Jewellery Website Marketing is no easy task - the web is full of jewellery websites that market aggressively. When we first met with Janine Davidson of Scarab Jewellery Studio down in Cape Town to discuss a new and improved website, her team knew nothing of SEO, the importance of being mobile friendly and why any of that mumbo jumbo mattered. All she knew at the time was that the way forward, in a very competitive industry, was to be found online. Plus we had to make room for an eCommerce store.

1. Reverted back with a comprehensive competitor analysis: This assortment of spreadsheets, and pretty graphs, gave our new client a fairly good understanding of her competitors and what they were either doing right or wrong according to best practices. By comparing these results with her own site, it gave us an all-important benchmark from which to move forward. It gave us a roadmap to setting goals. It showed us where we could do better than her online competitors. It highlighted the keywords they were being ranked for on Google search results. We insist on completing this process. The online web presence of any company cannot be built without an understanding of what their competitors are doing.
2. Moved their current site from the Wix website building platform to WordPress CMS (Content Management System). There is a big difference, particularly regarding SEO.
3. Created an Online Store - two in fact - One for South Africa and one for International. The reason was simple. Payment Gateways. We tried running one store with PayPal - but that meant basing prices on the dollar, and with the rampant dollar/rand fluctuation, South Africans were paying too much for the product. (The Rand is not a recognised PayPal currency, and even running a piece of code in the background to make the Rand work with PayPal did not prove optimal). In the end we decided to have an International Store using PayPal and a South African Store using PayFast. The system is flawless.
4. Blog - this is where WordPress plays to its strengths - from our perspective, in terms of SEO and marketing, having a regularly updated blog is crucial. By optimising each post for relevant keywords (preferably long-tail) - we are essentially expanding the Scarab Jewellery "footprint" on the web. It adds another entrance for the searcher to find Scarab Jewellery.
5. Paid advertising - we have been experimenting with Facebook since September 2015 and more recently with Google Adwords. Each business is unique - and time has taught us about how each campaign responds in terms of audience, cost and reach. For example, our first paid advertising campaign for Valentine's Day showed us that our price offer may have been too high for the Audience reached on Facebook. This insight will inform our next Valentine offer. As a first time advertiser, each campaign will be a benchmark for the following year.

Work on SEO and online marketing for Scarab Jewellery Studio is still ongoing.

We love our big little client in Cape Town.

NOTE: I wish the very best for Scarab Jewellery into the future!