Understanding SEO Keywords for Jewelry Brands

0:08
Welcome to the Joy Joy Podcast where jewelry is joy and everyone is encouraged to add more polish and sparkle to the world with topics ranging from marketing tips to business development, best practices and beyond. This is the go to podcast for ambitious jewelry industry dreamers like you.

0:31
Hi, I’m your host Laryssa Wirstiuk. Through this podcast, I aim to empower and inspire jewelry entrepreneurs and professionals so they can thrive while adding more beauty to the world. I’m passionate about digital marketing for jewelry brands, and I’m excited to share my passion with you. As we all know jewelry is joy, so I will gladly seize any opportunity to talk about it. This is episode 168. And today I’m going to give you a crash course in search engine keywords. What are they? Why do they matter? What role should they be playing in your comprehensive digital marketing strategy? How can you optimize for them? Where should they go? These are all questions I’ll be answering in this episode. So get a notebook take notes, you’ll definitely want to study what I have to say about search engine keywords.

1:26
If you want even more information about key keywords, boy, do I have a wealth for you. You can check out two of my past episodes number 132 about types of keywords for jewelry brands, and number 41. All about SEO copywriting for jewelry brands. This episode will touch upon some of the things that I mentioned in those other episodes, but really bring all the information together in a comprehensive way. But before we get to the solid goal of this episode, I’d like to take a moment to remind you that this podcast has both an audio and video component. So you can either listen on your favorite podcast platform or you can watch on YouTube by searching Joy Joya.

2:09
I love creating this content as my act of service to you my awesome listeners and you can support the podcast for free by taking the time not only to subscribe, but also to leave a rating or review on iTunes which helps other jewelry dreamers find it too. If you listened to episode 165 with my guest, Liz Kantner you know that we recently opened registration for our collaborative a six part webinar series called success with jewelry enrollment is still open. Do you want all the details? Go back and listen to that episode or visit success with jewelry.com or follow us on Instagram @successwithjewelry. I can’t wait to see you at that webinar and you can always DM us at @successwithjewelry with any questions that you may have.

3:01
In this segment of the podcast, I give out my sparkle award for the week. During this segment I highlight a jewelry brand that’s impressing me with their marketing. This sparkle award is also interactive so you can visit sparkle award.com to nominate a jewelry brand that’s inspiring you these days and I might feature your submission on a future podcast episode. This week. I’m moving a little bit away from brands for a second going a little bit unconventional. To talk about the jewelry looks at the Academy Awards this year. I’ve heard a number of my friends and colleagues share their favorites and I wanted to share mine because I’m very excited about it. So hands down. My favorite jewelry look at this year’s Oscars was actor Kodi Smit McPhee, he’s an Australian actor nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role as Peter in the power of the dog. Oh my goodness, I just loved this whole look. So he had a baby blue suit by Bottega Veneta and was absolutely, let’s say dripping with Cartier jewelry from the diamond encrusted Cartier watch to the white gold necklace with diamond baguettes and the big get and round diamond stud earrings to the rings. I loved it all. I’ll put a link in the show notes so you can see for yourself if you didn’t watch the Oscars or maybe you missed that look. You should definitely check this out. It’s definitely how do they say hashtag goals. Anyway, you can visit sparkle award.com to nominate a jewelry brand that’s inspiring you these days and as I mentioned, I might feature your submission on a future podcast episode let’s discuss some recent news related to jewelry or marketing. Each week I share my thoughts about three relevant articles and you can get those links by visiting JoyJoya.com/signup. Once you’re on that VIP list you’ll receive our weekly digest filled with new episode announcements.

5:04
Maybe this is old news, especially if you follow me on Instagram or tick tock, I’ve been talking about this already. But I think it’s important enough to mention again, Instagram launched the chronological and Favorites feed for all users. So this feature had been in limited testing starting in January, but now is rolled out to all Instagram users across their global user base. And this happened on Wednesday, March 23. users now have two options, two additional options to view their news feed. So instead of just the main feed, which is driven by the Instagram algorithm, you can toggle between following and favorites. And there’s a little pop up at the top left corner of the app when you’re on your home screen under the word Instagram. So you can choose again to see following or favorites. Following just means in chronological order, you can see a feed with everyone that you follow on Instagram, kind of back in the old days in like 2011, when Instagram was literally in chronological order. Or you can toggle to favorites, which is something that you need to manually update. So you can add like your friends favorite brands that you follow favorite accounts into this favorites feed. So if you want like a quick digest just of the accounts that you’ve personally deemed worthy of your time, you’ll also see those in chronological order. But it won’t be the default. So you’ll always get that main algorithm feed that’s not in chronological order. And you’ll have to intentionally choose to see the following feed or the Favorites feed. So in providing this choice, Instagram would satisfy their quote unquote, power users, while those who didn’t care will continue leaving the feed, as is in this article that I read about it from TechCrunch.

7:07
It was kind of like a negative perspective that Instagram isn’t necessarily doing this to satisfy the users and what the users have been wanting. But actually, they are from a legal perspective, seeing the writing on the wall, that this is something they kind of have to do to prepare themselves for these legal changes regarding social media, that content cannot always be driven by an algorithm and that instead, users of these platforms should have a right to choose the way that they are consuming and viewing content. So the way TechCrunch described it, it’s it’s like they’re preventing themselves from legal liability. I’ll be really curious to see like, what the data is around who uses the different types of feed formats. I’d really love to hear your thoughts just now. It’s been about a week now since this has been rolled out. And I haven’t really heard much about it from people that I work with people that I talked to you so I’m wondering if anyone’s even really been experimenting very much. The general attitude that I get is that people are just exhausted by Instagram in general. So what I’m hearing is that this is like too little too late, maybe, but we’ll see what happens.

8:28
The second article is about the metaverse Fashion Week. It happened from March 24 to march 27 Metaverse Fashion Week was bursting at the seams, as they said with runaway shows after parties, immersive experiences, shopping panel talks and much more. I’ve personally just been a little curious about Metaverse and retail lately. I it was kind of sparked at the end of last year with my podcast interview with Ben Smitty, if you remember that we talked a little bit about fashion in the metaverse about NF T’s. And I’ve just been kind of keeping my ears open to news and updates about that because I’m interested to see which brands are adopting it. And if it’s like coming into the jewelry industry at all. So this Metaverse fashion week really caught my attention. It had 60 Plus participating brands artists designers, hashtag MV FW 22 was a milestone event in the global fashion industry according to this press release. And actually some really iconic brands participated like gold dome, Dolce and Gabbana, Etro and Elie Saab forever 21 even presented an exclusive collection of wearables created just for the metaverse, and the event marks the launching of forever 20 one’s unique space inside this venue that they call decentraland.

10:00
With the promise of more events to come, and of course they had after parties. I didn’t attend this event, I kind of learned about it after the fact. So I would be curious in the future to at least be a fly fly on the wall for an event like this. And just continue to see how these changes in what’s being called Web three impacts how consumers shop and the future of retail.

10:25
And then our final article comes from morning brew. It’s called What makes a compelling loyalty program. According to the yeses, Julie Bornstein. So former Stitch Fix CEO Julie Bornstein co founded the yes, if you’re not familiar with it, it takes an algorithm driven approach to online shopping, and they use quizzes to really fine tune product recommendations. So the company’s really been focused lately on customer loyalty, especially since Bornstein actually played a big role in helping to create Sephora as Beauty Insider program. If you’re not a Sephora shopper, or you’re not you don’t know about that. It’s definitely considered like a leading industry standard for customer loyalty programs. A lot of brands look to Sephora as a model for how to structure a customer loyalty program. So in this article, she’s She shared some best practices of creating an amazing loyalty program, if this is something that you’ve been thinking about if it’s on your radar. So first, she says start small, keep it simple. Don’t try to overcomplicate things, keep the math out of it. Don’t make your customers do mental gymnastics by having to like calculate discounts or like really complicated point systems make it sustainable and integrated with your company mission. And supporting overall the user the customer experience, something that you can sustain for the long haul. So as an example, in the case of Sephora, of course, their loyalty program is a way to like motivate customers to purchase more to kind of gamify the shopping experience. But it also Sephora found that their shoppers, you know they can shop for beauty purchases across a number of different places they can go to the drugstore, they could go to a store like Target, they could shop for beauty online. But Sephora kind of wanted to not only create a loyalty program, but a way to help their users like track, rate, keep like a log of the products that they love and also provide customized product recommendations based on that. So it’s not just a way for their customers to earn rewards, but a way for their customers to kind of again keep track of their purchases, and really like consolidate their beauty shopping habits. So it has a more like utilitarian function as well. That’s just one example of how to make it more sustainable and how to support the customer experience. And then finally, with that loyalty program, I think a lot of brands are tempted to just keep filling that loyalty program with new users and to increase the user base. But successful loyalty programs are more focused on the true VIP customer and focused on retaining the loyal customers who are already there. Do you already have a loyalty program in place? Is this something that you’ve been thinking about implementing? I would love to hear your thoughts about loyalty programs.

13:32
As I mentioned, if you want to get the links to the articles I share in this segment of the podcast, you can become a Joy Joya VIP by visiting JoyJoya.com/signup.

13:44
Without further delay, let’s talk about search engine keywords. Hopefully, I won’t get like winded talking about this because I have so much to say there is so much to say about it. And I feel very passionate about using keywords because I’m very passionate about content marketing. So deep breath. Okay, so let’s get started. First, what are search engine keywords? Basically, at the very minimum, there words and phrases that give clues about your content to both search engines. And to that the user who would be coming to your website on the search side. So coming from the Google perspective, they’re the words and phrases that people are searching on Google or other search engines to get from their intent. So like the thing the person wants to find to the end results. So getting from point A to point B, the more keywords that you have about a certain topic on your website, the more likely you will come up in Google search results for that keyword. Now take that with a grain of salt because I’m simplifying this a lot.

15:00
And there are so many factors involved in in ranking in Google search engine results. But just as a generality, for the beginner, someone who’s new to search engine keywords, I’m going to say that there’s a direct correlation between the number of keywords you’re using for that are relevant on your website to how you’ll be ranking in search engine results. So as an example, let’s just say you sell Montana sapphire earrings. And that’s like your hero product, and your niche as a jewelry brand. So naturally, many of the products on your website have that key phrase in the items, they show up very frequently across your website, there’s a really good chance that in Google search engine results for someone typing the key word, Montana sapphire, earrings, you’ll come up high when someone is searching for that keyword. So maybe like on the first second or third page. Again, that’s simplifying it a lot. And there are many other factors involved in how you may rank in Google search engine results. But in general, that’s the idea that the more content you have on your website that’s related to that keyword, the higher up in Google search results, you’ll rank, because at the end of the day, Google’s job is to deliver the most relevant search results to the users. So their algorithms are constantly scouring the internet in the best interest of the end user who’s searching Google to deliver the right content to them. So if you are able to deliver that content, Google will reward you and help you come up higher in search engine results. Hopefully, that clarifies what they are. So why do keywords matter? At the end of the day, it all comes down to this word called intent. So by intent, I mean, what is someone trying to get out of their search experience? What are they looking for?

17:09
What where are they in their shopping journey? With social media, for example, you’re interrupting someone who is browsing, usually for entertainment, and not always for shopping. So when someone opens their Instagram app, they’re scrolling.

17:27
They might have in the back of their head that they’re, they’re interested in buying a new necklace soon. But they’re probably just scrolling for distraction to like, check in on their friends to see like what their favorite influencers are up to, to be entertained. And then you as a brand, if your post gets scrolled by, you’re kind of like interrupting a whole other experience that someone is having, when you are trying to kind of get someone in the mindset for shopping.

18:01
So that’s kind of a disadvantage of social media is like the people who are interacting with you there are not necessarily in a mindset to buy unless they are specifically searching for your brand to get more information. Of course, social media marketing is important. I’m not saying like, ignore that. But you have to understand the mind frame of people interacting with you on social media in order to interact with them effectively. And that means intent also. So the intent is that they’re there for entertainment.

18:37
It can also really be hard to use social media as a tool where new customers are finding you unless you make it to like the Instagram Explore page or someone finds you through a hashtag. So definitely these days the like discoverability of a brand on a platform like Instagram, and Facebook is very poor, however.

19:00
And here’s the positive thing about search engine keywords and why it’s important to try to rank for them with Google search. Typically, people are typing in Google and coming to that search page with a totally different intents and mindset than they are when they’re like scrolling on social media.

19:25
Most people don’t go to Google to like be entertained. I mean, there are instances of that maybe they’re looking for entertaining content. But typically someone starts a Google search with a specific purpose in mind, whether they want to find more information about something whether they want to learn how to do something, whether they are shopping for something they need to educate themselves about, like a shopping journey that they’re about to go on.

19:54
And they may be ready to buy now or ready to buy in the near future. So they have very qualified intent, perhaps for a jewelry brand. If that’s what they’re searching for, they’re ready to take some kind of action. It might not be to buy right then in the moment, but it is to take some form of action. So if you’re a jewelry brand, and you come across a user on Google with this type of intent, meeting them at the right time, then you’ll be capturing the customer in a more primed, first shopping prepared mindset than you would be if someone’s just scrolling past you on Instagram, for example. I hope that makes sense. I think this can be an abstract concept. But I just like to say, You’re a shopper, you’ve probably purchased jewelry at some point. Just be more mindful of your own habits and think about how you use these different platforms. And that will help you better understand what I’m talking about.

21:05
So if someone finds your brand through Google, even if they don’t end up purchasing right away, you’ve gotten yourself discovered. And the trick is not a trick, the strategy is to use other digital marketing tactics optimize well, to capture them to nurture them until they are ready to make a purchase. And then beyond. So those are things like your email marketing, then your social media marketing, things like that. So getting them to the your website in a warm mindset is the first step through Google. And then capturing them and nurturing them along the way is the second step.

21:50
And keywords, and I’ll talk more in this episode are the way to kind of help you meet them at the right stage in the journey. Keywords can also, let’s put aside the search engine rankings for a second, let’s put aside the search intent, let’s put aside Google for a second. Keywords can also serve as clues for your brand. So even if you don’t care about ranking, if you know, keywords that could possibly be related to your jewelry brand, if you know the keywords your brand is already ranking for in Google, if you know the keywords that your competitors are ranking for. So when I say ranking for it means you are coming up in search engine results for that keyword. It can help you understand what your customers need, what they’re looking for. And not only use keywords more effectively, but even coming down to product assortment helping you merchandise and create a more strategic product assortment, especially if you’re an E commerce first brand. And that’s primarily where you’re selling. So keywords can also help you strategically plan your product assortment it they matter in so many ways. So how do you find keywords? This is a question I get a lot people are kind of confused, like, Well, where do I even start with this?

23:20
It is confusing, because I have to say before 2010 It doesn’t feel like very long ago. But this was a long time ago. And I remember the good, let’s say the good old days of Google Analytics. Before 2010, you used to have Google Analytics connected to your website. And you could actually see in Google Analytics, the key words that got people to your website, how many people came in through those keywords, and then use that as a tool to optimize your website more effectively with those keywords. My goodness, I’m just sitting here reminiscing because it really was the good old days. But because of data privacy changes, which are all positive for the consumer, in 2010, Google kind of quietly started taking steps to remove keyword data. And then in late 2011, through the following year, a significant amount of that keyword visibility would be gone. So now, if you go into Google Analytics, and you look at the path of how someone gets to your website, and you specifically look at organic search, which is the path of search engine, getting to your website, you’ll just see a bunch of things that say like not provided, and those keywords are hidden.

24:48
This change made some people more likely people who aren’t SEO specialists think okay, well, if I can’t see keywords in Google Analytics any more than they probably don’t matter, right? Like, this isn’t, this isn’t a factor that’s impacting my search engine visibility. But in reality is, just because you couldn’t see the data anymore in Google Analytics didn’t mean that it doesn’t matter anymore. Google was still using keywords in the same way, as like a ranking factor in Google search engine results. It was just that that information was now protected, and brands couldn’t like manipulate it, manipulate it, or benefit from it to optimize their websites for search. So I hope that doesn’t over complicate things, I want to give you some context. The good news is that you don’t have to be a tech expert to start doing keyword research to start the keyword journey.

25:54
And there are a lot of tools and even your own intuition and your own experience that you can use to start brainstorming keywords to add to your website to potentially help you rank for certain words and phrases in Google search results. So first of all, you have to just put yourself in the shoes of your target customer. If you sell Montana sapphire earrings, and you know your target customer. What would that person search to find you, most obviously, Montana sapphire earrings, but maybe like stud earrings with Montana sapphires, or mint Montana sapphire jewelry. So like different phrases that someone might intuitively add to Google to find what they are looking for. And you can start that journey just by brainstorming whatever comes to mind, make a big list, again, putting yourself in the searcher shoes, what are they going to search for? How do you search Google? What types of words and phrases to you search for? How do you like tweak your search query to get the results that you want? Because sometimes even as a searcher you type something in and you realize, oh, these this isn’t really what I was looking for. Let me adjust that a little bit to get an answer that’s better suited for me. You can also use tools to gather keyword keyword data about your website. So even though Google Analytics no longer displays keyword data, there are other ways to get it. Google Search Console is like another Google product that will give you some keyword data. You can also subscribe to specialized SEO tools like sem rush, Moz, a refs, those are all really good tools that will give you not only keyword data, but keyword suggestions.

27:58
You can start by using those tools to see what are you already coming up in Google search results for there may already be like 234, or five keywords where you’re on the first or second page of Google, those I consider to be low hanging fruit. Those key words are ones that you want to take and run with, because you already have a ranking for them. Let’s now try to get even higher, a higher ranking for those. So those are the ones you want to focus on.

28:31
But then maybe there are keywords that you’re not ranking for, at all that still feel really relevant to your brand. You can also see what are your competitors ranking for with keywords, and you can use those SEO tools I just mentioned to get that information and data.

28:50
You can also use keyword research tools to help you kind of think outside of the box a little bit and help you brainstorm keyword ideas that maybe you didn’t even think of and those tools are keyword tool.io and kW finder. And again, they can give you ideas for keywords you may not have even considered.

29:12
So how do you know where to start? Like how many keywords should you be targeting? If you’ve never done any sort of SEO content optimization before and your small business, I would start really small with like five to 10 core keywords that you really think describe your products and your business and that help differentiate you from competitors. And maybe some of those are words that you’re already ranking for, which in the previous point I just talked about, you would find through Google Search Console, or specialized SEO tools.

29:49
And this is more of the, I guess, art of SEO. I think a big misconception about SEO is that it’s like very left brained, data driven, but there is an art to it. So when you choose keywords, you don’t want to just choose any keywords that feel relevant to your brand. They should have a balance of Keyword Difficulty relevance in search volume. So let me kind of briefly explain what each of those means. Keyword Difficulty refers to how hard is it going to be to rank for a keyword, if I decide to rank for a keyword like diamond earrings, is going to be very difficult. For obvious reasons, you can only imagine how many brands including the major players in retail, are already ranking for diamond earrings, I would say for a small business that isn’t already ranking for diamond earrings that doesn’t have like huge resources to be investing in SEO should not even try to touch that keyword, because it’s going to be impossible to rank. So you want to find a keyword or keywords that are maybe low to medium in difficulty, more niche keywords that makes sense for your business, but are not already super dominated by all the big players in the jewelry space. Obviously, the keywords need to be relevant, they need to describe the things that you sell, they need to be specific. And they need to match the intent of someone who would be shopping or starting their shopping journey. And then the third factor that you need to consider when you’re making these choices is search volume. So volume means usually it’s calculated on a monthly average per month, approximately how many people are actually searching for this keyword. So it may be a low difficulty, like easy to rank for. But if there are only like 10 people a month searching for this keyword, is it worth trying to rank for? I would say probably not. So the art of SEO is trying to find this delicate balance between Keyword Difficulty relevance and search volume. And how do you know things like keyword difficulty and search volume? Using those SEO tools that I mentioned before SEMrush, Moz and Ahrefs. They tell you all of that data. So you can look up any keyword and it’ll say, oh, from zero to I think the scale is 200. This is a 70 or something don’t try to rank for this. Or monthly there’s approximately like 5000 searches for this keyword per month. So that’s how you get that data.

32:57
And then once you have your list of keywords, you’re obviously going to have to implement them. So where where do they go, you can add them to a number of places most obviously into your like user facing content. So all the content that someone visiting your website would see your headings, your product titles, your product descriptions, blog posts, your homepage, copy your about us page, anywhere that you have content on your website, you can insert those keywords, you can also put them in your URLs, so you can manually edit like the web page addresses. This is especially useful for product pages, making sure in those URLs that like where it’s relevant, of course, that the keywords appear and them in meta descriptions and page titles. So that’s the content that Google sees about any given page on your site. And that’s kind of a big topic. So maybe I’ll do a whole other episode about that in the future, but also in your image data as well. So if you use a tool like Shopify, you’ll see when you upload an image, there’s a place to kind of write a little description of what that image is. That’s not something that the user necessarily sees. But it gives a clue to Google of what the image is, and can also help visually impaired people and make your site more accessible and friendly to people who can’t necessarily see the images on your site.

34:39
That being said, you do not want to what’s called stuff keywords. So you don’t want to just like arbitrarily add keywords to your website for the sake of adding them because Google is actually smarter than that. So they need to be relevant. They need to feel natural. They need to be naturally incorporated into the content. And also the writing this content, it can definitely be time consuming. It’s not something you can just, definitely don’t copy and paste it for the sake of having the keyword over and over, you need to kind of keep incorporating it not only in a natural way, but in an original way, also focusing on the user experience. So not just for the sake of ranking in Google, but for the sake of providing value and being informative and being descriptive and being relevant. So that’s again, where the art of the SEO comes in. And the nuance, and this is not just like, all left brain science, there are some intuitions, some experimentation, some feeling out involved.

35:51
So that is my crash course in search engine keywords. It’s a lot, I tried to simplify it, there’s a lot more to say about it on an advanced level, I could probably do like a two to three hour long episode about it, but I believe that that might be a little more advanced than my listeners and viewers would want. If there’s a specific thing, or specific sub topic and search engine keywords that you want to know about and you watch this on YouTube, you can leave a comment and let me know or you can always email me Laryssa that’s la Rys Sa i joy joy.com And let me know and I’d happy I’ll be happy to do like more of a deep dive into anything that I mentioned in this episode.

36:43
If you love this podcast, please share it with a friend who’d appreciate it. And don’t forget to subscribe as well as leave a rating or review on iTunes. To purchase a signed copy of my book jewelry marketing Joy visit Joy Joy a.com/book for more information. Thanks for listening. Remember to subscribe so you never miss an episode. For more information about working with Joy Joy, visit Joy Joy a.com where you can sign up to download our free eBooks about various topics in jewelry marketing.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai