Smiling Rocks
Managed in partnership with:
Smiling Rocks is a direct-to-consumer social good company that sells beautiful lab-grown diamonds and donates 10% of each purchase to charity. Working with them following their site launch, I managed a Search Engine Optimization audit and implementation and oversaw maintenance work performed by my team.
Smiling Rocks was a flagship client in the growth of my fledgling agency and acted as a stress test for the homegrown team and processes that I had created. Although my team included a project manager, I was deeply involved in the day-to-day collaboration and checked in several times with the client to ensure complete satisfaction. As I collected feedback, I made adjustments to processes, procedures, and software for the benefit of future projects.
Beyond the growth of our agency, Smiling Rocks came to Empower Ideas with two significant challenges: First, they were looking to improve their rankings in organic search results. Second, when the results of an SEO audit showed that their site was too slow, they identified the product listings pages as key culprits and were looking for ways to optimize the shopping experience and improve usability issues in those areas.
Smiling Rocks sells hundreds of SKUs, creating a very complicated product hierarchy and the need for a complicated technical architecture. That makes the filters on the listings pages essential, since they allow customers to browse large collections based on key characteristics, such as carats, prices, styles, and more. The company organizes their fine jewelry into curated collections that make it easy to browse complementary pieces; however these collections vary widely in number of products, making it even more challenging to design a product listing page that excels at every scenario.
The listings page was sluggish, taking upwards of several seconds to load and reloading after every interaction a user made. Worse, if a user clicked into a product and then went back to the listings page, the listing reloaded to the top with all of the view changes lost.
Additionally, due to the large size of their product catalog, Smiling Rocks populated their product images by directly exporting their high-resolution photography to the server with no intermediate processing. While it looks beautiful, loading these enormous images, especially on a mobile connection, is unnecessary, leading to long load times and excess data usage.
Smiling Rocks asked Empower Ideas to help improve the site by concentrating on these essential opportunities.
My team engaged in resolving both issues under my supervision. Since SEO and development were handled by different subject area experts, both challenges could be executed against in parallel.
I created a culture of regular meetings within the team and of progress reporting back to the client. The advantages of this approach were a more engaged and accountable team and a client that felt like we were making significant progress with each report.
My search engine optimization specialists worked on both on-page and off-page optimization, updating the site's meta descriptions and alt text for example, as well as reaching out to inquire about ethical inbound links. Over the course of three months, Over the course of three months, my team generated nine unique inbound links.
In order to improve listing page performance, my team prototyped several potential approaches to the problems, beginning with paginated listings pages. We had noticed that the listings pages showed (and loaded) all products that met the search parameters, which was not an optimal experience for very large collections, hence our consideration of pagination. We also prototyped a “load more” version, which would load an additional 30 products on the same page with each click. Then, we tested.
Smiling Rocks ultimately determined that they preferred the “load more” approach and we began to implement code improvements. We held all listing page customizations, including scroll position on the page, in memory, so that they could all be reloaded even if a user clicks away, such as to look at a product and then click back. We deferred loading as much of the page as possible to load in the background, which made the site feel snappier since it was responsive to the user more quickly even while still loading all of its complex properties. And once every element of the page was fully loaded in the background, the user was able to change characteristics and filters that took effect instantly, making the site feel more like a native app.
Our changes to the Smiling Rocks code helped to significantly advance the user experience, improve factors that lead to high search engine optimization, and realize a gain in search engine position ranking. All told, Empower Ideas helped Smiling Rocks’ diamonds shine even brighter.
