Is My Instagram Up to Snuff?
This is the 3rd blog in our series about self-assessing the health of your jewelry store’s online presence. Today, I want to walk you through the portion of the audit that we conduct with jewelers before we ever enter into a partnership, that addresses Instagram and your local competition.
To begin, our team does some homework and evaluates how the given jewelry store looks from the backend. This basically entails conducting an audit of the store’s online presence. In this blog post, I will walk you through some of the industry secrets and give you a behind-the-scenes view of what an audit may look like. In addition, I will leave you with steps you can take to do it for yourself.
Creating Engagement on Instagram
Instagram tends to be a little bit different when compared to Facebook. Instagram is typically used to highlight quality content.
As far as followers go, a brand may only have 3k to 5k followers. Now, that is not necessarily the end of the world when it comes to Instagram. What we want to look for is how engaged those followers are with the content we are creating. We can do this by looking at our post-engagement ratio, which is the number of followers we have compared to how many people are actually engaging with a post.
Let’s consider this example:
Suppose a business has 4k followers on Instagram, and they are getting about 150 to 200 likes and comments on every post. This is pretty good engagement, given that the brand only has 4k followers. This means that the people that are following the brand are really engaged with the content and are likely involved with special events, special products, offers, etc. This engagement is much more effective than a brand that has 30k followers and is only getting 15 likes on each post.
As far as highlights go on Instagram, we want to ensure that the highlight section features clean icons that are unified in appearance, as Instagram has a lot to do with aesthetic design. In addition, we must ensure that the photos we are posting are of high quality. They must tell a really compelling story and encourage our followers to engage with them.
Not only is post quality important, but post quantity is also important. At a minimum, the brand should be putting one post out every day. However, it is best to aim for at least two posts a day.
Comparing to the Competition
One powerful question that we can ask ourselves is, “Who near me is offering a similar product or service?” If there is a jeweler down the street from us that has more reviews, better photos, a higher number of photos on Google My Business, more post engagement on social media, and better SEO; we are likely missing out on an extensive amount of business. We can compare what we are doing to the competition in the area to determine how we can improve or change our current strategy.
We can find some of the competition in our area by going to Google and searching “Jewelry in [my city].” We can then ask ourselves who outranks us. Maybe we are first on Google, but who is second, third, or even fourth. We can also run various other searches based on what we are trying to rank for.
A great free tool that Google provides is Google Page Feed Insights. This tool allows us to see from Google’s perspective how well our website is performing and how optimized it is in regard to speed. This tool will provide us with a mobile score and a desktop score. The mobile score is typically lower than the desktop score.
SEO is another thing that we must look at to outrank our competitors. We can have our SEO team dive into our title tags, including the H1 tags, H2 tags, and everything that Google reads, to understand what our website is.
If we type “Google” into the search bar, the Google page is going to come up. If we hover over the tab, we will see the title tag pop up right underneath it. This is actually backend coding that anybody can see. Google’s title tag is “Google-Google Search.” So, our title tag may be something like “XYZ Jewelers” or “best jewelry store in [my city].”
It is important to optimize this title tag because it is going to allow us to rank much higher when people enter a given search query. When starting out, it is best to consider what we can name our pages to target what people are searching for on Google.
If most people are looking for our products, they may search “jewelry in [my city]” or “jewelry store in [my city].” Our title tag then needs to start with those exact words. For example, if our jewelry store is located in Denver, our title tag would read “Jewelry store in Denver.”
Title tags are the first thing that Google analyzes when determining what the page is and how it is going to rank compared to other similar pages. So, it is important that the title tags are all optimized.
Completed Audit
With all of those steps combined, we have now completed the Instagram and local competition portion of a general audit of our business. If you go to deepearthmkt.com/contact, you can actually request for us to run an audit for your business…for FREE! Just click “Get My Free Audit” and fill out the form. The audit will be more in-depth than what we covered here today. We look forward to hearing from you!
