In recent weeks, the number of online jewellers advertising through display and investing in platforms such as YouTube (preroll adverts) feels like it’s increasing, with new challenger companies advertising Swiss watches against the more renowned high-street jewellery names.
Considering how much the world has changed since the start of the pandemic, the traditional user journey for a lot of jewellery consumers has changed. No longer are consumers going to the brick-and-mortar stores to browse (and sometimes they can’t due to lockdown closures) — so for the most part this journey has moved online.
Online Jeweller Visibility
To get a temperature check of the UK online jewellery market I’m
- www.hsamuel.co.uk
- www.beaverbrooks.co.uk
- www.ernestjones.co.uk
- www.goldsmiths.co.uk
- www.fhinds.co.uk
- www.warrenjames.co.uk
- www.jewellerybox.co.uk
- www.fraserhart.co.uk
- www.thejewelhut.co.uk
- www.bluenile.com
So how visible are these sites when stacked next to each other?
Given that on the face of it, H Samuel are currently the largest, and Blue Nile the smallest (in terms of visibility) how have they fared over the past 5 years (according to third-party tools) in organic visibility terms:
H Samuel & Warren James
hsamuel.co.uk has had an interesting five years, with a considerable performance decrease in visibility from February 2019 through to October 2019, correlating with the Valentine’s Day update and potential fallout from the September 2019 core broad algorithm update.
Since then there has been stability, but the growth of competitors and that their stability is lesser than pre-February 2019, shows they have lost organic market share overall and there is opportunity to potentially grow further.
By similarity, Warren James have seen a similarly up and down time, with their down period extending for a longer period of time than H Samuel’s.
Again, whilst there has been an uplift, it’s not to the same level and does make you wonder how much visibility is left on the table.
Jewellerybox.co.uk & Bluenile.com – Contrasting Fortunes
By contrast, over the same period of time Jewellerybox.co.uk has seen a steady growth in terms of organic visibility.
This growth has come at the expense/market share of some of the historically larger players in the market.
By contrast, BlueNile.com have seen an almost correlative crash in terms of their visibility.
Both of these site’s significant changes correlate with the March 2019 core algorithm update, also dubbed Florida 2.
Given the international nature of the BlueNile.com domain, Hreflang and correct international SEO setup is important – however on even trying to validate the 4k+ lang tags in one of the many XML sitemaps – it’s flagging common errors.