This is a guest post by Nicolas Tranchant, a French entrepreneur living in Mexico where he manages his jewelry business, Vivalatina.
I decided to set up my own jewelry shop to be independent from marketplaces where rules and commissions can change and sometimes be abusive, in my opinion. Also, I wanted to set up my own jewelry brand and services and be able to reshape the business online the way I wanted, things difficult to do when selling through a marketplace.
Marketing is the key to your future
While it is a good thing to set up a business plan for your business, it is totally useless if you have no idea how to sell your products.
Marketing is a vast concept that is overwhelming for the new business owner, at least it was in my case. There is so much way to promote your business that it is easy to get lost.
When I started to promote my own business online, I was trying to follow advice from experts working for large companies and I was trying to do everything and failed in everything. I tried to promote my business on Pinterest, Facebook, Instagram and manage my own SEO, all of that while managing my business and dealing with my clients and shipping. I was going nuts.
Quickly I could not bear more and decided to focus only on SEO, with quite good results as my French jewelry boutique generates more that 40,000 visits a month and generates more than 10,000 USD monthly revenue.
My advice is: focus on one marketing channel, master it, and then add another one.
Today, I have a small team working with me and I have someone in charge of my Instagram account and dealing with my logistics, so I have more time to deal with SEO myself.
Selling through SEO
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is easy to understand in theory but is quite difficult to master with effective results.
To make it short, you will gain traction with your online boutique once you have shown that you have mastered your subject through valuable and numerous publications on your blog and shown Google your expertise through enough linking to your site from other websites.
One of the main advantages of SEO is that while it is hard to master, it can be free and works for years on its own once set up.
Create a blog
Having a blog is a must-have.
You will not be able to show to Google or your clients that you are reliable and trustworthy if you do not have a blog to show your expertise and share your knowledge.
Moreover, a blog is the best way to generate links to your website, helping to gain trust from Google which will help to rank your product pages.
Creating a conversion funnel from your blog is the most effective way to sell your products to your readers who may have never found you without your blog content. This means linking to your products pages in your blog. So readers find your site on Google, then click on your product pages from your content.
Sell the right product to the right audience
Selling online is different than selling in physical shops.
When you sell your jewelry through physical shops, you start by creating a design of jewelry and then try to sell it to the visitors.
Online, you have to do it differently as everything is driven by the keyword search of the users online. You have to do your work by finding what keywords are used by your future clients, for what kind of jewelry, and then make jewelry that matches their expectations.
If you make the best jewelry that has no keyword description that matches the consumers’ searches online, your jewelry will not be show up in search pages because no one is searching for it.
How I do keyword research
I share with you my method to find the perfect keyword for my products. This method helped me to grow my French product page traffic by 35% in 2022.
First, you will need to use a tool for keyword research. I use or have used Keysearch, Secockpit, and Ahrefs. You can use either of these tools to enter some keywords and see metrics such as number of searches per month, cost per click if you were to buy those keywords via Google ads, and which competitors currently rank for those keywords. Based on that,
My checklist for good keywords is:
- keyword related to my niche
- keyword with a decent amount of traffic (depending on what you consider to be decent)
- keyword with at least 0.5 USD Cost Per Clic in Google Adwords
- Keyword about evergreen informative content or buying intent
- Keyword for which the first page of Google shows at least 4 competitors with a Domain Authority inferior to mine
Once a keyword matches this checklist, I know that it will have a good chance to rank well in Google and generate direct or indirect income for my business.
After you finalize your keywords, start using them on your site and blog so Google can display those pages when people search for those keywords.
How to increase Domain Authority
Domain Authority is a score for your website that indicates how authoritative Google and other search engines think your site is.
As you have seen in the keyword checklist above, the Domain Authority is not vital but still important for your pages to rank well on Google. The higher it is, the easier it will be for you to rank for your keywords, and generate traffic to your service pages or product pages.
Your goal is to have a Domain Authority (DA) as high as the one of your competitors or higher if possible, which can be impossible in most cases.
The only way to grow your DA is to get links from other trusted websites online. The best way to achieve that is:
- To do guest posting sharing your knowledge and experience
- To create valuable source of data or information on your blog to attract links from other websites
- To partner with other website so you can exchange links, if this business partnership is logical for your business Google will not see it as an abusive method
- To build content that helps other blogs for their marketing showcasing them in exchange of a link back to your blog/website
Focusing on a niche
Once you master your keyword search and SEO marketing, it is easy to find new markets you were not thinking of, thanks to the keyword research tools.
Your keyword research will help you to find business opportunities with a low level of competition that allows you to quickly find a new market and sell your products adapted to this niche.
Let me explain. I started launching my French jewelry business in 2012 and when I decided to expand to the US market in 2018, I discovered with horror that I could not just translate my product keywords from French to English to find a new market as the level of competition was different and higher on the US market. The products I was able to sell in France where I had gained visibility were not easy to sell in the US.
But, keyword research allowed me to find a new kind of product that fits the market in the US, check it out here. Intaglio jewelry is a niche in the jewelry market where the competition was at my level. I just had to adapt some designs, make some products to launch my collection, and use my jewelry workshop the same way I was doing for the other jewelry designs I was already making.
Looking for different niches in your market will help you find new opportunities to sell online.
Translate your site to target keywords in different languages
Once you are able to analyze your market in your own language and focus on a specific niche, you will be interested in expanding your sales in another language. While you can be scared by another language, think that the French language represents 85 million people in Europe and Canada and the Spanish language represents 490 million people in America and Spain.
Today, many tools or AI help you translate your website quite easily to aim at another market.
This is the reason I made the choice to focus on a specific niche in Spanish to launch my last online boutique, as you can see it here. As I speak the language, I translated the site myself but you can rely on advance tools nowadays to help you on your task.
Last words
Focusing on selling online on your own website makes it easier to build a jewelry brand, protect your margins and keep you in control of your sales strategy which will require you to adapt to the market in the future.
Hope you found this content useful. Let me know about your own SEO experience in the comment section.
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