Wondering why your focused keywords aren't bringing in traffic? Not sure why your jewelry website never appears among the top search results? If so, this might be the right place for you and your jewelry business!

Google's ranking algorithm considers more than 200 factors when ranking websites. But understandably, some factors, like website speed and keyword optimization, carry more weight and importance than the rest. 

Search Engine Optimization, or simply SEO, is one of the most effective marketing techniques for increasing your site's organic traffic by elevating its visibility on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).

Although there are ample articles on tips for strategizing your SEO, we have even written some ourselves, such as SEO For Jewelers: 7 Steps for Local SEO, minimizing the most commonly made mistakes is also an important thing to be aware of.

With that in mind, let's take a look at the 5 most frequent SEO mistakes that jewelers should not overlook.

1. Ignoring Your Website’s Speed

Google most often favors websites that are faster to load. So to help your web page appear among the first few searches, you really have to pay attention to its speed. 

Google Page Speed Insights is a helpful and free tool used for checking your website's speed. This tool summarizes your website’s problem areas, as well as the areas where there is room for improvement. 

Effective image optimization is often an area that you can focus on for a quick result. Many jewelry websites, in particular, include a high quantity of large graphics and technical designs that take a lot of time to load. So, you will want to consider replacing PNG and JPEG image files with WEBP file types, due to WEBP being considered SEO friendly for having retaining comparable image quality while boasting smaller file sizes. 

We also suggest that you carefully inspect your active plugins if you are using WordPress. More often than not, these plugins are a leading cause in what is reducing the speed of your website. Therefore, you should carefully consider each  plugin and whether or not the functionality of the plugin is worth the speed reduction.

‍If you are using WordPress, it would be worth looking into using Webflow instead. There are a ton of reasons for why you should switch, which we talk about and cover in another blog, Why We Use Webflow over WordPress.

2. Using Ineffective Keywords

Optimizing your content with the appropriate keywords often ensures that your website will rank higher in SERPs. However, using generic keywords may not give the desired result that you are looking for. Oftentimes, those high-volume generic keywords are highly competitive and extremely difficult to actually rank for. So instead, you will want to think of more refined and specific searches that are related to the generic keywords that you wish to rank for. 

You may, for example, consider including the address of your company, the city, state, or country that you are in, to try and rank locally for the keyword, rather than globally. 

Another way to boost the effectiveness of your chosen keyword even further will consist of  surrounding it with long-tail keywords. Long-Tail keywords are phrases made up of 3-5 words, which usually end up being very specific. You can find relevant long-tail keywords related to the keyword you wish to go for in the “Related searches” section of SERPs.

‍It was even recently shown that for SERP positions 2-5, long tail keywords outranked generic search keywords by 3% to 6%. And that is just one of the helpful facts that you will find in our blog, SEO For Jewelers: SEO Trends to Know For 2023.

3. Not Putting Enough Emphasis on Meta Description

When searching for anything on Google, along with the page title, the page’s meta description is one of the first things that gets shown to your customers. As such, you should ensure that the meta description of every page on your website is optimized correctly.

We suggest that you include the keywords you are aiming for in both the page’s title and meta description, for every page on your website. 

Doing so will help your website to rank higher, improve your webpage's visibility, and allow potential customers to get a glimpse as to why your website is better suited to their needs than another one on the search results page. In turn, this directly affects your click-through rate (CTR). 

Your jewelry business’s website will witness more traffic, having convinced customers of its authenticity, genuineness, and usefulness.

4. Not Optimizing Website for Mobile Devices

Google shifted to a mobile-first indexing approach in 2019, hence, it prefers websites that are responsive and perform well on mobile devices. As such, your ranking will be highly negatively affected if your website works beautifully on a desktop but struggles and is clunky on mobile devices. 

Mobile-friendliness being one of the most crucial things that you want to make sure you get right. By 2025, it is estimated that around 75% of people will access the internet solely through mobile devices.

Using Google's free mobile-friendly test can help you determine if your website is mobile-friendly. While testing out and navigating your website on mobile devices, you should ask yourself four fundamental questions: 

• Does everything function correctly? 
• Is website easy to use and intuitive? 
• Does everything show up and display correctly?
• Do the pages load relatively quickly, creating a seamless experience?

If the answer to all these questions is a yes, rest assured that your website is on the right track, both in terms of SEO ranking and overall customer satisfaction. 

‍If you are interested in more mobile specific SEO tips, you should check out our blog, 5 Ways to Improve Mobile SEO For Jewelry Websites in 2023.

5. Forgetting Your Audience

The best course of action that you can take is often one that gets talked about the least. While you can make a website with pixel perfect SEO, the reality of it all is that Google is not your target audience. Google will not be the one shopping on your jewelry website and providing you with sales. And so if you go about everything with only Google, SEO, and ranking in the forefront of your mind, you are forgetting about the most important thing: your customers.

Customers are the most important aspect of your business, and you should keep them in mind during every stage of the process. 

At the end of the day, your customers are the ones who will be using your website and buying your products. So, don’t let that consideration get lost in the intricacies of SEO and ranking.

Wrapping Up

SEO is labor-intensive and a time consuming affair. But, if you put in the effort consistently and give it time, you will definitely be able to reach success. Avoiding the errors that we have discussed here, and utilizing some of the tips that we cover in our other blogs is a great way to start.

You can reach out to us for a free SEO audit, where analyze the SEO performance of your site, and identify problem areas, and provide solution suggestions. 

With our specialization in SEO for jewelry businesses and focus on customer satisfaction, our team of passionate, expert individuals are ready to help you and your jewelry business reach your full potential.