s because it can be. But you need it because, without it, no one will notice your online store. If you want to drive customers to your website, then you need to know how to make people interested. And study after study has shown that people only click on the first few links when they type in a Google search. So if your jewelry store doesn’t show up in the first few links, you might as well not be online.
However, SEO doesn’t cost any money. You can hire a professional SEO company (and it might be a good idea), but you can do it in-house. And once you have SEO set up, it usually takes very little time or energy to maintain. An hour or so each day to post up something new and exciting on social media, and then things take care of themselves.
