CASE STUDY
Stave Puzzles Increases Organic Revenue +154%
See how our digital marketing team helped Stave Puzzles, a premier maker of handcrafted, custom wooden jigsaw puzzles, increase organic revenue through search engine optimization.
Main Objectives
We began SEO work for Stave Puzzles a few years ago, at the start of Quarter 4, in anticipation of the upcoming holiday season. They had recently relaunched their website, and were struggling to regain the organic visibility they had previously. The new site was also failing to attract new customers in the right demographics. Over time, Stave Puzzles’ core offering, premium wooden puzzles hand-cut by artisans, had earned them a loyal following of luxury clientele. Subsequently, most visitors came to the site from branded searches rather than searches for broader puzzle categories.
To bring more customers to Stave Puzzles, we created a strategy to improve pages’ organic rankings. The goal was to increase organic traffic and drive organic revenue growth through:
- Building a Strong Keyword Foundation
- Improving Accessibility Through Content Optimization
- Expanding the Customer Base by Reaching a Larger Organic Audience
Overarching Challenges
When Stave Puzzles launched its new site, Google Analytics wasn’t configured correctly, creating tracking issues and skewed data. Organic traffic also relied heavily on branded terms, category pages lacked targeted keywords and structured data, and the site failed to clearly communicate what sets hand-cut wooden puzzles apart from mass-produced alternatives.
Reliance on Branded Searches
Organic visibility came mostly from people who already knew and searched for Stave Puzzles. To reach more consumers, Stave Puzzles needed to rank for non-branded search terms, such as “wooden jigsaw puzzles for adults”.
Optimizing Critical On-Page Elements
Thousands of pages had missing or undeveloped metadata. Many pages also lacked alt text and on-page paragraphs. This limited how search engines understood each page and made them less accessible to potential customers.
Standing Out From Other Brands
The site needed to clearly communicate how Stave Puzzles differed from mass-produced puzzles and children’s puzzles. With their products’ high price point, pages needed to convey their craftsmanship to luxury gift buyers.
Strategy & Solutions
We helped to significantly increase search rankings and online sales by expanding Stave Puzzles’ reach beyond branded searches while reinforcing its premium, handcrafted positioning. First, we researched target keywords based around general and category-specific themes, and then used those lists to clean up page structure and content.
Expansion of Target Keywords
Stave Puzzles’ target market focuses on the overlap between adult jigsaw puzzle enthusiasts and luxury gift givers. To ensure the site would rank for more than just branded traffic, our team did extensive keyword research to identify keywords related to the different categories we would be optimizing for, as well as broader keywords such as “puzzles for adults,” “wooden jigsaw puzzles,” and “handmade puzzles”. We also identified negative keywords to reduce overlap with lower-intent searches. For example, target keywords needed to focus on families and not small children, since these products aren’t children’s toys.
On-Page Optimizations to Improve Visibility & Accessibility
Stave Puzzles has nearly 300 product categories. These categories range from occasions, themes and puzzle types to collections and art series. For each category, we identified focus keywords from our research, and applied them across the metadata and on-page content. Where needed, we also restructured page URLs to be more logical and worked through any technical cleanup.
Added Targeted Content to All Christmas Best Sellers
To capture holiday shoppers during eCommerce’s peak season, we prioritized adding optimized content to Stave Puzzles’ best-selling Christmas products. Google Analytics was first used to identify products with the most sales historically, and then we updated each product’s on-page content with keyword-rich artwork descriptions, metadata, and search tags to help holiday shoppers find them.
SEO With Real Results
Increased Organic Traffic Leads to Revenue Growth
Over three years, our SEO strategy has not only improved Stave Puzzle’s organic visibility, but also purchases and revenue attributed to this channel. Organic sessions in the most recent Q4 were up 75% compared to the project start, which in turn led to a 59% increase in organic purchases and a 154% increase in organic revenue.
Organic Traffic Increases Over Time
Organic sessions grew in the first year and kept climbing, reaching a 75% increase by year three. Since our keyword targeting matched what high-intent shoppers were searching for, that traffic turned into sales: organic revenue more than doubled within 12 months and rose 154% over three years.
After 1 Year
Increase in Sessions From Organic Traffic
After 3 Years
Increase in Sessions From Organic Traffic
After 1 Year
Increase in Revenue From Organic Traffic
After 3 Years
Increase in Revenue From Organic Traffic
Continued Improvements in Visibility
Moving beyond branded terms gave Stave Puzzles a much larger footprint in search. The number of keywords ranking on the first two pages of results has grown 39%, and first-page rankings have more than doubled. Top-three placements, where shoppers are most likely to click, are up 95%.
Since Project start
Increase in Total Keywords Ranking in Positions #1-20
Since Project start
Increase in Total Keywords Ranking in Positions #1-10
Since project start
Increase in Total Keywords Ranking in Positions #1-3
Hear From Stave Puzzles
Briana Paronto
When it comes to selecting a digital marketing partner, nothing is more important than finding a team that truly understands your business objectives and can help you achieve your goals. For this reason, Stave Puzzles feel incredibly fortunate to have found Bytes.co. Not only have they helped us to significantly improve our website’s search-ability and ADA compliance, but their expertise in strategic optimization has truly made a difference in our website’s user experience, allowing our customers to easily navigate and find what they need. We couldn’t be happier with our experience partnering with Bytes.co.
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