Starting point: what we had before the work began
About the project
Belsta is an online retailer of quality home footwear: slippers and travel shoes made of genuine leather, eco-leather and textile for the whole family. 15 years of market experience, in-house production, a leading position in its niche.
The project came to us in March 2023 with a request to audit the site. The site was not "at zero", but it was losing positions and traffic — primarily because of two algorithmic updates in a row.
| Metric (start, March 2023) | Value |
| Average monthly traffic | ~9,000 visits (per Ahrefs) |
| Traffic structure | branded traffic takes the lion's share |
| Dynamics | a drop after the March 2023 Core Update and the February Product Review Update |
| Link profile | low quality, needed cleanup |
Source of starting data: Ahrefs for the Belsta domain (March 2023).
The main challenge of the project
The key problem was not one factor but their coincidence: the site dropped from two updates at once — the content-focused Product Review Update and the general Core Update — while the link profile was weak and added no trust. Simply "building more links" in such a situation is dangerous: it could amplify the negative signal.
The non-standard solution: we split the work into two independent but synchronous streams — first put the product-card content and category metadata in order (a direct response to the Product Review Update), and only in parallel, carefully and with a second tier, build the link strategy through PR articles and directories rather than link exchanges.
Work performed
We ran a technical audit and set out detailed specs. For each direction — why exactly this way:
- Structured-data spec → so product cards and categories pass data into snippets correctly and stand out in results against aggregators.
- Load-speed audit → footwear is more often viewed on mobile, so mobile speed directly affected the bounce rate.
- Content-manager spec → many products were "identical" and competed with each other, and product-card descriptions were insufficient — which is exactly what the drop after the February Product Review Update pointed to. The goal — remove cannibalization and raise relevance.
- Developer bug spec → technical cleanliness as the base, without which content and links don't work at full strength.
- Link strategy → a detailed competitor link audit, gathering a pool of sites where the project was absent, outreach and preparing content for each → trust growth without the risks of link exchanges.
Results
After thorough content work and coordinated work on descriptions, by July we began to see the fruits of our labor. The link strategy launched by April, and its impact showed in September 2023 — traffic went up.
| Metric | Before (March 2023) | After (October 23, 2023) |
| Organic traffic from Google | ~9,000 visits/mo | ~23,000 visits/mo |
| Increase | ×2.5 (+156%) over 6 months | |
| Links built | 90+ (social programs, directories, PR articles) + second-tier reinforcement | |
Source: Google organic search data / Ahrefs for the Belsta domain, March–October 2023.
Team and project parameters
| Work period | March 2023 — October 2023 (6 months) |
| Promotion region | Ukraine |
The project was handled by the SEOquick team:
- Nikolay Shmychkov — SEO strategy (Deputy Director)
Full team and roles — on the About page.
What's next
A similar case in an adjacent e-commerce niche: SEO for the Sunshouse.com.ua clothing store — where we likewise built the semantics and category content for non-branded traffic growth.
Want to assess your online store's potential? The concrete next step is not "ordering SEO blindly" but getting an audit for an e-commerce project and discussing promotion specifically in your product niche.