Case study · SEO
From page three to page one: doubling sales through organic search
A lean, nine-month SEO campaign took a specialist jewellery retailer from an average Google position of 24 to 11, with adds to cart up 304% and tracked net sales doubled.
Results
The challenge
The client is a well-established UK jewellery retailer with a strong in-store reputation and a growing online presence. Despite quality stock and genuine expertise, their website wasn’t performing in organic search. It sat at an average position of 24 across all search queries, which in practice meant page three of Google, and it was largely absent from page one for any meaningful commercial term.
Clicks, click-through rate and product engagement were all low. The US market, a stated priority for the business, was generating very little organic traffic. Across the whole of the previous year, products had been added to a basket just 103 times. There was no structured SEO approach in place.
The approach
The engagement was deliberately lean: two days a month, from October 2025 to June 2026, with a total campaign spend of around £7,000 to £10,000. There was no paid search and no shortcuts. The goal was to build lasting organic visibility on search terms with genuine buying intent, and let the rankings build over time.
The work focused on the fundamentals:
- Technical SEO: fixing the issues that stopped Google crawling, understanding and ranking the site properly
- Content optimisation: improving the pages that mattered most, so they answered what searchers were actually looking for
- Structured data: helping Google understand products and pages, and show richer listings in search results
- Category pages: targeted improvements to the main jewellery category pages, which carry the most commercial intent
The results
We compared the most recent six months with the six months before, using three independent sources: Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4 and the client’s Shopify sales reports. All three pointed to the same conclusion.
Climbing Google’s pages
Average position improved from 24 to 11, a gain of 13 places. Published benchmarks for ecommerce SEO suggest a gain of one to three places over a similar period, so this was a structural shift in visibility rather than a small improvement. Desktop, where customers are most likely to complete a high-value purchase, moved from 30.6 to 17.2.
Some individual pages and searches moved much further. A gemstone guide page and a key gemstone category both reached page one, and a broad “vintage jewellery” search climbed 40 places.
View as table
| Search or page | Position before | Position after | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| All searches | 24 | 11 | Up 13 places |
| Desktop searches | 30.6 | 17.2 | Up 13.4 places |
| Gemstone guide page | 15.7 | 7.4 | Up 8.3 places |
| Gemstone category search | 27.5 | 5.6 | Up 21.9 places |
| “Vintage jewellery” | 61.8 | 21.6 | Up 40.2 places |
More clicks, more baskets, more sales
Organic clicks rose by 29% while impressions stayed essentially flat at around 1.28 million. The same number of people saw the site in search results, but far more of them clicked: the homepage’s click-through rate alone more than doubled, from 2.1% to 4.4%.
Further down the funnel the growth was bigger still. Product page views grew by 225% year on year, from 19,412 to 63,180, and the number of different products that customers added to a basket tripled, from 58 to 173.
View as table
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organic clicks | 6,720 | 8,670 | +29% |
| Click-through rate | 0.5% | 0.7% | +40% |
| Adds to cart | 103 | 416 | +304% |
| Orders | 31 | 62 | +100% |
| Net sales | £69,389 | £140,039 | +102% |
| Online last-click sales | £55,835 | £65,481 | +17% |
Against industry benchmarks
Every key metric beat published 2025–26 benchmarks for UK ecommerce and specialist retail SEO, most of them by several times over.
View as table
| Metric | Our change | Typical range |
|---|---|---|
| Adds to cart | +304% | +20–50% |
| Net sales | +102% | +10–30% |
| Orders | +100% | +10–25% |
| Click-through rate | +40% | +5–20% |
| Organic clicks | +29% | +5–15% |
| Online last-click sales | +17% | +5–15% |
The commercial value
Tracked net sales rose from £69,389 to £140,039, an increase of £70,650. Online sales measured on a last-click basis, the most conservative way of attributing sales to the website, grew from £55,835 to £65,481.
These figures only cover online, direct and social sales. In-store sales are excluded entirely. For a destination retailer, many customers research online before visiting in person, so the true impact is higher than the numbers show.
Buying the same extra clicks through Google Ads would have cost an estimated £15,000 to £45,000, before a single sale was counted.
A note on the figures
The client’s name, location and some details have been withheld at their request. All figures are real and unchanged, taken directly from Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4 and Shopify, with no data adjusted or selectively included.
If your website isn’t getting the visibility it deserves, our SEO service takes the same focused, data-led approach. For the local side of search, see our guide to getting into Google’s local map results.