You might not have heard of SEO ("search engine optimization"), but trust me, you're already an expert.
I can see why you might not believe me. There's a lot of annoying pesky persistent people trying to make SEO seem mysterious and scary: "Pay us tons of money or your online business will fail! You need professionals! No mere mortal can work the magic of SEO!"
There's one small problem with this doom-and-gloom attitude from the "experts." Your whole life you have been using keywords to find what you need. So that's what? Twenty years of experience? Forty? How much more experience do you need?
Here are some examples:
Car Manuals
A couple of weeks ago I had a blinking light on the dashboard of my car. Not being fluent in blinking car messages, I pulled out the car manual, blew all the dust off it, and tried to figure out what my car was trying to tell me. I thought it had something to do with one of my rear lights. I used the index to try to find lights (no listings), rear (no listings), and warning (no listings). I finally found the information under "service reminder indicators."
Yep, I was using SEO. The "search engine" was the car manual and it wasn't very good. (If you want to impress a corporate bigwig, don't tell him that the manual was a piece of junk. Tell him it wasn't "optimized.")
Phone Book
Paper phone books are still around, but not as widely used, so this might mean a trip back down memory lane. When you needed to get a haircut, did you look up "haircut"? You probably had to look up "barbers" or "beauty salons" instead.
Newspapers
Newspapers were a similar story. If you were looking for a job, where did you look? "Jobs" or "employment"? If it was a secretary position, was it listed under "secretary" or "clerical"? If the job description mentioned "60 WPM," could you decode what that meant?
Grocery Store
Until recently, my grocery store always stocked the sweetened condensed milk in the cereal aisle. Whenever I made fudge, I always went first to the baking aisle (the keyword/subject I would have chosen) and then to the cereal aisle (the keyword/subject that the expert chose). I can understand the confusion if you're not a baker. Milk is milk, right? Doesn't it all go on cereal?
But What About the Computer?
None of those examples involves a computer, but the concept is the same. If you've ever used Google to find a cool pair of shoes, you know that it takes some playing around to find what you want. Part of it is just the scope of the internet. There are far more shoes online than in any shop in your hometown, so it will likely take longer for you to find what you want.
The other difficulty of online searching is that you need to have a kind of mind-meld with the shopkeeper. You both need to be calling the item the same thing. You could search for "cool shoes", "fall footwear," "blue stilettos," or "hand-tooled leather cowboy boots under $80." All of those searches will likely pull up a completely different list of results. A shop might have the coolest pair of shoes in the world, but if they've labeled them "midnight party," you will never find them.
Of course, if someone is a returning customer, she will know to just go right to your shop and browse. Keywords won't be quite as important. But in the meantime (before she knows you're wonderful) . . .
Would you like to have a little fun?
If you want to use SEO to help your customers find your jewelry or other
items you sell, you're the absolute best person to do it. No outsider knows your customers or product better than you do.
But that doesn't mean you have to do it alone. I'd love a chance to show you what a big difference it can make for your online shop, but I need your help. Is there an item of yours that you're trying to sell that has beautiful photos, but doesn't seem to be getting very many views? That's often a sign that you aren't using the best keywords.
I'd like to feature your item (and links to your shop and/or blog) and suggest some keywords, showing you how I came up with them. Sometimes it's helpful to have another person offer her perspective. My suggestions might be just what you need or they might trigger some new thoughts of your own.
Anyone game? Let me know in the comments. Thank you!