How I tripled Dušák Jewellers' e-shop revenue in the year everyone expected customers to return to brick-and-mortar stores
SEO and optimization of an e-shop with luxury watches and jewellery. 2022 was the first post-COVID year, and the whole market expected that for goods of this value customers would mainly return to physical stores. At Dušák the exact opposite happened. Below I break down how I achieved it.
e-shop revenue
year over year
organic traffic
year over year
advertising cost
of sales (ACOS)
all of the above
in a single season
What Dušák is about
Dušák Jewellers is a family business that sells luxury watches and jewellery – a segment where a single order is counted in hundreds of thousands of crowns. That changes everything. The customer doesn’t buy impulsively. They decide over weeks, compare, read reviews, check the seller.
The brand had a strong name and an established brick-and-mortar store in the centre of Prague. But the e-shop had long worked more as an online catalogue than as a sales channel. People found the goods on it and then came to the store.
And that is exactly where the opportunity was. Because a customer looking for a specific watch model starts with Google – whether they end up buying online or not.
Starting point: the e-shop as a supplement to the store
This wasn’t a website in crisis. It was a website that wasn’t using even a fraction of its potential.
The brand had trust that competitors had to buy. It had a product range that people actively search for. And it had traffic that ended without an order, because the purchase journey wasn’t built for buying goods at this price level online.
Specifically, I found:
- Category and product pages without texts, which had no chance of ranking for anything other than the exact model name
- A slow website – for goods worth hundreds of thousands, every second of loading is lost trust
- Missing modern payment methods, so part of the customers dropped off at the last step
- Poor product and category names that didn’t use the website’s SEO potential.
- No product feed for performance campaigns and free listings on Google.
- Duplicate and missing titles and descriptions across the catalog
None of these things on its own will bring an e-shop down. But together they create a ceiling that the website can’t break through, no matter how much you pour into advertising.
A tip for you
For more expensive goods, first calculate how many people drop out between the cart and a completed order. If the drop is large, don’t tackle traffic first. Bringing more people into a leaky bucket is the most expensive way to grow.
A system instead of random tweaks
Most SEO collaborations fail because they do “whatever just pops up”. Something gets fixed, something gets forgotten, and after half a year nobody knows what was actually done and what of it worked.
That’s why at Dušák I didn’t start with optimization but with an audit and an order of priorities. The work was divided into four streams that ran in parallel:
Technical foundation and speed
First the website had to stop losing points on things that can be fixed once and for all. Titles and descriptions across the catalog, heading structure, alt texts, internal linking. On top of that, speeding up the website – for goods of this value, slow loading is not just worse UX but directly a signal of untrustworthiness.
Category and product pages
This is where e-shops have the most untapped potential. Categories are the pages with the greatest purchasing power. A person searching for “men’s Omega watches” is much closer to buying than someone reading an article.
I rewrote the category texts to answer what people actually search for, and created a separate e-shop subpage that gave online sales their own space instead of hiding behind the store’s catalogue.
Purchase journey and payments
SEO brings a person to the website. The purchase journey has to take care of the rest.
I implemented Apple Pay and Google Pay, because for an order worth hundreds of thousands every unnecessary step in checkout is a reason to think twice. Simplifying the last step translated directly into the conversion rate.
Inputs for performance channels
SEO doesn’t work in a vacuum. I prepared a product feed for PLA campaigns, so the cleaned-up product data started being used in paid channels too, and the related free listings increased organic revenue.
The result then showed in ACOS: revenue grew significantly faster than advertising costs.
A tip for you
Set up a feed for PLA ads.
If you already have one, great, but check the status of your free listings. In practice I often see clients whose products are not eligible, which means they are not visible organically. Free listings can be a very strong supporting channel to PLA, as you lead customers directly to the product detail page.
If you don’t have a feed yet, create one and set a minimal spend on PLA ads. According to independent studies it will help the visibility of free listings, even though Google denies this.
Do you have an e-shop that isn't using its potential?
I’ll show you where exactly you’re losing customers and what to do about it first.
Results
The collaboration ran in 2022, the first year after COVID. The market’s expectation was clear: for luxury watches customers would return to brick-and-mortar stores and online sales would slow down.
The exact opposite happened. The numbers below are a year-over-year comparison 2021 → 2022.
Year-over-year comparison (2021 → 2022)
| Metric | Change |
|---|---|
| E-shop revenue | +282 % |
| Organic traffic | +180 % |
| Advertising cost of sales (ACOS) | −65 % |
| Conversion rate | +87 % |
| Advertising costs | grew an order of magnitude slower than revenue |
The most important number is not revenue but ACOS. Revenue can be bought, you just pour more into advertising. But when revenue grows threefold and costs only by a fraction, it means that primarily SEO grew, which you don’t pay per click for.
Key takeaways
Order before growth
Before you start building, you have to clean up. Technical errors, empty categories and a slow website form a ceiling that performance can’t break through, no matter how much you put into advertising and SEO.
The purchase journey is part of SEO
Bringing a visitor to the website is half the job. With more expensive goods what matters is whether they trust you and whether you complicate the purchase at the last step. Payment methods are not a detail.
Don't be afraid to go against the trend
The whole market expected customers to return to stores. That is exactly why investing in the online channel was so advantageous, because that year the competition was looking elsewhere.
Let's take a look at your e-shop
Half an hour, no obligation. We’ll go through where your e-shop is losing customers and what has the biggest impact to do first.
Frequently asked questions
How long until SEO results are visible?
At Dušák the first movement showed within a few months, with the full effect over the course of the year. Realistically count on three to six months for the first visible change. Technical fixes and rewritten categories tend to be faster, building content and authority slower.
Does SEO work for expensive goods that people buy once in a lifetime?
It does, just differently. There are few orders, but each has enormous value, so even a relatively small increase in traffic pays off. At the same time the decision process is long and the customer usually returns to the website several times before buying. All the more important is that they find it every time and that the website appears trustworthy.
Why bother with website speed when I have a nice design?
Because for goods worth hundreds of thousands, a slow website is a signal that something is wrong with the seller. Design decides whether you like the website. Speed decides whether the customer will even wait for it, and whether Google shows you before your competition.
Do I have to change my e-shop platform because of SEO?
Usually not. At Dušák we dealt with what could be done on the existing solution – texts, structure, speed, payments, feed. A platform migration is an intervention that pays off only when the current one really limits you. In most cases it’s not the platform that limits you, but how it is used.