How to Self-Assess Your Jewelry Store’s GMB
Have you ever wondered how well your store was doing? It can often be challenging to judge your own performance and see areas for improvement because you are too close to the project. Today, I want to walk you through part of the audit that we conduct with jewelers before we ever enter into a partnership.
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 part of an audit may look like. In addition, I will leave you with steps you can take to do it for yourself.
Before beginning, we must determine how we are going to be aggressive with the growth of your store. In order to do this, we must determine what the problems are and if there are any cracks in the current strategy, along with how to fix them.
Establishing Quality Reviews on Google My Business
The first thing that we will look at is your Google My Business page. This is the profile that displays the store information on Google. There are a couple of things to look out for on the Google My Business profile.
If this page is not properly set up, there are some things that we can look at to make some improvements. The first thing to look at is the review count; we look for around 200 reviews at the minimum. Let’s look at this example:
Suppose you are looking for an engagement ring for your girlfriend, and you find a jewelry store that has around 300 reviews. In addition, you find another store that has closer to 50 reviews. You will probably lean toward checking out the store with more reviews as they appear to have more credibility compared to the store with only a few reviews.
Not only is the number of reviews important, but the sentiment of those reviews is important as well. Most stores have an average rating of 4.8 to 4.9 stars out of 5. So, in most cases, maintaining the same quality service and encouraging people to leave reviews is the best course of action. A number of our larger partners have 800 to 900 reviews on their Google My Business page.
When people look at the Google My Business page, they also want to see that the business is engaged with the customers. This means that responding and engaging with reviews is important; respond to every review with a unique response to demonstrate customer engagement. These unique responses to reviews will begin to generate organic SEO visibility for the page. Google favors businesses that are engaged with their customers.
How to Enhance the Google My Business Page with Social Media and Quality Photos
Linking social media profiles on the Google My Business page allows potential customers to view the business on various platforms; this enhances credibility and allows the store to build a relationship with current and potential customers. So, be sure that ALL of the social media profiles for the jewelry store are linked within the Google My Business page, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest.
In addition to linking social media platforms, high-quality photos are just as important. What is important here is to have high-end lifestyle photos that represent the experience of what the store is trying to communicate to customers. In other words, these photos should showcase the experience that customers can expect to encounter when they visit the store.
Many businesses make the mistake of only showcasing vendor photos with a white background, making it look like they are building an Amazon page. This does little to entice customers to come and experience the physical store. In addition to photo quality, photo quantity is equally important.
A study that looked at over 15,000 Google My Business listings found that listings with over 100 photos received over 520 percent more calls from customers on Google. Ensuring that the business page has over 100 photos is an easy step that can be taken today to boost engagement.
Getting a Complete Audit
With all of those steps combined, we have now completed the GMB portion of a general audit of our jewelry store. If you go to deepearthmkt.com/contact, you can actually request for us to run a complete 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!
