Do you have a jewelry webshop? Then you surely know how KILLING the competition can be in your product category. That is why it is even more important that your webshop can attract organic traffic, because with advertising, you will quickly spend a lot of money for very few sales, precisely because of that competition.
That is why today I want to share 5 tips on how you can give your webshop SEO a boost in 2019.
1. Ensure your shop has a good, comprehensive page structure with many specific URLs
And that is especially important when you sell a huge variety of jewelry. Do you have gold and silver, short and long, hoops and charms, etc. etc.? Then it is most convenient to create a separate page for every larger category, so that it gets its own URL. For example, "hoop earrings" gets its own page if you sell many types of these.
Why?
Because you can then optimize this page very specifically around that theme - allowing you to show Google through texts and images that this is an important product category that should be found on its own when someone searches for "hoop earrings".
When you throw all products into one pile (pun not intended!), it will be very difficult to rank for specific search terms, and you will have to fight very hard against all those competitors who also want to be found for the word "jewelry". Sorry, but you can only dream about that...
2. Ensure every important product category has space for an SEO text, and write a unique text for every category as well
My tip is to place this at the bottom of the product category page, so that it doesn't take up a lot of space above your products. People won't necessarily read this text - but Google will! So, write a piece of at least 200-300 characters about the product category and use the name of that category in your text a few times. For example, "Hoop Earrings" in a sentence.
3. Keep a blog - based on seasonality and search volumes
This means that it is better to be current or to focus entirely on keywords that are frequently used if your goal is to rank higher in Google. A short inspirational post is nice for the visitor, and you can alternate with that - but Google likes substantive, longer blog posts that are focused on a highly searched theme. When many people come to your blog and stay there for a long time, it gives a signal to Google that the blog post is relevant and also interesting for your target audience. Try to do this at least twice a month, or outsource it and save yourself the stress!
How do you find the search volumes for your jewelry webshop?
You can use the Google Ads Keyword tool, for example. If you do not have a Google Ads account, you can create one for free. You don't have to pay until you create campaigns and start advertising. You can still use the keyword tool to see how many times a search term is searched for per month, and also the possible level of competition. You will soon find an SEO tutorial about this at TWSH.
4. Ensure your images are also specifically tagged
When you give images a more specific name than "image-00034", you make that image readable for Google. Do this as specifically as possible; for example, name at least the type of jewelry, the material, and any color if applicable. For example, "gold-hoop-earrings-large". You do this in a field called alt-tag or image-tag, usually found in your backend where you upload images or while adding an image.
5. Watch out for duplicate content!
From experience, I know that some website systems automatically create URLs for many product variants or blog post tags that Google then sees as duplicate content. You are penalized for this because Google prefers that you use a unique piece of text on every page.
When you suffer from duplicate content, there are several ways to solve this - you can either have a canonical URL added that indicates which of the duplicate pages is the most important, so that Google only includes this one. Or you can indicate in something like a Robot.txt file which URLs Google should not index. Which method is the best is something you should best discuss with your web developer or webshop support. This varies per webshop.
Hopefully, I have helped you on your way with these tips so that you now know what you need to remember to do structurally (image tags, texts for new product category pages, new URL or category for new types of jewelry) etc.
If you would like more advice, schedule a 30-min call with me here!