Tips for getting the most out of your website

By Matthew A. Perosi

The internet has transformed the way we do business. Your website address is now more important than your street address, and if you worry about the first impression your store makes, then you should be even more worried about the first impression your website makes. Website visitors will first judge you by your website design—the way your website layout and colors look. Next, they will judge its user friendliness or usability—how the information is organized and if they can find their way around your site easily. Finally, they will judge your website content, which is the information you have on it, including photos and written copy throughout your site.

Consumers want to look and feel good when wearing jewelry. The challenge for every jewelry website is to illustrate how consumers can make that happen. To do so, jewelry designers should focus their online efforts on creating ownership desire through stunning visuals and intriguing storytelling to generate consumer interest. Your website either needs to convince customers to purchase in a store, or it needs to guide the online purchase through e-commerce. Either way, the process of setting up your website to support your business is a little more difficult than you may think.

Initial Website Considerations

There are numerous components that make up a successful website. What was once a simple process of buying a website template and having a high school student put it together has now turned into an integral part of your business that you should never entrust to an amateur. The setup process takes as much time and thought as opening a retail store or designing and manufacturing your first line of jewelry. Think of all the challenges you went through to accomplish either of those monumental projects, and the number of variables that were a surprise during the process. Building a successful website is also a monumental project with technology hurdles and financial considerations.

Pictures Say A Thousand Words

Your site may be functional and laid out well, but it will fail without great photography. Jewelry photos with amazing close-up detail are the only way to come close to the experience of seeing jewelry in-person. Well-focused photos with white backgrounds are more important than photos with colorful backgrounds. Photography taken with incorrect lighting often produces blurry images with gray backgrounds, which won’t help generate sales. If e-commerce is your goal, then you’ll also have to take many photos from different angles to replace the ability of turning a piece over in your hand. Remember: Your online customer can’t see it in person, so your photos need to show even the finest details. You can’t capture those fine details without a good camera, and I don’t recommend just using a smartphone.

I firmly believe that anyone can learn the process of taking good jewelry photos once they have the right equipment. There are a few online courses available that teach jewelry photography and lighting techniques. (Search lynda.com and photigy.com for courses.) The camera equipment and software needed to shoot and touch-up your own photography requires a large initial investment of time and money.

Alternatively, you can hire a professional jewelry photographer. Good jewelry photographers know how to take high quality photos that capture attention and lead to sales. Always evaluate samples of their work before hiring them, but be aware that good photographers charge about $100 per photo for their expertise. Having just 200 products in your e-commerce website would quickly turn into a $20,000 photography bill, which is far greater than the approximate $5,000 investment in your own equipment and training.

It’s All About Balance

Once you have your photos ready, the next step in developing a website is figuring out how to portray your jewelry style in a design that’s also user friendly. However, simply creating a nice website will not immediately bring people to you or generate sales. You first have to figure out how to lead people to your website, which is easiest to do through search engines. The content you write on your website will appear in search engines when people look for specific products. Through search engine optimization (SEO) you can fine-tune how the content and the search engines match up. I’ll explain a little more about SEO in a moment, but first, understand that finding the right balance of photos, design, usability, and content leads to increased sales.

It is tough to find that balance, and you won’t achieve it until long after your website is launched and you’ve had time to review your results. There are low-cost services, such as Shopify and Squarespace, that make the web design and setup process easy with built-in templates and their own standardized methodology, but you have to do everything yourself using their templates. It could easily take nine or more months to set up your website with one of these DIY systems, which is time better spent in other areas of your business.

Instead of doing it all yourself, I recommend hiring a professional website developer who can bring your business style to life in a design that is also user friendly. Let them handle the programming and initial setup, and then they can show you how to edit the content on the site as needed. You should expect your website cost for the first year to be about $5,000. The time it takes them to work on the website is the time you’ll need to work on the photography.

Making a Mobile Friendly Website

A mobile friendly website is one that appears one way on a desktop computer and a different way on a mobile device such as a smartphone. In early 2015, Google announced that mobile search usage passed the 50 percent point and that all businesses should start building mobile websites to satisfy the new majority of website users. In April 2015 Google started placing mobile-friendly websites, which look good on a smartphone and respond well to single finger control, higher in their search results than non-mobile-friendly sites.

There are two ways to make your site mobile friendly. Responsive website design is an inexpensive method that has become the most popular, but note that this method simply reorganizes content depending on the size of the device being used. In theory, a responsive design will provide a good user experience, but in practice, most designs are plagued with font sizing issues and functions that can’t be properly controlled on a touch screen device.

The better approach is to use responsive web design with server side (RESS) content manipulation. With this method, the website detects the device being used and shows the appropriate layout and content. Although it is slightly more difficult for your programmer to set up, it provides a better user experience. Your website programmer should include a mobile-friendly website as part of the initial setup cost, but check to make sure they use RESS.

Content Building

The way to make your website popular in search engines is to know what types of keywords your target customers will search for, what motivation they have for using those keywords, and where they might be while doing it. When you know those things, you can write content using those keywords and phrases that are related to those moments in time and those specific places. This process is called content building. Because every moment/keyword/place combination is unique, you need a dedicated page on your website for all those possible situations that you would like to target.

Most jewelers would love to have their website appear at the top of search results for the phrase “engagement ring.” However, it will probably surprise you to find out that people will search for something specific such as “where’s the best proposal spot in Anytown, USA” long before they search for “engagement rings Anytown, USA.” Targeting content for those “proposal” searches would give you the chance to find customers much earlier in the sales cycle.

Blogging is one of the many methods of content building, and one of the easiest since it’s just written words that Google can read and use to match against the search phrases people type. A single blog could tell a story of where someone proposed, how it was done, and the halo engagement ring used. This story covers the need to capture the moment/keyword/place that would attract attention from the person searching for a proposal location and a halo engagement ring. You’d need a completely different blog post if you wanted to target cathedral style engagement rings.

The content building process never ends, and you should be publishing at least one new blog per month. You can hire a freelance writer for as little as $15 to write these blog posts, or you or an employee can do it in-house. The minimum word count for a blog should be 300, which should take less than an hour for you or your employee to write.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Website optimization is a wide area of study with many different techniques ranging from simple content writing to web-server speed configuration. I’ll explain in simple terms how SEO relates to the content creation I mentioned earlier, and how to track the results.

Those blogs you write will appear in the search results when a search query phrase matches word phrases from within the blog. The order that search results appear in is called ranking. The first few places on the first page of the search results are referred to as top ranking. Achieving these top coveted locations usually means that the headline of your page, the page title, and the copy within the page either closely match or exactly match the search query phrase.

The headline for each page should be a summation of the information on that page written in about 65 characters, but no longer than 100 characters. The 65-character limit is good for search engines and the 100-character limit is good for social media sharing. The 65-character version of your headline should then be used as your page title.

Every page of the website should be examined as part of the SEO process. What’s written on every page needs to be easily readable and without too many keyword phrase duplications. Do not unnaturally force keyword phrases into your copy just to increase the number of times the phrase is used on a page.

SEO is a full-time job for someone other than yourself. It’s easy to get confused by all the SEO rhetoric found online and accidentally follow bad advice. Therefore, it’s better to hire an SEO professional to work on your website. It’s usually more cost effective to hire an SEO firm for about $1,000 per month than the average $150 per hour rate. An SEO firm will be able to handle your web page content needs, local address optimization needs, and any higher level code and server speed fixes.

The amount of time you spend on your SEO efforts will depend on what your website tracking tells you. Google Analytics is a free tracking service from Google that will show how people move around your site, what they click on, and what they read. Although Google provides easy-to-read reports of all this data for any business owner to learn to read, there’s a lot more that an SEO professional can tell you about each report. It’s this reporting that will tell you if your SEO effort is working, if you need more, or if you can cut spending for a month. Most small businesses only need to review their Google Analytics reports once a month, or at most once a week, but any more than that is probably overkill.

What I presented here is just the beginning of very big topics, and there are a plethora of online resources that can dig into these topics with much more depth. The most important thing to realize is that your business website is now the focal point for all customer communications and marketing. You can’t ignore it, but you also can’t expect to manage it all on your own. Focus on what you do best and seek outside help to manage the online component of your business. Although there are generally accepted practices for website development and supportive online marketing, every business must work through their own unique process of digital discovery until they find the sweet spot where more profits are returned than the money spent.