How Local SEO Can Help Jewelers Attract More Customers

Local SEO is essential to jewelry stores that operate on a regional level, as opposed to national. While national SEO focuses more on ranking in searches across the country, local SEO prioritizes appearing on Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs) in a specific location. 

This strategy relies on marketing your brand, products, and services to local potential and current customers. Optimizing your local SEO means more website traffic, leads, and conversions since the strategy is more relevant to your base of local customers. Think of this focused strategy as a way to help you compete more effectively against larger national brands that have unlimited resources to spend. 

By focusing on  local-SEO, you can neutralize the advantage of bigger brands that routinely optimize for broader keywords and rely on brand recognition, instead of value propositions, to bring in traffic.

Further, 35% of all search traffic is local according to an estimate in a 2017 ReviewTrackers’ study. Without local SEO, your business could be losing out on a significant amount of traffic.

Here are the top 10 ways you can make your local SEO successful.

Still lost when it comes to SEO? Check out one of our latest blog posts to learn more!

Creating & Optimizing Your Google My Business Account

To get started, jewelers need to claim their business on Google My Business. This establishes a jewelry store’s presence, for free, on the search engine, and it means a business will also show up on Google Maps. 

Not only will your jewelry store appear in the search results on all devices, but, if Google authenticates your business as legitimate, it could also surface in the valuable sidebar space of a Google search.

To optimize Google My Business, ensure that you:

• Verify your listing
• Provide accurate and up-to-date information
• Include your logo, hours of operation, acceptable payment methods, the product or service you sell, and plenty of images
• Encourage your customers to review your business online
• Respond sincerely to customer reviews
• Create content within your account with Google Posts

Receiving Regular Reviews from Happy Customers

Getting your customers to write glowing reviews for your business doesn’t just optimize your Google My Business presence; it also encourages more local customers to buy from you. BrightLocal’s 2017 Local Consumer Review Survey reveals that 85% of customers believe online reviews as much as personal recommendations.

Here are some tips to encourage customers to leave reviews:

• Ask for a review in person after the close of a sale
• Send a post-purchase email or text asking customers to write a review (but only after you’ve screened them via an internal survey to ensure you’re not approaching dissatisfied customers)
• Respond to existing reviews in a professional way, thanking reviewers and addressing complaints in not-so-favorable reviews

Optimizing for Voice Search

Voice search will grow rapidly in the coming years. Therefore, in local SEO, it’s vital to optimize for how people ask questions when they speak into devices, as opposed to how they type out their searches.

Essentially, your customers use more long-tail keywords when doing voice searches compared with regular search. Because of this, jewelers will also have to adjust the SEO of their content to fit the more conversational tone of someone speaking. For example, you’ll want to account for the traditional question starters (who, what, when, where, why and how).

It’s also crucial to consider user intent when optimizing for voice, as these searches are most often performed when the user needs a specific piece of information. If they’re baking and ask Alexa to convert tablespoons to cups, they’re expecting a quick and useful answer. If a potential customer uses voice search to ask what your store’s hours are, this information should also be readily available

Want to learn more about landing pages? Download our 2019 Jewelry Store Marketing Guide!

If you're looking for expert guidance, you may want to consider partnering with a digital marketing team who specializes in the jewelry, like GemFind Digital Solutions, Contact GemFind Digital Solutions today and get in touch with one of our digital marketing experts!

Contact GemFind to get started. 800-373-4373