“My mother used to say always leave your heart open… it’s the only way to give and receive love.”

Sound familiar?  Unless you have been living in a cave or have a PHD in DVR programming you couldn’t have missed Kay Jewelers’ highly effective Valentine’s Day campaign over the last few weeks.  Kay Jewelers, a top retail jewelry brand, started with one store in 1916 and has blossomed into a 1,402 store operation in all 50 states and employs more than 21,000 team members.

Kay Jewelers scored big with a sensational Valentine’s Day campaign and their website traffic reflects it.  Thanks in large part to their iconic Open Hearts campaign featuring the stylish and refined Jane Seymour, Hitwise reported a dramatic spike in KayJewelers.com website traffic rankings for the week ending February 7th:

“The Kay Jewelers website moved up 1,606 positions among all websites visited by U.S. Internet users (week ending February 7, 2009) to rank number 1,593 overall. Of the website’s total traffic, 72 percent consisted of new visitors. The websites contributing traffic to Kay Jewelers that increased contribution compared to the previous week were: Yahoo! Mail, eBay and AOL Mail.”

Hitwise Research

 

A 2007 iProspect/Jupiter Research study found that 67% of search engine users are driven to search by an offline channel.  You can bet the hacienda Kay Jewelers drove an impressive amount of traffic to Google with their Open Hearts campaign.

Let’s experience what prospective customers found using the phrases “Kay Jewelers,” “Kay Jewelers Open Hearts,” “Open Hearts necklace Jane Seymour,” “Kay Jewelers coupons,” and “engagement rings.”

 

“Kay Jewelers”

Naturally, the Kay.com website takes the top two organic results on their brand real estate for the search “Kay Jewelers.”

Google search “Kay Jewelers

 

 

Beyond that, Kay Jewelers experiences brand erosion above the fold with a stinging complaint by a model customer, “Help, Kay Jewelers Destroyed My Wedding Ring…”  Below the fold another negative result compounds the impact on brand equity and triggers the prospective customer to contemplate, “can I trust this brand?”

What is the solution?  The answer is two-fold.  First, engage the dissatisfied customer directly and on the message board/blog/website if the customer has a legitimate complaint.  Second, OWN YOUR BRAND REAL ESTATE IN THE SEARCH ENGINES BY UTILIZING SUB-DOMAINS.  The is a digital brand management best practice.

Everyone knows that Google, Yahoo, and MSN will display up to two results for your top level domain.  So how does a brand rank for all ten results on the first page of Google and control their “brand real estate?”  Let’s see how Google, Yahoo, and Hewlett-Packard do it.

Yahoo search, “Google” 

 

Google search, “Yahoo”

 

Google search, “HP”

 

The benefit for Kay Jewelers would be to push down competitive and unwanted visibility while providing a better search user experience by presenting listings of different categories that reflect how their audience searches for “Kay Jewelers.”  Recommended sub-domains may include:

Engagementrings.kay.com
Weddingrings.kay.com
Earrings.kay.com
Bracelets.kay.com
Necklaces.kay.com
Chains.kay.com
Watches.kay.com
etc…

 

In terms of search advertising on Google for the keyword set “Kay Jewelers,” Kay Jewelers frequently serves geo-targeted ads that feature the brand slogan and their 90-day money back guarantee.

Note that the Zales ad has a higher Google quality score than that of the Kay Jewelers ad, and thus, ranks higher in the sponsored listings.  This is due, in large part, to the fact that the Zales ad has higher coverage for this keyword set (appears more frequently, and thus gets more clicks) and may be bidding higher.

Google search, “Kay Jewelers” 

 

“Kay Jewelers Open Hearts”

For the Google search “Kay Jewelers Open Hearts,” KayJewelers.com takes the top position but fails to optimize the title tag for conversion or search engine relavance:

Google search, “Kay Jewelers Open Hearts” 

 

An optimized title tag, based on how the Kay Jewelers audience searches this product, would read like this:

Kay Jewelers Open Hearts Collection – Jane Seymour Open Hearts Design – Necklaces, Bracelets, Earrings, & Rings

This title tag would benefit Kay Jewelers by converting the scanning eye as well as ranking this page at the top of Google for multiple keyword sets.

Also note the lack of a search advertisement for this very targeted keyword set.  As a rule, the more targeted, the higher converting—especially when the search phrase is relevant to a company’s products or services.

Competitors Zales, Shop.com, Target, and OpenHeartsJewelry.net divert traffic from the brand real estate of Kay Jewelers and optimize their ads by including the keyword phrases “Hearts Jewelry,” “Heart Key Jewelry,” and “Open Hearts Jewelry.”

Because Sterling Jewelers, the parent company of Kay Jewelers, has trademarked “Open Hearts By Jane Seymour” (trademark data here), the marketing/legal team (or agency managing their search marketing) should aggressively submit trademark complaints against entities using the phrase “Open Hearts” in the title or copy of Google search advertisements.

 

“Open Hearts necklace Jane Seymour”

According to Google Suggest, the phrase “Open Hearts necklace Jane Seymour” is a frequently searched keyword set.  Below are the search results in Google:

Google search, “Open Hearts necklace Jane Seymour” 

 

KayJewelers.com is a no-show in the organic results simply because they do not optimize their pages for the search engines.  If they were to optimize their title tag with the specific recommendation above they would be ranking for this keyword set within a couple months.

Kay Jewelers also misses out on low-hanging fruit because they do not advertising on this highly targeted keyword set.

Kay Jewelers launched the “Open Hearts” campaign in April of 2008 to coincide with Mother’s Day.  A look at their press release reveals some missed opportunities:

Kay Jewelers Introduces ‘’Open Hearts by Jane Seymour'’™ Collection 

 

From a search marketing perspective, online press releases are designed to provide two functions; convert desired actions (a retail sale in this case) and build link popularity to specific web pages (this is what increases the rankings of web pages in the search engines).

Kay Jewelers missed opportunity was to include a link to their “Open Hearts” web page with a call to action.  Here is one approach:

“AKRON, Ohio–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Perfectly timed for Mother’s Day, Kay Jewelers today introduces Open Hearts by Jane Seymour™, a complete fashion jewelry collection designed by Jane Seymour. Sold exclusively at Kay Jewelers, her new line will debut in select stores.  The collection is available now for online purchases at www.kay.com/open-hearts.”

Or, because of the size of this campaign, it would have made sense to create a microsite specifically for this campain and utilize the website address in all offline and online marketing.

“The collection is available now for online purchases at www.OpenHeartsCollection.com. (this domain was available until November 2008)”

 

“Kay Jewelers coupons”

While analyzing different ways Kay Jewelers audience searches for “Kay Jewelers” I came across a few branded search opportunities that stand out like a sore thumb. One example is the volume of queries for the search “Kay Jewelers coupons.”

Google search, “Kay Jewelers coupons”

 

KayJewelers.com has no pages ranking for this branded keyword set.  Coupon searches generally represent immediate business because the prospective customer searching for coupons typically has a product or service in mind when conducting coupon searches.

The risk here is allowing a third party to pique the interest of the prospective customer by offering coupons or discounts on similar products.

The recommendation is for Kay Jewelers to create a coupon web page, if, for no other reason, than to engage the prospective customer further.  It would certainly make sense for Kay Jewelers to create some coupon offerings—coupon searches have spiked dramatically across many industries since last fall, in light of the current economic condition.

A study released today finds that monthly “coupon” searches have spiked dramatically from December 2007 to December 2008.  According to comScore, the volume of “coupon” searches in December 2007 was around 7.6 million for the month.  In December of 2008 this number exceeded 19.9 million, a 161% increase:

comScore - Growth in Search Terms Related to Economic Downturn 

 

The profitability of this keyword set portends to be positive as indicated by the amount of third parties advertising on “Kay Jewelers coupons”in the screenshot above.

Who uses coupon marketing successfully in the retail jewelry space online?  Zales, Diamond.com, Gordon’s Jewelers, Ice.com, Reeds Jewelers, Mondera, and others.

 

“Engagement Rings”

Finally, I want to take a look at a non-branded search for one of Kay Jewelers leading products, engagement rings.  This will also allow us to identify some of the challenges and obstacles facing the online marketing team for Kay Jewelers in terms of search engine optimaztion marketing.

Google search, “engagement rings” 

 

Would you say that the keyword set “engagement rings” is important to Kay Jewelers?  I know, loaded question.  Kay Jewelers has a distinct advantage over online-only competitors because Kay Jewelers offers prospective customers a choice; the choice to physically experience the exquisite elegance of the desired engagement ring in person upon researching online.

With that in mind, consider this; according to the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, searches on Google for engagement rings exceed three million (3,000,000) per month.  Simply capturing the eyeballs of a tenth of a percent of these searchers would yield an additional 3,000 prospective customers per month.  Hmmm…

What is preventing KayJewelers.com from ranking in the search engines for some branded and most non-branded keyword sets?  (CAUTION: I’m about to get technical)  The first obstacle is the URL structure of web pages served by their Web Content System (WCS).

Here is the URL for the Engagement Rings “product page,” which should be the highest ranking page in the search engines for the search “engagement rings,” and be the gateway to all engagement ring inventory within the website:

http://www.kay.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/category|10101|10001|-1|15057|15051|15051.15057|Y

 

Here is what an optimized, search engine friendly URL looks like:

http://www.kay.com/engagement-rings/

 

Here is the URL of the web page that ranks #1 in Google for the search “engagement rings:”

http://www.jamesallen.com/engagement-rings/

 

If Kay Jewelers were to rewrite the cumbersome URL’s of all product category pages with short, one or two sub-folder, keyword-rich, static URL’s, that would be a step in the right direction. If you are still awake reading this evaluation I want to assure you that I won’t put you immediately to sleep by addressing the issues with the dynamic product pages that follow the product category pages.

In terms of on-page SEO elements, the Kay Jewelers “Engagement Rings” page lacks key-word rich marketing copy and optimization of title, description, and alt tags.  They need to include text links on the home page to all product category pages which serve as anchor text to inform the search engines what the pages are about.  Currently they feature links in the form of images that lack alt tags for category pages such as “Watches.”

So who has the competitive edge among national jewelry store brands in the search engines?  Kay Jewelers, Jared, Zales, Gordon’s Jewelers, Shane Co., Reeds Jewelers, or Tiffany & Co.?  The fact is, Walmart outperforms all these jewelry-specific brands in Google for product categories such as “earrings,” “necklaces,” and “bracelets.”  That says a lot.

Kay Jewelers, as well as all the other brick-and-mortar jewelry retailers with an established online presence,  has a tremendous amount of opportunity to multiply and convert targeted traffic through strategic SEO initiatives.

Additional jewelry retailers, such as Bailey, Banks & Biddle, Fred Meyer Jewelers, Whitehall, and Rogers & Hollands, have a ways to go to develop a profitable online presence and increase market share, but they can learn pitfalls and best practices from the actions of competitors.