eCommerce SEO and the Jewelry Industry: Improved Targeting and Boosting Rankings

One of the most common questions we hear, as a respected eCommerce digital marketing agency, is “are your strategies effective for our industry?” 

This question is particularly relevant to those that serve niche industries that are influenced heavily by trends, such as those in fashion or jewelry.

The short answer is, yes, our eCommerce SEO strategies are effective in those industries. 

But, perhaps, a case study will illustrate that point better than our testimony. 

The Position

One of our current clients is a family-owned company that, for four generations, has been guided by family values and pioneered trends in the jewelry industry. 

Their online shop offers an exclusive catalog of exquisite jewelry, handcrafted with pride in the United States by artisans with many years of experience. 

Their collections, many of which are themed or curated according to color, cut, or aesthetic appeal, are entire sui generis and have no equals, even in the fine jewelry industry. 

Of course, as appealing as that sounds, this client is, like so many of its peers in the industry, up against such heavy hitters as Jared, Kendra Scott, and Nordstrom. 

There are, quite literally, millions to billions of results for search terms like “jewelry” and “fine jewelry” with downright astronomical difficulty scores. 

Differentiating a client like this would take some thinking outside of the box. 

The Goal 

The goal here for this client is fairly straightforward, which for both us and the client, is good news: growth online. Specifically, organic growth. 

Like many of our SEO clients, the primary goal for this client, at the outset was (and has remained) to drive more qualified leads to their website with the goal of converting them into customers. 

Some clients have unique requirements, based on location or niche, but with this particular client, we had a little more flexibility. 

Our main challenge was defining a target market (with which we had help from the client) and then settling on a keyword strategy that stood a chance, in this competitive industry, of generating measurable results.

The Keyword Strategy 

For this jewelry client, as is the case for most companies in the jewelry industry, most keywords are simply off the table. They are either unattainable objectively or unattainable in the short term. 

Regardless of the uniqueness of the company’s position – and this client has one since it sells products that are completely unique – there are too many competitors vying for similar (or the same) keywords. 

This makes it economically untenable to go after most of them. Short tail keywords like “jewelry” and “necklace,” even “necklaces for sale,” are far too competitive. 

Rather, our SEO experts had to roll up their sleeves and get into the trenches with these industry-specific keywords, finding a cohort of keywords that had substantial search volume, but with difficulty scores that we could hope to reach within a reasonable timeframe.

What this came down to was dialing in on customer intent as well as on specificity. 

For instance, this client sells a substantial number of items with baguette cut stones. Consequently, we went after a number of keywords containing this seed keyword and others that were similar.

We had to strike a balance between specificity and the trade-off that comes with it – highly specific, long-tail keywords are associated with easily identifiable search intent, but search volumes tend to be low. 

Ultimately, we keyed in on a set of these keywords that were specific, associated with intent to purchase (commercial or transactional search intents), relevant to their products and categories, and most importantly, well-balanced in terms of volume and difficulty. 

The Process

With a solid keyword strategy in place, the next thing we needed to do as a collective team was actually to start implementing the optimizations that would start driving growth. 

Our technical team began sweeping the website looking for crawler errors, potential issues with URLs, duplicate content, and other technical SEO issues. These we removed and created a log to supplement our ongoing scans.

We also created an organized list of target URLs and optimized on-page factors such as H1 tags and metadata. We also added these pages to a content schedule and prioritized optimized, refreshed copy for them.

The same content schedule also contained prioritizations for blogs and offsite guest posts. We crafted a series of onsite blogs focusing on industry-relevant topics, trends, and keywords, which increased the website’s overall impressions, specifically its impressions for the target keywords of the campaign. 

Simultaneously, our content writers also produced a series of offsite guest posts which our technical team then published across a variety of third-party websites, sowing backlinks in each one. These increased the referral traffic to and domain authority of the client’s website. The process is ongoing. 

Together, these efforts address the needs of the client’s website with respect to all four pillars of SEO.

That’s the process; what have the results been?

The Results 

As we have covered in a previous case study on the importance of quality content in SEO, there are numerous metrics you can use to assess the impact of content on an SEO campaign and on the efficacy of eCommerce SEO services in general. 

With this campaign, however, we have different, but equally exciting metrics to share to gloss the success of our efforts. 

One is total sessions. As you can see in the image below, total sessions for the website were averaging slightly less than 50,000 each month before we started implementing our optimizations.

However, as you can also see from the chart, total sessions sharply increased – nearly tripling – since our SEO services got underway. The red arrow in the image above indicates where our SEO work began, at which point you can see a mild dip followed by an impressive, and  incontestable, increase. 

Another set of metrics you can use to directly assess the impact of eCommerce SEO services are keyword movements, directly. In the image below you can see the target keywords and the movement generated.

While we can’t share the keywords themselves – that would be giving away the recipe for the secret sauce, after all – you can clearly see the immensely positive trends. These five keywords have all shifted up the SERPs by 3 positions or more, all of them on the first and second pages of Google. 

The picture above is helpful but doesn’t capture the immensity of the effect we’ve had on the upward trajectory of our client’s domain, overall. For that, you need to consult a graph showing the average ranking position for the client’s total target keyword cohort, which you can see in the image below.

As you can see, starting in September 2022 (which is when the campaign officially began) there is a sharp, upward trend among all of the keywords. Average rankings started out at just about thirty – which would put them near the top of page three. As of January 2023, the average ranking for all tracked keywords was below 20 – which means they appear on page two.

If that doesn’t paint the picture of success, we don’t have data that does. 

Put Our eCommerce SEO Services to Work for Your Business

We did it for this client. We’ve done it for hundreds of clients in the past. You can see some of our results in our collection of eCommerce case studies. 

We can do it for you. 

If you’re ready to put tired, flat strategies to rest and pick up a channel that will bring you more interested, better-qualified leads, get in touch with our eCommerce SEO experts. 

We’ll develop a custom suite of eCommerce SEO services that will improve your rankings and generate additional traffic to your website. 

Get in touch with us today at Sales@1DigitalAgency.com or contact us at 888-982-8269 to get started.