Make a Better Website Case Study : Oak Hill Jewels
This website case study is a request by reader Deena, who asked me to take a look at her Oak Hill Jewels site via a comment on my article How to Promote Your Jewelry Website, and also by Anita who commented on my comment.
The issue? Traffic. Deena says she thinks she's optimized her website properly for keywords, and she thinks she's providing good content, but still nada. Why is no one visiting?
I gave a little advice in the comments, but Anita asked me to clarify on what Deena could do better to increase traffic and build a better website, so here we are!
What Is the Point of This Case Study?
Before we look at Deena's website, let me tell you a little about the objectives of this case study. This is a landing page case study and it's also an overall website case study.
The landing page is the page that a visitor lands on first. For most websites this is the home page. When you build a website, whether it's a blog or a regular website, you want to have a homepage. I know that blogs aren't normally set up that way, but this doesn't mean that you shouldn't have one.
People like having a starting point that clearly explains what they can find on your website, what the point or focus of your website is, and an easy to understand way to jump off to other points on a website. If you have a home page, you can give them some much appreciated direction. You can greet them warmly, let them know what your objectives are and how your site will benefit them, how to get around your site, and generally make them feel more comfortable with you, and your website.
The rest of your website should focus on more of the same. Your entire website should be structured around a focused topic. This makes it easy for the search engines to categorize your site, and in turn lead targeted traffic to you. This applies whether you have an information site, an ecommerce site, or a combination of the two.
What You'll See in the Website Case Study Video
This case study looks at Deena's landing page, her content, and her on-page and off-page search engine optimization. I use a few tools to try to figure out what keywords she is optimizing for, whether she is successful at optimizing for them, whether they are good keywords to target in the first place, and give some suggestions for improvement.
To better illustrate what to do to fix the website, I point out features of my own How-to-Make-Jewelry.com website. This website is a content site primarily, but the rules apply whether you are build ing a website that sells products, sells jewelry, or sells advertising. You need content to draw the traffic, you need to optimize your pages for terms with reasonable search volume, and terms that have a reasonably low amount of competition.
Note: When you are looking at good examples of optimized websites, I want to point something out... Handmade Results is not one of them. I threw it up quickly primarily to deliver my Handmade Results Weekly course, not as a search engine optimized website. As a result, it breaks all the rules of a good keyword targeted website. What it is a good example of is what you can accomplish when you have a mailing list and have built up a reputation from a well-built, optimized website. At the moment all my traffic comes directly from word of mouth and from my "I'm Making Jewelry in my Jam Jams" newsletter. I do have plans to search engine optimize and make it more usable at some point, but one thing at a time....
With that lengthy introduction, go ahead an watch the website case study video below. You'll get a great overview of how a website can be made better and more search engine friendly, and more visitor friendly too for that matter.
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