- Period
- 2 yearsApril 2024 — February 2026
- Visitors
- +75%Apr 2025 — Feb 2026 vs the same window a year earlier
- Google top 10
- 44%253 of 571 queries, 17 Feb 2026
- Yandex top 10
- 25%144 of 571 queries, 12 Feb 2026
Starting position
The store came in with a young site that was getting exactly zero visitors from search. It did not appear in any search engine, the catalogue structure had never been thought through, there were no external links, and robots.txt, the sitemap and redirects were all unconfigured.
The niche is crowded: the top results for gift sets belong to the large marketplaces, aggregators and stores with decade-old domains. That is one of the standard reasons SEO fails to deliver, and it is not beaten by competing head-on — it is beaten by choosing different queries.
Strategy
The goal was to build the channel from nothing and get a steady flow of buyers out of search. Fighting marketplaces on high-volume terms is pointless for a new domain, so I put the weight behind mid- and long-tail demand: queries defined by occasion, by recipient and by what is in the set — where a specialist store has an advantage over a marketplace's generic catalogue page.
What was done
Technical
- robots.txt, canonical URLs and 301 redirects configured.
- Sitemap generated and submitted to Google Search Console and Yandex Webmaster.
- Page indexing audited and fixed.
- Broken links, code errors and slow page loads resolved.
Keywords and catalogue structure
- A keyword set built from mid- and long-tail commercial queries.
- Queries clustered by occasion, by recipient and by set contents.
- Catalogue structure built to match those clusters — the way buyers search, not the way the warehouse is organised.
- Structure extended every month, with a separate branch for corporate gifting.
On-page
- Titles and descriptions, H1–H3 headings, readable URLs.
- Copy for the key pages, internal linking, image optimisation.
Results
The first year went into foundations: the site started holding rankings, and the first sales came entirely from search, with no paid advertising in that channel. That is the normal horizon for a new domain. Traffic peaks lined up with New Year and the February–March holidays, confirming the seasonality of the niche. The second year produced the multiple.
| Metric | 2024 (from April) | 2025 |
|---|---|---|
| Unique visitors | 943 | 3,652 |
| Visits | 2,227 | 5,601 |
| Queries in Yandex top 10 | ≈10% | 25% |
| Queries in Google top 10 | — | 40%+ |
Yandex Metrica
Enlarge
Rankings as of February 2026
Out of 571 tracked queries:
| Search engine | Measured | Top 3 | Top 10 |
|---|---|---|---|
| 17 Feb 2026 | 103 (18%) | 253 (44%) | |
| Yandex | 12 Feb 2026 | 32 (5.6%) | 144 (25%) |
The corporate branch
A separate track covered corporate gifting — queries along the lines of "corporate gift sets" and "gift sets for partners". The traffic volume there is small, but the average order value runs five to ten times higher than retail, and it is the branch that produced orders worth several million RUB.
How I measured it
The first year is incomplete: the site launched in April 2024. So comparing calendar 2025 against calendar 2024 — which would read as +287% visitors — overstates the effect, because it sets twelve months against nine. The honest comparison uses matching windows, April to February in both years, and that is the +75% quoted above.
This matters more than it sounds. Most reported e-commerce SEO growth figures compare uneven windows or include a seasonal peak on one side only. If a number I give you can be inflated by the choice of window, I show you the window.