Small Business SEO – Sea Glass Jewelry – Ground Zero

My wife and I met with Deborah, who creates sea glass jewelry at mermaidspurse.us. I posted about the research I did for her site below. I found the keywords and the competitors and decided what we should target.

Once again, I learned something about my client that I would have never known without talking to her. Last time, I was surprised that brides search for wedding flowers based on the venue, not on the city. This time, I was surprised to learn that there’s a difference between “sea glass” and “beach glass”.

Now, I live near the beach, near LA. I ride my bike at the beach regularly. Deborah told me that the difference between “sea glass” and “beach glass” is that “sea glass” comes from the beach of an ocean, while “beach glass” comes from the beach of a lake. Thinking back, I remember that the “beach glass” web sites were located near lakes, not oceans.

How do we “own” the keyword ‘beach glass’, when all of her products are “sea glass”? I’ll have to think about that one for a bit. At the least, we need a page that describes the difference and uses the term a lot, including in the title. Maybe a disclaimer on each page telling the difference. Not sure yet.

Organization

The real question I needed her to answer for me was how she organized her jewelry. Does she have enough that we’ll need to dip into the world of ecommerce? Yes, yes, she does. She doesn’t want to put up too much at any one time, so she doesn’t overwhelm shoppers, but she’s got a load of jewelry. This girl is prolific.

My next move is to review ecom solutions and decide which is most appropriate for her. We need to get that page count up with product pages for each of her items.

She also has a very specific organization for them. Whenever I do an ecom site, I always need to figure out how things are defined, by color, size, price, type, or whatever. How will a user browse the products? What makes the most sense? How are things organized?

She has types of jewelry, e.g., necklaces, bracelets, pendant, etc., I was thinking that the next cut would be by color. She already did better than that. She’s got them separated into collections. Each collection is named after a local beach or area. “White’s Point” is the white jewelry. Hermosa is the light blue stuff. Porto is darker colors. Hermosa Beach is at the south end of my bike ride, while I start out in El Porto. (Porto Rules! Locals Only, Dude!)

WordPress

I taught her how WordPress works and gave her instructions on using the NextGen Gallery plug in. This morning I was pleasantly surprised to see two new pages with all of her photos loaded. Very nice. Most clients freak out and need me to hold their hand through the process, which I’m happy to do, and actually good at doing, but not Deborah. I gave her instructions and she did it on her own. I’m very proud of her. The lesson there is that even if you are not sure what you are doing, or you are afraid to try something, go ahead and try it and most likely it’ll be OK. Props to Deb.

Statistics

This is a new site, weeks old. We’ve just begun to put content on it. It’s got a few pages, but we’ve not really tried to optimize anything yet. I wanted to get a baseline, a ground zero, so we can track what a great job I do on SEOing her site.

The first metric was the number of external links she has. We used Yahoo Site Explorer. Remember that her five biggest competitors have between 300 and 1,700 external links. Deborah has two external links. Both of those links are from me, from this very site. We talked about how to work on getting more external links. I’ll be sharing what we do as we go along.

She has 1 page indexed, but we’re working on that with the ecom plugin. Where does she rank for her search terms? Where do you think? She has no listing in the first 3 pages for any search term, in any of the 4 search engines we’re checking.

I think ground zero is really a zero. We’ll start here and build up.