When it comes to higher-end jewellery, it’s interesting how nuanced it gets from a targeting perspective.
Most clients that deal with us say that they want to rank for the biggest term in their field. Why wouldn’t they? It has the most searches, so surely it represents the biggest opportunity.
Not necessarily.
Take 'engagement rings' as an example. Over 90,000 searches are carried out every month (the last time we checked). Why wouldn’t a specialist house want to rank for that?
The trouble is, that search tells us next to nothing about the person behind it.
They could have £200 to spend, or they could have £20,000. They could know exactly what they want, or they could be wondering where to start.
Now compare that with someone searching for “pink diamond engagement rings”.
Immediately, we know much more about what they’re looking for. And for a jeweller with a strong pink diamond collection, there’s a far clearer match between the customer’s intent and what the brand actually sells.
It also does an element of qualification for us. Someone searching specifically for a pink diamond engagement ring is likely to understand that they’re looking at a different price point from the mass market.
Understandably, we’ve sometimes had our ambition questioned when we talk about this, and that’s fair enough. I’m not saying we should never go after the category-defining terms. I’m saying we should earn the right to compete for them by building strength around more specific and commercially relevant terms first.
How we connect those broader search terms with the longer tail is where jewellery SEO starts to get interesting (if you’re a geek like me).
Topical themes
At Imaginaire, we’re strong advocates for building out deep collections around a core commercial theme.
Think of the main category as the broadest version of what somebody might be shopping for, with increasingly specific collections underneath it.
Using engagement rings as an example, /engagement-rings/ might sit at the top level, supported by more specific collections such as:
/engagement-rings/diamond-engagement-rings - targeting “diamond engagement rings”, although I’d question whether this needs its own collection if the majority of the main engagement ring range already contains diamonds
/engagement-rings/pink-diamond-rings - targeting searches like “pink diamond engagement rings”
/engagement-rings/cushion-cut - targeting searches like “cushion cut diamond engagement rings”
/engagement-rings/emerald-and-diamond-engagement-rings - a much more specific collection for people looking for rings featuring emeralds and diamonds.
The important part isn’t creating pages for every keyword variation we can find.
A collection might make perfect sense from a keyword targeting perspective, but if it creates a confusing journey, contains hardly any products or exists purely for Google, it probably shouldn’t exist.
The best structures tend to work both ways: they help search engines understand what the site is relevant for, while making it easier for customers to narrow down what they actually want.
So, when should a keyword target become a collection?
In ecommerce merchandising, it can be hard to balance the SEO team’s priorities with what’s best for the customer journey and conversion.
How do you stop this turning into 20 thin collection pages that technically target keywords but do very little for customers or sales?
In my opinion, you shouldn’t be creating sub-collections for the sake of it and purely to rank them in search. Here’s a rough idea of how my decision-making process would work if I was thinking about targeting a keyword with a collection:
Is there meaningful search demand?
Basically, is it worth creating this collection? Does the group of keywords that it would be targeting make the effort of building out the subcollection worthwhile?
Do we have enough relevant products?
If the proposed collection only has three products, I’d question whether it deserves to exist. Of course, there are exceptions in very specialist or high-value categories, but generally the customer should have enough choice for the page to feel like a genuine collection rather than an SEO landing page.
Is the customer intent distinct from what we already cover?
We touched on this when we said the top-level engagement rings category might target diamond engagement rings and, if so, how we wouldn’t have a subcategory for diamond engagement rings.
If the search intent is already covered by another category, target the new keyword with that.
Should it be handled by a filter, facet or editorial page instead?
There are some product attributes that don’t make sense to exist as a dedicated landing page, it would be overkill.
We’d never want to see landing pages for things like ring sizes, availability or internal merchandising tags.
Likewise, we wouldn’t be trying to rank pages for every combination of filters there could be, for example “18ct white gold halo engagement rings size M”.
For those cases, we’d definitely stick with filters.
Any question-based search terms are a different part of the funnel. They deserve editorial pages of their own, or to be combined into a buying guide.
Building authority around a collection
Earlier in the article, we said we’d tell you how we connect the broader search terms (“engagement rings”) to the longer tail (“pink engagement rings”).
Having the right collections and sub-collections is only one side of the equation.
The other side is having genuinely useful content supporting the theme and using the power of internal linking to support the entire thing.
Supporting content
Buying guides
I’m a big fan of having buying guides as a cornerstone of each major commercial category.
They help you from an SEO perspective and a customer experience perspective.
You can guide your potential customers through the funnel, telling them about all of the things they need to be thinking about and looking at, with clear examples that they can find on your website.
Then, from an SEO perspective, you can link to the main category and subcategories, giving them natural visibility.
As well as the categories, you can link out to other supporting content that you’ve written about the theme.
Other supporting content
As well as overarching buying guides, it’s never a bad idea to have plenty of content around some of the common questions that come up in the showroom. Lean on your sales team for this one.
For example, under a pink diamond engagement rings collection, supporting content could include things like:
- What makes pink diamonds valuable?
- Natural vs lab-grown pink diamonds
- Pink diamond grading
- Care and maintenance of pink diamonds
Linking it all together
The pieces don’t work nearly as well in isolation. They should be part of a congruent journey.
Internal linking is what helps search engines and customers understand how those pages relate to each other.
Your top-level category page is the most likely to have the most authority as it will be linked heavily across your website, from navigation to footers and different panels of the homepage.
For that reason, you need to be linking out to the subcategories in a coherent manner.
If you have lots of relevant subcategories, you’ll want to prioritise the four to six most useful to customers rather than cramming them all into the main category description.
From the subcategories that are linked, you can then link between the other relevant subcategories where it makes sense.
I wouldn’t overthink this. I imagine there’s a guru somewhere with a formula, but I’d ignore that and just focus on being helpful to your customers.
Your job is to guide them through to the categories that give them choices around what they’re looking for.
For example, diamond engagement rings would conceivably link through to subcategories for specific colours (“pink diamond engagement rings”), or cuts (“cushion cut engagement rings”).
It might also be an idea to break up the product grid with genuinely useful content where it helps the customer make a decision.
Think of your website like a salesperson. Its job isn’t just to put products in front of people and then hope they buy. It should help them understand what they’re looking for, how they can become more selective about what they want and then narrow down their options so they’re confident enough to take the next step.
That’s ultimately what good jewellery SEO should be doing too.
Why this works so well for jewellery
Anyone that’s been involved with jewellery sales and marketing knows the purchase journey is rarely straightforward. It’s a considered purchase and it usually needs multiple touch points before a customer is ready to buy.
It’s an interesting industry where you often see the buying journey unfold in front of you.
Most people start with a broad idea, for example “I want to propose, I’ll look at engagement rings”.
Then they start researching the topic in more depth than they could have imagined before this phase of their life. They’ll be trying to understand things like:
- Gemstone types
- Cut
- Setting
- Metal
- Provenance
- Certification
- Price
- Care
- Comparisons between options
That creates a lot of legitimate search intents around the main commercial category and they’re useful because, if you’re showing up for them, you start to get a picture of what the customer actually wants.
I’m a strong believer that the sales team is an untapped resource in jewellery SEO. The best content strategy is built around what customers are actually asking and there’s no better way to understand that than sitting with the people that are in front of customers day in, day out.
Rule of thumb: if customers repeatedly ask the same question in the showroom before purchasing, there should be a page dedicated to answering that question, even if it shows no search volume.
The goal isn’t to create content for traffic. It’s to answer the questions that move somebody closer to making a decision.
Over time, these collection pages, guides and supporting articles reinforce that broader category that you ultimately want to compete for.
The point isn’t to avoid competitive keywords, it’s to stop treating them as your starting point.
Start with the areas where your range is genuinely strong and differentiated. Satisfy the more specific searches around your brand’s unique propositions, connect everything coherently and use that as a foundation to compete for the bigger terms.
Or, if you’d rather not get quite this geeky about jewellery SEO, get us to do it for you.
