Every year, we release sector reports on a wide range of industries. These reports look at various metrics, such as visibility, keyword opportunities, page speed and social scores. This allows us to see which brands are doing well online and which need to give their websites a bit of attention.
One of these reports is the Jewellery Retailers Market Report. Our 2023 report saw an overall 7% visibility decline in this market, despite some brands’ impressive growth. Within this overall decline, there was one brand that caught our eye for all the wrong reasons.
The Jewel Hut saw a huge visibility decline of 68%, taking them from a visibility of 17,708 to 5,714.
As these were in our top ten jewellery brands in 2022, we decided to look and see where they’ve gone wrong to see such a big drop in 2023. We also looked into how they can remedy their current errors.
If you want to discover how we’d turn this decline around and get The Jewel Hut sparkling online again, read our analysis.
Keyword Targeting
One key contributor to The Jewel Hut losing visibility is likely their keyword targeting. From May 2022 to May 2023, they have lost a massive 13,538 keywords! This includes important terms such as “jewellery” (search volume 122,000), “mens watches” (search volume 86,000), and “earrings” (search volume 66,000).
Although they have these categories, so they are targeting them, there are some huge terms they are not targeting. For instance, in their mega nav, they have “cluster rings” (which has a search volume of 2,400) but not “diamond cluster rings” (search volume 2,900). In fact, diamonds are a big category that is missing. You can find various diamond jewellery types in the various drop-downs, but being in the drop-downs means they are harder to find, not just for users but bots too. There is a lot of search volume around diamonds that The Jewellery Hut is not tapping into. And if diamonds aren’t being targeted correctly, it’s likely they have more gaps that are not helping their visibility score.
Looking at the mega nav further, the first thing a bot will crawl is “Nomination”, telling Search Engines that this is the most important category. The term “nomination jewellery” has a search volume of 1,000, which isn’t too bad. But compared to other jewellery terms, this is small. They would do better to have bigger terms towards the left of the mega nav.
Our Solution
We would perform a gap analysis to see what big search terms The Jewel Hut is missing out on. This would include looking at competitors and search volume. From this, we’d look to add some categories that would help to target these keywords.
Regarding the mega nav, we would look to redesign this, moving the bigger terms to the left.
URLs and Potential Bloat
Although the landing page URLs are good, when you start using filters, this begins to unravel. Many filters create a new page (the price filter doesn’t do this). Take a look at this example when filtering through Casio watches:
The URLs, when filtering, all contain /filter, which is a bit odd. But more importantly, with each filter option creating a new URL, this means that there are hundreds of pages, which can cause bloat. This uses the crawl budget and could make search engines miss important pages. Furthermore, each filter page has the same metadata, causing cannibalisation.
Luckily, The Jewel Hut does have these filter pages set to no-index, so the cannibalisation and bloat issues are minimal. However, bots can sometimes ignore the “no-index” tag.
Another small thing to note is the spelling of “colour” in the filter. This is a UK site, and the filter has the US spelling of “color”, which could be seen as a trust issue.
Our Solution
Although the filter pages are no-indexed, we would still suggest changing this, as it’s bad practice. To do this, we would remove the pages created when filtering and instead use URL variables, such as /casio-watches?filter=XXXX. This would reduce any risk of bots ignoring the “no-index” tag, which could then lead to using crawl budget and cannibalisation.
Content
Ever heard the phrase “Content is King”? It’s well-known in the SEO industry, and it simply shows the importance of good content. It appears that The Jewellery Hut are unaware of this, though.
There’s a lot to look at with content; there is both category content and supplementary content that can affect rankings and visibility.
Category Content
We’ll start with the category pages. In good news, Jewellery Hut has decent Title Tags on their category pages, with good keyword targeting. Unfortunately, though, that is where it ends.
The “title” at the top of the page is an image, not an H1, and as bots don’t read the text on images, crawlers won’t read the text. Also, some of these images are the same between pages:
This means you (and bots) have to scroll to the bottom of the page to find the H1 (which is well-targeted). There is then a small amount of copy, which is very similar between the pages.
This means that bots won’t get much information about the page, and lots of long-tailed keywords won’t be targeted. Furthermore, with a lack of enhanced content, you can’t internally link to other pages. Internally linking is important, not just for users, but for bots too. Internal links show bots the relationship between pages and which pages are important, as well as make it easier for the bot to crawl the site.
Talking about internal links, we did find some from product pages to categories. However, the anchor text isn’t very well thought out. For instance, a link to the Pre-Owned Watch Collection page has the anchor text of “Watches”, which is telling bots that the Pre-Owned Watches page is what should be ranking for the term “watches” when in reality, it is the Watches page that should rank, which could cause confusion and reduce rankings.
Supplementary Content
The Jewel Hut could also improve their supplementary content. Although they have a size guide for jewellery, they do not have a guide hub. Furthermore, the actual guides are PDFs, which bots cannot crawl.
The Jewel Hut does also have a blog, which is great. However, the content on the blog is rather thin and doesn’t make use of heading tags throughout the content.
Blogs and guides are a great way to target longtail keywords and show your expertise (important for EAT). Guides especially can help to support category content. Not only that but guides and blogs can be used to produce shoppable content or simply help a user go from the research stage to the buying stage of their journey.
Our Solution
The first thing we would do to fix the content would be to look at the category pages. We’d look to move the H1s to the top of the page, with a bit of copy, then add enhanced content below the product listings to target longtail keywords and add relevant internal links.
We’d also look to move the guide PDFs to their own page and create a guides hub. The blog we would also look at deciding which blogs should be kept and which should be removed. We would find extra titles for both the guides and blog to ensure we show expertise throughout the jewellery niche.
Within all this, we would use internal links to create a content web, which can help users on their journey and help bots to crawl the site.
Trust
Trust has been an important ranking factor for a while, which The Jewel Hut could do with showing more of. This is especially important in markets such as jewellery, where some products are worth a lot of money, so people want to be sure they are buying from a reputable source. Although they have excellent Trustpilot reviews, which they signpost over the site, trust goes much further than that.
For instance, the About Us page is rather thin. It doesn’t tell you much about how the company has grown or mention experts anywhere. The page talks about being a leading jewellery retailer and an authorised stockist, but it needs to prove this.
Another important factor when buying jewellery, and especially pre-owned watches, is the warranty. People will want to know that they are covered if anything goes wrong after spending a lot of money on a piece of jewellery or a watch. We could not find a warranty page on the site; if we can’t find it, it’s unlikely that bots and users will.
Our Solution
We would complete a full Trust Audit to find all the trust issues on site. Once we know all the issues that may be affecting their trust, we would give recommendations for fixing each issue.
Beyond this, we would look to give guidance on creating a trustworthy and visual About Us page. We would consider their experts and training, how they asses preowned jewellery and watches, and the full history of the brand.
The Positive Side
Despite the drops, there are some areas that The Jewel Hut are very much succeeding in, these are branded keywords and links. Maybe, these are where they’ve been focusing their SEO efforts this year. Because the online environment is constantly changing, it can help by focusing on one or two areas but this may mean you lose sight of other areas which can cause drops. Here is where we’ve spotted The Jewel Hut excelling:
Brands
Brands tend to have huge search volume but can be very hard to rank for, as the brands themselves dominate the SERPs for the terms. However, we can see that The Jewel Hut is ranking really well for brand terms, and brands show up on their top pages when looking in ahrefs:
Nomination, Thomas Sabo, Swarovski and Pandora all feature in these top pages, and each term has a decent search volume. So, how is The Jewel Hut ranking well for brand terms?
Firstly, they have brands in their meganav (in fact, Nomination has its own drop-down, making it clear that this brand is important to them). They do not include all brands in the dropdown, but popular brands. This means that they are showing Search Engines which brands are important to them, and it makes it easy for users to navigate to these brands.
Clicking on “Brands” takes you to their brands page. This page is easy to navigate, listing all the brands in alphabetical order, with jump-links at the top of the page. The brands are also listed with their logo, making it easy for users to recognise the brand that they are searching for, or to spot one that they recognise. Ease of navigation can have a positive indirect effect on rankings.
Links
It looks like The Jewel Hut has been doing well on digital PR this year, with over 50,000 links gained from Feb 2022 to Feb 2023. This has included links from newspapers such as The Sun, which has high authority.
They are also keeping on top of these links by redirecting broken links to relevant categories where needed:
Making sure you redirect when pages are removed means that you keep some of that link juice, rather than losing out.
Summing It All Up
The Jewel Hut has some wins around links and branded keywords and has a good base to work with. Despite this, they’ve seen some big drops in the past twelve months but with a bit of attention, they could easily turn this around. To do this, they should ensure they are targeting everything that they can and ensure they are adhering to best practices. They should also look to improve their content, both on categories and supplementary content, creating a web that allows bots to easily crawl their site and help to guide users through the buying process. They should also ensure they are doing everything they can to prove that they are a trustworthy site. Some pre-owned Rolex watches, for instance, cost over £10,000, so any buyer would understandably be cautious about buying something like this online.
Of course, there’ll be more to look at, at these recommendations are just the beginning. SEO is a constantly changing landscape, and you need to be looking after your SEO to stay ahead of the competition.
If you’re interested in seeing how your site could be improved or want to get a free professional, in-depth audit on your site, you can contact us online today or call us on 01244 564 500.