SEO Tips to Boost Traffic to Your Website

SEO is a term that every jewelry designer with an online presence will hear at some point. But what does it mean, and how can you successfully harness it to drive more traffic to your website?

SEO--search engine optimization--is a general phrase used to encompass the many strategies that enable a website to rank higher in organic search engine results to improve its visibility. For instance, if you sell earrings with butterflies, you want your website front and center when someone is searching online for butterfly earrings, preferably appearing on the first page of the search results. Good SEO practices can help with that.

Improving your site's SEO can seem intimidating at first, but there are practical things you can do to improve it. Here are some easy, helpful tips to get you started.

• Claim your business online. If you have a physical location, claim your business profile on Google and Bing, as well as services like Yelp. Doing this will foster customer interactions and help your business to appear more prominently in location apps. Try to nab your business name on every social media platform. Even if you don't have plans for a social media presence on a particular platform, this will at least reserve that name for your business instead of some other unrelated business.

• Do you have a website? Take advantage of the SEO tools and plug-ins offered by many website builders, like Shopify, WordPress, Wix or Squarespace

• Research is key to good SEO. Google Trends can be a great place to gather information about what styles, colors, techniques and materials are on the rise and what might be falling out of favor. It also allows you to compare trends or search terms and to see how they perform over time. This knowledge can help you to understand where you may want to direct your designing efforts. You'll have a much higher chance for success if you are supplying something that has demand already.

• Pay attention to Google's autocomplete when you are searching for things. The search engine will populate that drop-down with what people are searching for most often, giving you an idea of what is trending. One caveat, make sure to perform these searches in incognito mode. It will prevent Google from using your past searches to predict the search term, possibly skewing the results.

• Autocomplete isn't just on Google. You can also study the results on Pinterest and marketplaces like Etsy. This is a great way to identify popular search terms that you may want to include in your product descriptions and tags for your products.

• Use your product descriptions to foster search hits. Spend some time on these for every selling platform that you use. They tell the story of your designs and help customers and search engines understand what you are selling. Once a search engine has this information, it can better determine what searches are relevant to your website and products.

• Be wary of anyone offering SEO services with guaranteed results. There is a lot of ambiguity surrounding SEO since search engines don't explain exactly how they work and update their algorithms periodically. People spend years studying patents, release notes and Google's Quality Rater Guidelines, but even then, the answer to if it will work is "it depends." With a million factors at play, no one can guarantee "page one results." It's also best to rely on a variety of marketing strategies, like paid advertising, social media and email, rather than focusing solely on improving SEO.