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Ready to break free from algorithms, vanity PR, and money-sucking ads? My name’s Laryssa Wirstiuk, and I’ve learned in 7 years of jewelry marketing that content is the crown jewel. My agency Joy Joya takes a holistic approach, leading with laser-focused storytelling, impactful content creation, and strategic content distribution. This method has worked for the solopreneur as well as the multi-million-dollar company, and now I’m sharing these systems and tactics with you. Here’s to standing out in the Sea of Sparkle.

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Welcome to episode #238. Today, I’m diving into the exciting world of search engine optimization, or SEO for short. Now, I know that SEO can be a tricky topic for many jewelry entrepreneurs and marketers out there. It’s often shrouded in mystery and can leave people feeling baffled. But fear not! Throughout the next few episodes of the Jewelry Marketing Jumpstart series, I’m here to demystify SEO and help you understand what it is and how it works. By the end of this series, you’ll have a clear understanding of this powerful marketing tactic and be ready to tackle it head-on, if you choose to do so.

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I’ll be covering: The basics of SEO to the various approaches you can take to optimize your website for search engines. How you can determine if SEO is the right focus for your jewelry business at this time What tools and resources you’ll need to get started

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From now through early July of this year, I’m offering a free (yes FREE) six-month, podcast-guided program called “Jewelry Marketing Jumpstart” which involves weekly audio and video lessons as well as companion PDF downloads for each new episode. This week, Jumpstart members will get exclusive ChatGPT prompts that can help you write website content. If you haven’t already signed up at joyjoya.com/JUMP, then I highly recommend you stop waiting and sign up now. We’re getting into “GO” time with these hands-on lessons for jewelry entrepreneurs like you. To sign up for the FREE full program right away and get the companion PDF download to this episode, visit joyjoya.com/jump. Link in show notes as well.

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But before we get to the solid gold, I’d like to take a moment to remind you that this podcast has both audio and video – so you can either listen on your favorite podcast platform or watch on YouTube by searching “Joy Joya”. You can support the podcast for free by taking the time not only to subscribe but also to leave a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. If you leave a review, I might read it on a future episode – please let me know what you think about this episode or about any other major takeaways you’ve had recently. Speaking of podcasts, did you know I also co-host another podcast with jewelry marketer Liz Kantner? It’s called Success With Jewelry, and we’ve already released 31 free episodes everywhere you listen to podcasts as well as on YouTube. We also have an Insider community, where we share extended episodes, hands-on guidance, and a plethora of resources. Visit successwithjewelry.com to learn more.

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Okay, my sparklers let’s get into the next installment of jewelry marketing jumpstart, which will walk you through an intro to search engine optimization. Alright, let’s get started. Let’s talk about the basics of SEO, as well as the various approaches you can take to optimize your website for search engines. So search engine optimization, probably better known to you as SEO for short, is actually a subtopic of a much broader topic called search engine marketing. And that’s a term that describes all the marketing tactics that a business might use to optimize their website for search engines. So SEO more specifically refers to the practice of implementing various techniques to help a website rank as high as possible in organic search results. When I use the word “organic”, I’m not talking about pesticides, or about like fancy produce you can buy at Whole Foods. I’m talking about search results that are not ads or paid, so there’s no money behind them. Google is just choosing them as the best results and offering that to the searcher.

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So why does it matter so much to rank in Google search results? Well, it presents an opportunity for your target customers to find you when they really may have no other way to discover your brand, and the latest data shows that Google processes over 99,000 searches every single second, resulting in more than 8.5 billion searches a day. That’s kind of mind blowing. So given those kinds of numbers, your target customer could be searching for products that you offer. And the best part about that is they are in the mindset already to learn more about your product or even to buy it. On the other hand, if they’re scrolling on Instagram, or they see your email marketing campaign, with your messaging, you’re likely interrupting their day, or a thought they’re having or multitasking they’re doing. But if they’re on Google actively searching for something that you have, there’s a synergy there, there’s an intent, they have taken time to actively look for you, rather than you interrupting them. So to understand SEO a little bit better, you kind of need to know how search engines like Google work. We’re not going to get into the super technical nitty gritty, but just like a general overview. So let’s talk about Google. Because it’s the most widely used search engine, Google has one goal in mind, to provide the user, the person searching, with the best possible results for the thing they’re searching for, or what their search query is. So if Google’s able to regularly deliver what you as the searcher need, then you’ll likely return to Google again, and again and again. And that’s great for Google, because then they can make money from ads and their other products. So they’re in the business of serving up good information, and they look for websites that will give that good information to the person who’s searching.

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And to do this, to deliver these great search results, Google has a lot of proprietary methods for deciding what’s a good search engine result, what’s not a good search engine result how to like rank those search engine results from best to least helpful. And that involves their algorithm. So the algorithm they have is regularly changing. And that’s in order to get better and better as the needs of searchers evolve, as the landscape of the internet evolves, as new content gets created. And there are actually more than 200 Google ranking factors. So those are like characteristics that Google uses to judge how well your website content matches a particular search query. So some examples of those include mobile friendliness, website loading speed, keyword optimization, and high-quality content. So Google looks at like 200 different things, to decide what content out there on the internet is the best content to show you as the searcher. So in its analysis, using all its ranking factors of all the things on the internet, it’s looking at things on the page. So on your website page, as well as off the page. On page refers to content, and off page refers to how your website kind of fits into the ecosystem of the internet, and what other websites are linking to yours. So some examples of on page would include your website content, how those pages are formatted, the readability of those pages, how in depth and informative is the content? Also the structure of your website URLs? Do the links actually have words in them that describe what’s on the page? Your pictures and the descriptions and tags associated with the pictures, your title tags, and meta descriptions? So those are descriptive information for each page on your website that comes up in Google search results to tell the searcher what is on that page if they were to click. So if you do a Google search for anything, you will see there’s like a little heading and like a two line description of what the website is. And that helps you decide whether to click or not. And that’s the title and the meta description. So those are things that you enter on the back end of your website. Another example of content would be internal linking. So within your website, how are pages linking to each other? If we’re talking about off page, those are things like what other websites are linking to yours? So Google has this thing called Domain Authority, where, let’s say the New York Times is linking to your website, that could be a sign that because the New York Times is a really reputable, high quality source, if they’re linking to you, kind of by association, makes your website more reputable. So that’s an example of off page. Also, social media activity, or sharing of your page could help boost its credibility, because it means a lot of people are looking at it and sharing it. So there’s the content part of SEO, which is like the words, the pictures, the thoughtfulness, that informativeness, the reputation aspect of SEO. There’s also a technical part of it. And to do that, unless you’re like super web savvy, and you understand how websites work, you will likely need to get a web developer to help you with things like this, the loading speed of your web pages, or the mobile friendliness of your website. But as like a little hack, I guess, if you have a Shopify site, and you use one of the Shopify themes, pretty much all of them are optimized for mobile, they’re optimized to load quickly. So that’s like a quick hack that, you know, at the bare minimum, this site will work for SEO. Of course, there are always things from a technical perspective, that you can do better. But pretty much all Shopify themes are optimized for search.

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So besides that technical piece of SEO, that may be a little bit harder to DIY, when it comes to content, there’s a ton you can do on your own without being a technical whiz. You just have to like with anything in marketing, understand your audience, know your brand, know what your audience wants, and have a feel for how your products can fit into search and what people might search for to find you. So let me quickly do an intro to keywords. We’ll be talking more about those in another episode. But just as a general introduction to them, keywords are the search queries, the things that a user would type into Google like a word or phrase to help that person achieve the goal of finding what they’re looking for. So like, if you’re looking for a hairstylist in your city, there are a number of ways that you would phrase that in Google, but you’d probably start by typing “hairstylist Los Angeles” or whatever city you’re in. “Barber Los Angeles”, like “best haircut Los Angeles”. Depending on who you are, and more specifically, what you’re searching for, there are a lot of different ways to phrase that. And key words are all the variations of how someone might look for something in search. So it’s really important to kind of like have an intuitive understanding of how people look for things in Google. And one way to do that is even to pay more attention to how you use Google and how you adjust and adapt your searches. When you’re looking for something, how do you kind of change up the words to get better results? What are some ways that you’re looking for things? I would definitely try to become more aware of your own behavior. And then there are longtail keywords. So those are the ones that have multiple words, and are more specific. So to continue on my hairstylist example, let’s say “best men’s haircut in West Hollywood” or something. So it gets much more specific now we’re talking about men’s haircuts. We’re talking about the best men’s haircuts, and we’re talking about West Hollywood, which is like a specific area of Los Angeles. And so as you can imagine with longtail keywords, fewer people would be searching for those because they’re more niche and specific. But there’s also potentially the most opportunities there. Because if you offer the product or service connected to that longtail keyword and someone’s looking for it, boom, you have found your exact high intent customer, and you are exactly what they’re looking for. So there’s less like, doubt or questioning in the person’s mind that you are the right solution for them.

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And when you’re just starting this process, there are a lot of free keyword research tools that can kind of help you see things like search volume, and competitiveness. So what I mean by that search volume is on average, every month, how many people are actually searching for these terms? If it’s like a super specific keyword, maybe nobody is searching for it, because they’re not even thinking to search for that. And you don’t want to bother ranking for a keyword like that, because there’s no opportunity. On the other hand, if there’s a really high search volume, like if you were just to type in something very vague and generic, like best haircuts. It’s just so nonspecific. You don’t know like, is the person looking for haircut inspiration, just like pictures? Is the person looking for a short or long haircut? Is the person actually hoping to get a haircut? Or do they just want to see pictures of haircuts? And probably the search volume for a keyword like that is in the 1000s.

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So it’s also not great to try to rank for a keyword like that, because it’s too general, it’s too nonspecific. You don’t know what the person’s intention is. And it’s going to be pretty competitive, because there’s going to be results really all over the place. And that’s what competitive the competitiveness of a keyword means. It means that too many websites are using those keywords. And it’s very difficult to rank for them if you’re not already ranking because some of the major websites in that space are already dominating like the first few search results of Google. So you want to find a balance between search volume, how many people are searching for that keyword, and between competitiveness like somewhere in the middle of that. And you can use free keyword research terms to help you see those statistics, and even to get ideas for new keywords based on like a preliminary idea that you have. And some of those would be keyword generator, Answer the Public, even chatGPT is a great place to come up with keyword ideas, Ahrefs Webmaster Tools, and Google Keyword Planner, and I’ll link to some of those in the show notes as well if you want to try them out.

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So in general, how would you measure the success of SEO, if you are going forth with some of these tactics? One, you would look in Google Analytics to see whether or not there was an increase to your website from organic traffic. And that’s why it’s so important to have Google Analytics connected to your website. You can also use an SEO tool to see which keywords your site’s ranking for or like which new keywords you’ve gained. Or if you do customer surveying, or you ask your customers how they found you, you could potentially see then if Google search was the source of that customer and how they found you and made their purchase. So how do you measure the success of SEO? We’ll get a little more specific into this in future episodes. But in general, I just want to say, one in Google Analytics, you would see an increase of traffic to your website from organic search. And that’s why it’s so important to have Google Analytics connected to your site. You can also use an SEO tool to see which keyword rankings you’ve gained or where you’re ranking or if the keywords feel more specific, relevant and tailored to what your customer needs and the products you actually offer. Or you can ask your customers how they found you. So if you regularly survey your customers, you can see what brought them to your site in the first place.

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Okay, so now that you know a little bit about SEO, how can you determine if this is the right focus for your jewelry business? At this time, I would say search engine marketing is best for jewelry brands that have a unique product, but also not so unique that someone wouldn’t even think to search for it like they wouldn’t even know it exists. So let me give you some examples. Let’s pretend you sell engagement rings, and you specialize in solitaire diamond rings, that alone is going to have a lot of competition in Google search. So if that’s kind of your take on your product, search engine marketing might not be a great option for you, because it’s just a really crowded space. You’re going to be competing with all the big players in wedding jewelry. But if you sell blue sapphire solitaire engagement rings, there’s probably a little less competition. And I think that’s still the type of product that a consumer would be looking for, they would be aware of that exists. And they would be searching for that. But if you sell a really unique type of engagement ring, let’s say it features like a diamond that’s been to space or something like that. And that’s your unique feature of the engagement ring. I don’t know maybe there are some people that already know they want an engagement ring with a diamond that’s been to space. But I think most consumers wouldn’t even think to search that because they wouldn’t even know that was a thing available. So in that case, maybe search engine marketing wouldn’t be great for you either, because consumers would need like a different kind of discovery and education process to get them to learn about your brand and your products. I think it can also be right for you if you can be committed to content, to updating your website, and to being intentional about the content that you share. It’s not right for you if you can’t be bothered to maintain and update your website. I think it’s right for you if you’re willing to learn about or work with someone who knows best practices for ecommerce. And you’re committed to making your online shop as user friendly as possible and can invest in a web developer, even like for short term stints, or like for short term projects to help optimize and improve your website. But I would say if you’re selling online, and you’re really committed to that channel, you should be doing that anyway. So that’s not even related to SEO, you should have a good developer in your back pocket who can help you stay up to date with best practices in ecommerce.

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So what tools and resources will you need to get started on this journey? As I mentioned before, 100% Google Analytics whether you do SEO or not, you need Google Analytics connected to your website. Definitely Google Search Console, which is another free Google product. I would say use a free keyword tool like Wordstream’s free keyword tool, and I’ll put that link in the show notes. And you definitely need an open mind, curiosity, some intuition, start using Google to type words and phrases related to your products and just see what comes up. And then rephrase your queries and see how that changes the results. I think you need some self awareness of your own search habits. So get in the practice of doing that. Okay, that’s it for now. Much more to come in future episodes. Visit joyjoya.com/jump for additional information, action items, and more to help you begin to understand SEO.

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Before we get into The Gold Mine as well as my jewelry marketing news roundup, I want to share a case study of a jewelry brand that I think embodies what I speak about in this podcast. Okay, so these are my thoughts about how I’d apply the lesson to a jewelry brand in the wild. Disclaimer: this brand’s not my client, so I don’t have any inside information. I’m just sharing my own observations. So this week’s case study is about MiaDonna. MiaDonna was founded with the mission of offering consumers a beautiful, beautiful, ethical and affordable diamond alternative. As they say, “We’re putting a modern twist on an antiquated industry; making beautiful, ethical and affordable diamond jewelry attainable by all.” Regardless of what you think about lab-grown diamonds, you should consider this brand’s storytelling and what you can learn from it. They do such a good job of speaking to the customer rather than speaking about themselves. It’s less “me, me, me” and more in a voice that would resonate with the customer who shares similar values and is looking for what they sell. When I went to their homepage recently, I saw two hero images with text on them that really stood out to me as masterful storytelling. I’ll put the screenshot links in the show notes if you want to see for yourself. One of them says, “A Diamond Made for a New Generation: Let your values shine as bright as your love with our ethical, American-handcrafted engagement rings! Every purchase gives back 10% and plants a tree.” The next one says, “Let Your Love Be a Part of the Solution: Year-round, your ethical jewelry purchase builds farms, protects the environment, and empowers families. We exist to give back, and can’t do this life-changing work without your love!” I’m speechless. I just I love this. I think this is so smart. Again, if you were a consumer who resonated with this mission, and this was part of your values, you would feel so empowered and inspired that your purchase is giving back to build farms, protect environment, empower families, and that by purchasing from this brand, you’re almost entering into a mutual partnership of shared values. You’re not just like paying someone money for a product, you are becoming part of a community with a shared goal. And I love that. I love the emotional element. I love that they use the pronoun you. It’s more about the customer and their values. So I just wanted to share that as a great example of utilizing website content to tell a story. What do you think? Let me know in a podcast review or YouTube comment.

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Okay, let’s get into The Gold Mine. All right, The Gold Mine is a segment of the podcast where I talk about topics like mindset, entrepreneurship, and just my personal take about observations I have about the industry. So this week, in The Gold Mine, I want to talk about the art of asking questions and why asking the right questions can help you get out of your own way and into a space where you can grow. I recently had someone ask me questions about marketing, but I realized the way they were asking me questions showed that they were assuming something about the answer I would give. So let me give you a non-marketing related example. The type of question they were asking: Why do you think cake is the most popular dessert today? You probably think ok, there’s nothing wrong with that question. It tackles one of the who, what, where, when, whys. It’s not a “yes” or “no” question, so it allows the respondent to elaborate rather than just answer in one word. If you were talking to an expert on cake or desserts or food trends, you’d probably get some good information. But here’s why the question kind of sucks, especially if it’s being asked by someone who’s not an expert in cakes, and there’s no other context. It’s assuming that cake is the most popular dessert today. A better question would be: What’s the most popular dessert today? Then a person who’s qualified to answer that question would probably come back with some kind of qualifier, to ensure they’re giving you the best answer. Do you mean dessert to order at restaurants or dessert to make at home? Do you mean all over the world or in just one country or region? And then if you really know nothing about this topic, you’d probably be surprised, like “Oh, I thought the same dessert would be popular everywhere, oh Oh, I didn’t even consider that a popular dessert to order out would be different from a popular dessert to make at home.” So that would force you as the question asker to get more clear on what information you’re trying to get, and you’d also realize you have a lot of gaps in knowledge and may even go back to research or thinking before you ask another question. Basically, what I’m saying is: if you’re not a marketing expert, but you’re seeking information on the Internet or advice from an expert, you should go into it assuming nothing and pretending like you know very little, even if you do know some. Because if you ask your question with an assumption in mind, you may lead the respondent down the wrong path. You may also get an answer that lacks context and isn’t quite the answer you need or want. Asking why cake is the most popular dessert today is leading – meaning it includes or implies the desired answer to the question in the phrasing of the question itself. According to Nielsen Norman Group, “Leading questions ultimately rob us of the opportunity to hear an insight we weren’t expecting from the user. The more leading our questions are, the less likely the user will comment in a way that surprises or intrigues us, or makes us think about a problem or solution in a different way.” So if you are trying to take your business, your marketing to the next level, if you feel really stuck, if you kind of think you know the way forward, but you’re not totally sure, it’s sometimes kind of best to play with the beginner’s mind and kind of like, just forget you know anything, and then approach it again with this beginner’s mind, assuming nothing, and asking questions that will almost help you start from scratch, so that you can pull away all your assumptions, all your blocks, and be surprised, enlightened, intrigued by an answer that you probably would not have gotten otherwise. So what do you think by that? I know it’s a little bit conceptual, but I hope it kind of helped you think a little bit differently about how you ask questions about your business. Tell me in a YouTube comment or podcast review if you can relate, and I’d love to know your thoughts.

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Okay, let’s get into the news roundup, where I share three relevant articles related to jewelry, or marketing. The first one comes from Business of Fashion, and it’s called “Behind the Text Message Marketing Boom”. Sales from text messages increased by 35% year over year in 2023. Well, email only saw a 5% rise according to this source in the Business of Fashion article. Brands are now investing more in text message marketing with 72% of 500 surveyed brands planning to send text message campaigns in 2022. And some examples would be – and this is how fashion and beauty brands are using text message marketing – they can provide customers with order updates, they can provide them with exclusive access to products and discounts that they wouldn’t get anywhere else. And one of the best parts is they can help boost customer retention, with nearly 80% of brands using it to encourage customers to make repeat purchases. If you really want to see text messaging as an effective tactic, you really need to work on developing a personalized content strategy for each customer. And as one expert in this article, says, if you’re committed to helping your customers, ultimately they will be customers for life, and it will lead to purchases. So my main takeaway is in my other podcast with Liz Kantner, the Success With Jewelry podcast, we just recorded an entire episode about SMS marketing, and it’s coming out soon. We both believe and I think this Business of Fashion article underscores this, if you know your target customer well. And you know they spend time on their mobile phones, which many people in the world do. And you can figure out a way to connect with them via text while providing them value, then this could be an awesome way to have direct access to those customers, furthering your brand’s story and staying in close contact with them again, so that they become repeat customers those customers for life.

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The next article comes from Retail TouchPoints. And it’s called Saks CMO on How Luxury Marketing is About Making it Both ‘Aspirational and Really Easy’. So I love this because we got a firsthand look from Saks CMO, Emily Essner, and there are so many great insights in this article about luxury marketing. First post pandemic, it’s probably not a surprise, more luxury consumers are traveling, and they’re out and about in the world. So brands that cater to these customers, they’re taking that knowledge, and incorporating it into the way they present their products. So I’m just gonna read this one really awesome quote that I think summarizes a lot of the approach that brands like Saks are taking. So Emily says, quote, “We have an incredible world-class fashion office that is responsible for understanding what is going on in the world of fashion, whether that’s the runways, the streets or everything in between. Our job is to take this input we’re getting from our consumers who are interested in travel, who are doing a lot of it, and then take the fashion direction that we’re getting from our fashion office. ‘These are the most important trends.’ ‘We’re really excited about these brands.’ We put those two together. In general, our customer is someone who wants to be engaging with things that are new, that are exciting, and so that marriage is how we do it.” So to summarize that, Saks is really taking this opportunity to offer customers inspiration through content. So for example, ideas about what to wear to various travel destinations that’s going to be compelling and relevant to them. emphasizing the fact that what they’re showing is new is cutting edge will help them in their day to day life as they move through the world and try new experiences and go to new destinations. So merchandising and marketing jewelry is not something that happens in a vacuum, you have to consider it in the context of what’s happening in the world. What’s happening in fashion, lifestyle, what are people enjoying, what behaviors do they have, and then making the jewelry make sense, given the context of all those things. This is like my dream come true marketing strategy, what Saks is doing, I feel like they truly understand their customers. They’re thinking about how to sell products as part of a lifestyle, and then educating those customers about topics related to that lifestyle, rather than trying to sell apparel and accessories as a commodity.

41:46
And the last article comes from Martech.org, and it’s called “3 ways to drive sales with email”. So to make your emails convert, or to inspire people to buy via email, it’s not just about writing a few lines and hitting send. I wish it was that easy. Your email success depends on everything from your email list quality, to your writing skills, and even more than that, so if you’re kind of disappointed by your email performance, you want to take a step back and assess how your emails are doing, the ones that are actually performing better than others, and then create similar ones in those vein in that vein to resonate with your audience. The other thing is, and I see this mistake, a lot, of course, making great emails, the writing of them, the design of them, that takes significant resources. And I see brands pouring so much time, money and energy into that. And then they never look at the health of their list. So they’re sending out campaigns that just have low engagement, not because the emails are bad, but because the lists need updating, and they kind of need to be cleaned out. So it’s important to check in with the health of your email list. Also know that your email subscribers are all at different stages of their buyers’ journey. So it’s essential to create emails that meet specific needs, and expectations at every stage. And know that successful email means not being nervous about or afraid to send very regularly because actually regular email sends boost your reputation, help your deliverability and keep them relevant and top of mind with the people on your list. So my main takeaway is if you’ve quote unquote, tried email marketing, and then decided it didn’t work for you, then please try again. There’s probably a lot you could be doing to boost the effectiveness of your email efforts. It’s about so much more than just making a pretty email and hitting send.

44:11
That’s all for today. Did you have any questions about Jewelry Marketing Jumpstart? You can always email me laryssa@joyjoya.com. If you love this podcast, please share it with a friend who would appreciate it. And don’t forget to subscribe as well as leave a review on Apple Podcasts. If you’re completely new to digital marketing, then you’ll want to purchase and read a copy of my book, Jewelry Marketing Joy, visit joyjoya.com/book for more information.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai