The Silver Shop Of Bath Case Study

The Silver Shop Of Bath is a jewellery and gift shop tucked away in one of Bath’s historic Georgian lanes near the Roman baths. The shop opened in 1952, and has a loyal base of local customers as well as passing trade from visitors. The business’s longevity can also be attributed to its willingness to adapt, and the company has sold a selection of products online for several years.

The Problem

In our first meeting with Hannah Griffiths from The Silver Shop of Bath, it was clear that their website was mostly working well, and that she aimed to fine-tune things rather than rework the whole site. Online sales had generally been steady, but Hannah was concerned that they were not growing as well as she hoped. She thought more traffic and better SEO would help increase orders.

Our main discussion was about improving SEO, and Hannah shared several websites she considered competitors. She also gave us some ‘aspirational’ competitors; this was really useful for us to get a better idea of where The Silver Shop wanted to go next.

Hannah also had a list of design updates she had tried to implement, but couldn’t quite get right. She was confident managing the products online and had good processes in place for handling orders, but was less familiar with the actual pages on the site and didn’t have time to figure out how to make the changes she wanted. The site was originally built in 2012, so the design was a little outdated in places, and the menus and homepage didn’t accurately reflect the products currently on offer.

We agreed to work on an SEO strategy and tick off the design changes where possible.

Initial Thoughts

Our first step was to review the SEO metrics of the existing website. Hannah’s initial goal was to increase traffic to the site, but looking at the visitor analytics more closely we found that traffic levels were already good. The site ranked well in terms of organic SEO keywords, and many of the ‘aspirational’ competitors were doing only marginally better in this area, while some were doing worse.

However, one thing that stood out was that the competitor sites we looked at had a better ‘reputation’ with search engines, which caused them to rank higher even with fewer keywords. This was because they had backlinks from well-respected sites. For example, one of them had been featured in the Christmas gift guide of a national newspaper. Search engines’ main problem is working out which sites are high-quality from a human perspective, so a straightforward way to measure this is to look at the sites linked to by sites with top-level reputations. Getting an editorial link from a newspaper or magazine suggests to search engines that your site has good content and is worth visiting; whereas a site with no backlinks, or only linked to by low-quality sites is a riskier choice. Search engines’ business model is based on supplying good quality results, so the more confident they can be about a site’s quality, the more likely they are to show it high up the page.

With this in mind, we were able to provide Hannah with high-level advice about how to incorporate keywords onto the site, and we recommended that working on backlinks for The Silver Shop through a wider PR strategy was a better approach for boosting traffic. SEO can be very time-consuming, and we understand that small business owners are often doing several jobs at once, so it’s important to focus on the tasks that will create the most impact.

Going Deeper

In our initial discussion, Hannah had mentioned a few small issues with the site. These were things like products not being easy to sort by sub-category; for example, there were hundreds of earring designs on the site but it wasn’t possible to narrow these down to see one style like hoops or studs. There were also some minor aesthetic changes to make the site design feel more modern.

After reviewing the SEO scores and seeing that traffic was already fairly good, we decided to look into the user experience (UX) of the TSS site more closely. Conversion rates were 1.48%, which is lower than average. This meant customers were coming to the site, but not choosing to buy. We also knew sales in the real-world shop were good, so this pointed to the problem being on the website, rather than a lack of traffic or the wrong products.

We tested the site as if we were a customer, looking at product information, page layouts, accessibility and the user journey between seeing a product and completing checkout. We also compared TSS’s website to their competitors to identify any features or common elements that customers buying jewellery and gifts online would expect.

We found that The Silver Shop was in line with the industry standards when it came to product information and content, but that the site had several confusing elements, that were tricky to use or poorly designed. For example, the ‘Add to Basket’ and ‘Checkout’ buttons were grey – when the site was originally designed this was part of a silver-themed colour scheme, but it made them look inactive. Another issue was that some pages didn’t work well on mobiles, which is a common problem when working with slightly older sites. Around 60% of web traffic comes from mobile devices, so making your site look good on a smaller screen is an easy win.

While it’s never nice to find issues with a site, the UX review process meant we could pinpoint where customers were dropping off, and how we could fix this. Reviewing competitor sites was also really useful, as we were reassured that the underlying structure and content were up to standard.

Our Work

After submitting our initial report to Hannah, we suggested that we work on improving the UX of the site and not continue with in-depth SEO work as proposed. While our initial proposal covered topics like keyword strategy and metadata, fine-tuning these would not help TSS reach their goal of more online sales.

Hannah was very open-minded about our suggestions and saw that the issues with online sales could be solved by improving the conversion rate rather than increasing traffic. She took the opportunity to highlight some of her favourite features on the competitors’ sites, such as large mega menus with images, and we used these as inspiration when developing the new layouts and functionality for The Silver Shop of Bath.

Our first job was to rebuild the homepage to showcase best-selling and seasonal product categories. Jewellery is a market that has big spikes around certain periods, such as Valentine’s Day and Christmas, so creating a space on the homepage to display seasonal products meant that users looking for a gift could easily find the right items.

We changed the main image on the home page to have a text overlay, as previously the headline text was part of the image. This is a great example of how a structural change can impact page performance without really altering the design. When the text was part of the image, it would look strange at certain screen sizes, was inaccessible to visually impaired users, and carried no SEO value. By making the headline text a separate element on top of a background image, we ensured it always displayed properly and could be picked up by assistive technology and SEO crawlers. However, for most users, the overall feel and design of the page have not changed – there is still a big image with headline text.

We also added filters to the product listing pages so customers could narrow down their options more easily, reformatted some of the templates to work better on mobile, and made the buy and checkout buttons more obvious by using the blue from the colour scheme instead.

Next up we spent some time on the headers and footers of the pages, updating the information and making them easier to read, as they previously scored low for contrast and accessibility. We changed the navigation menu from a standard menu to a mega menu, which gives more room to include all the different product categories and uses images to highlight popular products or categories.

Finally, we arranged a session with Hannah to talk her through the changes we’d made and explain how she could swap around the products on the homepage and make edits to the mega menu. These are all easy to do once you know how, and this means that Hannah can now use the homepage in the same way she uses the real shop window; to highlight the shop’s most interesting and eye-catching products to customers. A regularly updated homepage is also appealing to returning users, as it suggests there are new products to discover since their last visit.

The Results