The Goal of a Jewelers Website
is to drive traffic into the store!
Forget about shopping carts & trying to make sales directly from your site. Your strength lies in the fact that you have a better selection of jewelry & the customer can actually touch & feel the pieces. The online retailers can’t offer this kind of presentation using photos alone.
Don’t try to compete with online retailers in their own arena.
Take the home court advantage!
Every page on your site should be designed to funnel the viewer into your store. To do this you need to consider all of the reasons why a person is on your site in order to tailor the content to their needs.
The obvious reason would be that they are looking to get married or they have an anniversary or birthday or some other gift giving occasion which jewelry would be appropriate for.
Next you need to consider how they are finding your website.
These are some of the ways a visitor finds your website
- FREE search results
- Paid search results
- Print or other advertisement
Print & Other Ad Visitors
The chances of someone typing your website in after seeing or hearing an advertisement is pretty slim unless there’s some kind of hook in the ad. Offer a special in the ad or promote a social/charitable event.
Have a microsite tailored to each particular offering.
Use a separate dot com name to point to a promotional microsite.
A microsite can be a simple one page announcement or a full blown website in itself. You can use the same hosting account that you use for your main website. The only cost is for the additional dot com name & the page design. If the microsite promotes a charity you may be able to get someone to design it for FREE!
FREE Search Result Visitors
These guys more than likely found your website because you’ve done a great job of optimizing your site for local search.
They may or may not have been looking at online retailers before they found you.
You should probably include highly visible links to any microsites or other special offer pages which you are already advertising to the general public.
Paid Search Result Visitors
These guys need to be sent from your ad to a special landing page.
The page content needs to be specific to the keywords they used to find your ad.
If they typed “diamonds” then you want them landing on a page that states you will match online diamond prices & then outline the additional advantages of coming to see you.
- Bigger selection of rings
- See before you buy
- Hometown service for life
- FREE watch battery?
The landing page should include navigational links to the rest of your website.
However; your main website should not have any links directly to this page. The reason for this is obvious. You do not want to tell them that it’s possible to compare diamond prices online.
By the same token don’t specifically mention Blue Nile or any other online retailer when you offer to price match. Simply say you’ll match online retailers diamond prices & leave it up to the visitor to find the online dealers (they’ve probably already found them if they’re on your landing page but there’s no sense advertising for them anyway.)
People tend to focus on selling directly from their website.
There are more productive methods.
I hope this has been helpful!
Feel free to comment…
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