Case study
Jewellery SEO Case Study: 33,500 Visits Worth 40 Cents Each
This jewellery SEO case study is here for two reasons that pull in opposite directions. It is the one engagement in this portfolio where link acquisition genuinely was part of the answer rather than a line on an invoice. It is also the engagement with the worst traffic value per visit published on this site.
Both facts are useful to an Australian retailer, and neither is useful in the way an agency pitch would use them.
- $990
- Entry price, published in full
- 30 days
- Notice to leave. No lock-in
- 1pm to 6pm
- AEST, senior-led, contactable
- Organic traffic
- 33,500a month
- Keywords
- 16,700ranking
- Top three
- 792positions
- Referring domains
- 843
- Domain rating
- 54
- Traffic value
- $13,300a month
Links mattered here, and the reason is specific
The chart covers the year to April 2024. Organic traffic goes from about 10,000 monthly visits to 33,500, so roughly a tripling. Across the same window referring domains go from about 300 to 843, which is also close to a tripling, on a domain rating of 54. That is the highest domain rating in this set of nine engagements.
Now put that beside the car rental engagement, which tripled over the same twelve months, from about 5,000 visits to 17,000, on 241 referring domains at a domain rating of 21. Same growth multiple. A third of the links. Less than half the authority.
Two engagements tripling under opposite conditions is the whole argument about link building in one comparison. Links are sometimes the constraint and sometimes not, and the difference is not the industry label. It is whether the site already has pages worth ranking.
Car rental had pages nobody else was bothering to write properly, so the searches were winnable on merit. Jewellery retail is the other case. Thousands of stores sell a near identical product, describe it with the supplier's copy, and put it on a category page built by the same three or four Shopify themes. When the page itself cannot be much better than a competitor's, ranking gets decided on something outside the page, and that something is authority. That is when links stop being optional.
So the honest reading is conditional rather than universal:
Authority gates you when the page cannot differentiate
Retail product and category pages in a crowded consumer category are the clearest example.
Authority barely matters when the page can
A service business publishing what a job costs and what goes wrong is competing on content nobody else will write.
Which one you are in is a question, not an assumption
It is answerable in an afternoon by looking at who ranks and what their pages actually say.
An agency that sells links to everybody is right about a quarter of the time and charging the other three quarters for nothing.
40 cents a visit, and why that is the number to sit with
$13,300 a month in traffic value against 33,500 monthly visits. Divide one by the other and you get about 40 cents a visit. That is the lowest figure in this portfolio.
| Engagement | Visits a month | Traffic value a month | Value per visit |
|---|---|---|---|
| Car rental services | 17,000 | $31,100 | about $1.83 |
| Pharmaceutical manufacturer | 35,400 | $49,900 | about $1.41 |
| Jewellery ecommerce | 33,500 | $13,300 | about $0.40 |
A car rental visit is worth more than four times a jewellery visit by this measure. A pharmaceutical visit is worth more than three times one.
One clarification before that gets misread. Ahrefs traffic value is its estimate of what those visits would cost to buy through Google Ads. It is not revenue, earnings or income, and nothing here claims otherwise. It measures how commercial the traffic is, which is exactly what is being compared.
Two things drag jewellery down. The first is that jewellery search is saturated with informational and browsing intent. People look at rings, styles, stones, meanings and gift ideas constantly and buy rarely, so a large share of the 16,700 ranking keywords are cheap to advertise against because advertisers know they do not convert. The second is that the terms which do convert are dominated by marketplaces and the very large retailers, who have both the authority and the ad budget.
High traffic in retail is not the same thing as valuable traffic. Tripling a number does not tell you which kind you tripled.
What an Australian retailer should take from this
Not "buy links". The link acquisition here worked because it was paired with a site that had something to rank, in a market where authority was the binding constraint. Bought in isolation, in a category where the constraint is somewhere else, it is the most expensive way to change nothing.
The reading that survives is about which searches you go after. Marketplaces win the obvious commercial terms because they have the catalogue, the reviews and the authority. What they serve badly is anything requiring a person who knows the product: sizing and resizing for an Australian buyer, what a stone actually looks like under Australian light, repair and remodelling, local made, turnaround for a proposal in three weeks, what happens when the piece does not fit.
Those searches are smaller. They are also the ones where a store with a real workshop behind it can write a page a marketplace structurally cannot. The method is on the ecommerce SEO page, and the platform half on the Shopify SEO page.
There is a lesson here for service businesses too, and it is the uncomfortable one. This store carries 33,500 visits a month against the pharmaceutical engagement's 35,400, so the two are within striking distance on traffic. On traffic value it is $13,300 against $49,900, roughly a quarter. Almost the same number of visits, a quarter of the commercial weight. If you are choosing what to chase, the volume number is the one that flatters and the value number is the one that pays.
What this does not show
792 keywords sit in the top three out of 16,700 ranking, so roughly one in twenty one. That is a healthier spread than a site living off a few head terms, and it is still a minority of the keyword set doing the work.
The limits matter more than usual here. The market is 98.8 per cent United States, on Shopify. Nothing in this engagement touched a Google Business Profile, a map pack position, suburb pages or review velocity, so it says nothing whatsoever about Australian local search. An Australian jeweller with a shopfront in Fitzroy is fighting a different fight, and the local half of it is covered on the local SEO page.
The client is not named. None of the clients behind these charts agreed to be a public reference, so none of them appear by name anywhere on this site.
What this costs
An Australian online store usually needs Growth at $1,990 a month, because product and category work, content and link acquisition all run at once. Authority at $3,490 suits a store competing nationally in a category where marketplaces are the incumbent. Local at $990 fits a single shopfront whose online sales are secondary. Everything is on the SEO pricing page, no lock-in and 30 days notice.
Do the sums on margin, not turnover. Growth is $23,880 a year. On a $1,200 average order at a 45 per cent gross margin you make $540 an order, so clearing the retainer takes about 45 extra orders a year, a little under four a month. If your average order is $180, the same retainer needs roughly 295 extra orders a year and the answer is probably Local or nothing.
Questions
Questions we get asked
Straight answers, including the uncomfortable ones. Anything else goes to the person who does the work.
Ask your own questionSo do we need links or not?
It depends on whether your pages can out-argue the competition. If they can, links are a small part of the job. If you sell the same product as four hundred other stores with the same supplier photos, authority is the deciding factor and pretending otherwise wastes a year.
Is $13,300 what the store earned?
No. It is Ahrefs' estimate of what those visits would cost through Google Ads. It is a way of comparing how commercial traffic is between sites, and a poor way of estimating anybody's income.
Forty cents a visit sounds like a failure.
It is a weak number and the growth was still real. Three times the traffic is three times the traffic. The point of publishing the ratio is that traffic growth and commercial value are separate measures, and a retailer who only watches the first one will be pleased for about two quarters.
Can you get us 843 referring domains?
Not as a promise, and be careful with anyone who offers a number. Links that moved this site were earned against a site worth linking to. The question we would ask first is whether links are even your constraint, because for a lot of Australian service businesses they are not.
We sell on a marketplace as well. Does this apply?
Partly. It strengthens the argument for competing on the searches the marketplace serves badly, since on the terms it serves well you are bidding against your own channel.
Free, by hand, no obligation
Get a free check on your product and category pages
Four fields: your website, your main competitor, the suburbs you service, and your email. Within two business days a senior person spends 30 to 45 minutes on it by hand and sends back three real findings, one you can action yourself without paying us anything, and one that needs proper work.
For a store, the first thing checked is whether authority or content is your actual constraint, because that decides whether link work is worth a cent to you. No automated PDF, no obligation, no sales call unless you ask.
- Turnaround
- Two business days
- Follow-up
- No sales call unless you ask
What clients say
In their own words
Upwork reviews, reproduced unedited apart from the spelling of Arbaz’s name.
Working with Arbaz has been an absolute pleasure. His expertise in managing our off-page strategy is evident in the tangible results and increased visibility we've achieved. Arbaz is professional, diligent, and consistently goes above and beyond our expectations. He not only understands our goals but also offers insights that add tremendous value to our strategy. I appreciate his proactive approach and clear communication. We feel fortunate to have him as a part of our team and I highly recommend him to anyone looking for top-tier off-page strategy services.
Arbaz was incredibly helpful and dependable. His expertise in SEO is evident, and he did an outstanding job restoring many of our websites. I highly recommend working with him.
Great service, great communicator, patient, kind, helpful, and knowledgeable. Arbaz delivered a solid report that listed all the issues we face with our site, and answered all our questions. Happy!
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