Case study · SEO · Fine jewellery · At Megantic
S-kin Studio: the award-winning SEO campaign I led.
Fine jewellery ecommerce, organic search, twelve months of work. Winner of Best Use of Search, Fashion at the 2023 Global Search Awards, judged against agencies worldwide. I ran it as Project Manager during my four years at Megantic.
The situation
Bigger competitors, bigger budgets, their terms.
S-kin Studio is a fine jewellery brand on Shopify. During the COVID years, new competitors flooded their category. Competing head-on for the big generic jewellery keywords meant fighting brands with far bigger budgets, on their terms.
Instead of chasing the obvious keywords, we found the ones the competition ignored.
What we did
Build the strategy around the buyers everyone else ignored.
Niche keyword targeting
The underserved demand sat in three search themes: minimalist, ethical and sustainable jewellery. Real volume, almost no competition. While bigger brands fought over the generic head terms, the whole strategy was built around the buyers they were ignoring.
Site structure matched to real search behaviour
We restructured the menu and category architecture around how people actually search, opening new category entry points for buyers to land on.
Click-through work
Custom meta descriptions written to earn the click, not just the ranking.
Site speed
Image optimisation and compression to bring load times down on a visual, image-heavy store.
What made it actually work
Honesty, both ways.
The part the award write-ups don’t capture: the founder was transparent with us about everything. Margins, operational pressures, website constraints, timelines. That honesty is what made the conversations constructive: what to change on the site, what strategy fit the timeline she needed results in, and what mattered first.
The solutions were usually middle grounds. Sometimes they weren’t. There were compromises she simply wasn’t going to make, and some we couldn’t make either: chasing short-tail keywords like “jewellery” was never going to work at her size, so we didn’t pretend otherwise.
That honesty, both ways, is what the rankings were built on.
The results · 12 months
Every target was beaten.
+100%
organic sessions
target was +80%
+49%
organic revenue
target was +30%
+41%
organic transactions
target was +30%
+156%
keywords in the top 3
target was +100%
+137%
non-branded page-1 keywords
target was +100%
Figures cited from the 2023 Global Search Awards write-up, the public record of the campaign. Check them yourself.
Why this matters if you run an ecommerce store.
The lesson wasn’t “do more SEO”. It was that a smaller brand beats bigger competitors by finding the demand they’re ignoring, then rebuilding the site around how buyers actually search. That thinking is channel-agnostic. It’s the same way I approach Google Ads and Meta accounts today: find where the profitable demand actually is, and stop paying to fight battles you can’t win.
At Step Digital you work directly with me, the person who ran this campaign, not an account manager relaying messages.