How SOVA Beat the Niche with a Complete SEO Program
«Jewelry eCommerce in Ukraine is a high-stakes game. Competitors with massive assortments and strong budgets dominate the search results, but in the premium segment, the winner is the one who builds trust and becomes a user’s point of reference in search. That is why, for premium brand SOVA, competition became both a challenge and an opportunity to prove that uniqueness and strategy can beat the mass market.»
eCommerce Niche Analysis
The field of electronic commerce, regardless of the product, always requires a carefully designed SEO strategy. Online sales here rely on search demand, which in turn depends on site usability and content quality, a store’s ability to inspire trust, and to attract users to make a purchase. In this niche, success depends not only on sound technical optimization and content structure, but also on a brand’s ability to stand out from competitors. Modern buyers are demanding: they compare prices, read reviews, and look for a unique selling proposition (USP), and SEO is what helps put a specific brand in front of them at that decisive moment.
The difficulty of promoting eCommerce projects lies in the fact that most queries are commercial, resulting in saturated search engine results that are often dominated by strong websites that invest heavily in SEO. It is also crucial to account for technical nuances: optimizing page load speed, building a clear category hierarchy, mobile adaptability, and disciplined work with filters. All of this forms a strong technical base. Without it, other efforts will, unfortunately, fall flat.
Content plays an equally central role. Unique category and product descriptions, expert reviews, and a well-run blog help improve indexation and respond to user needs even before they are ready to buy.
Google is increasingly focused on sites that can prove their authority through expert content, product reviews, and transparent, real business contact details. This matters especially in niches tied to finance, health, or other topics that can impact a user’s well-being, known as YMYL topics – Your Money or Your Life.
For jewelry, which is exactly what our client sells, this looks like the following. On one side, we see a classic online store with product cards and order forms. On the other hand, we see a store with high-margin goods, where buyer expectations around the purchase are exceptionally high.
People buy jewelry not only as accessories but also as gifts, status pieces, for weddings or proposals, and even as investment items, harder-to-access luxury goods. The level of trust in the site, as well as in the brand, is decisive for this eCommerce category.
About the Client and Project Start
SOVA brand banner
SOVA Jewelry House is one of the most recognized premium jewelry brands on the Ukrainian market. It is not just a classic jewelry store, it is a modern fashion brand with its own view of style, design, and presentation. The company works exclusively with gold and releases made-to-order collections, both original SOVA designs and collaborations with prominent Ukrainian artists, designers, and influencers.
A defining feature of the brand is its focus on customers with a higher-than-usual order value, who care not only about material worth but also about the aesthetic and creative side. The high margin lets the brand invest in high-quality visual communication and brand awareness.
We started SEO for this project in August 2024. The client’s primary request was to increase organic traffic and raise conversions from target commercial queries. At kickoff, most organic traffic came from branded queries like «sova» and «sova jewelry,» which clearly showed strong brand recognition, but also limited potential to attract a new audience that did not yet know the brand. The customer already had well-formed loyalty, so our SEO work had to make sure we scaled the site the right way through broader, non-branded queries in the niche, such as «wedding rings,» «gold rings,» «gold earrings.» In short, SOVA started the partnership as an established brand, which was a real starting advantage.
Target Audience Definition
SOVA positions itself as a premium brand, so the key task for the strategy was not only to expand organic reach but also to attract an audience ready to invest in aesthetics, quality, and an idea. The goal was to generate not just traffic, but visitors able to produce higher-than-average order values. The main market was Ukraine. Site languages were Ukrainian, Russian, and international English, taking into account the global version on the subdomain, https://global.sovajewels.com/.
SOVA traffic by geography
Based on research into behavioral patterns, demand structure, product positioning, and the brand’s style, we outlined several core audience profiles. Primarily, these were women aged 25–40 with middle to upper-middle incomes who value contemporary jewelry design, express themselves through accessories, follow trends, and seek more than classic «gift» jewelry. A distinct segment was young couples who searched for wedding bands or their first serious gifts for each other. This audience often arrives between May and September, the peak wedding season. In peak gift seasons, before New Year’s, on Valentine’s Day, and International Women’s Day on March 8, the number of male buyers grows as they look for premium-level gifts for their loved ones.
Challenges We Faced
The first serious challenge in shaping the strategy was adapting the brand to a highly competitive niche. For a long period, Google’s top results featured players like Ukrzoloto, Zolotyi Vik, Zlato, Aurum, and other large sites with deeply developed category infrastructure, a strong backlink profile, and significant technical resources. These projects actively targeted commercial queries and held substantial authority in Google’s view.
At the same time, SOVA itself worked exclusively with gold, while most competing brands focused on items made from various metals and promoted mass-market goods rather than limited collections and exclusive models. A much broader assortment, combined with a larger SKU count and lower pricing, simply did not let us outpace them quickly in search results. This approach helped competitors reach a wider audience and push more effectively on high-volume queries, which made it harder to rank SOVA’s limited collections in the premium segment.
Organic competitors of the SOVA brand
Against this backdrop, promotion in high-demand categories like «gold rings» or «wedding bands» meant playing on a field where competition for organic positions is among the toughest in the niche. As confirmation, during the SEO analysis of the site and the market overall, we recorded rapid growth in the external backlink profile of sovajewels.com, which at first glance might even look like a positive signal. However, a deeper audit showed that most of these links were toxic, mentions on dubious resources such as casino sites, doorway pages, and low-quality blogs, sometimes entirely unrelated to jewelry.
Example of irrelevant domains for the SOVA site
It was already clear there would be many attempts at negative SEO from competitors trying to undermine the site’s authority in search engines. This pressure required a careful approach. On the one hand, we could not ignore the situation. On the other hand, we needed to avoid panic and overreaction.
Another important point was keeping the balance between branded and non-branded traffic. As noted earlier, at the project start, most organic traffic came from branded queries. This structure limited the site’s growth potential because it could not fully expand the business’s audience. Our task was to develop category pages actively without harming the brand’s established semantic core. It was essential not only to increase the number of new commercial non-branded queries landing on the site, but also to preserve the loyal audience already searching by brand, not breaking what was already working.
Core SOVA queries at the start of SEO work
A separate workstream was technical optimization, largely tied to multilinguality. When we launched, the client was already developing a global version of the site (https://global.sovajewels.com/) as an additional entry point for an international audience, which introduced extra complexity. We had to sync technical optimization on the main site with the subdomain while avoiding duplicate content and hreflang attribution mix-ups. It was critical that both versions, local and global, grow independently without conflicting in Google’s eyes.
In short, the strategic plan required flexibility. We had to factor in many risks, which called not for a template approach, but for a precise understanding of the SOVA brand itself.
Promotion Strategy and Results
From the outset, the client positioned SOVA as a unique player in Ukraine, not recognizing direct competitors. However, in search results, the SEO competitors were brands like ukrzoloto.ua, zolotiyvik.ua, aurum.in.ua, stolychnashop.com.ua, and zlato.ua. All of them hold strong positions on non-branded category queries and have solid technical setups. Therefore, our first focus was to grow traffic to category pages by optimizing key site sections, improving their structure, and updating content. Priority categories were «wedding bands,» «rings,» and «earrings.» For each group, we applied classic SEO methods, optimizing meta tags, structured data, and internal linking, as well as elements tailored specifically to this brand.
Top queries SOVA ranked for in 2024
We started with technical optimization for both the Ukrainian-language version and the global site. During the process, we issued a large number of tasks tied to site optimization.
The first tasks were rules for correct URL formation for site pages, including regional subdomains. We also refined how URLs are formed when a visitor selects a city, since with business expansion to new cities, we needed to plan for correct link structures.
Part of the requirements for forming URLs when selecting a city
We additionally worked through URL patterns for filter pages. Because the client’s products vary in size, materials, and other aspects, it was essential to plan URL formation for two or more selected filters.
Part of the requirements for forming URLs with multiple filters
Speaking of filters, we also reviewed their structure, considering that not all of them should be open to indexation. With this in mind, we created a clear visual of our preferred setup for these pages, then provided detailed explanations in a separate technical brief for the client.
Drawn filter structure for categories
We paid special attention to correct structured data on pages, including breadcrumbs, Local Business and Organization in JSON-LD, and Open Graph, so the site would be as readable as possible for both Google and the end user.
Part of the requirements for adding structured data to pages
Next, we moved to look and layout, particularly the footer, designing and sketching a clear structure. Since the footer is a persistent element on every page, we added links to important sections and categories to aid in indexing.
Sketch of the site footer
Continuing the topic of internal linking, we issued an optimization brief to set up sensible automatic interlinking on product pages, for example, by shared attributes, blocks of similar or new items, and more.
Part of the requirements for automatic internal linking
We also needed the correct server response for pages that do not require frequent reindexing. We considered two approaches, ETag or Last-Modified. Since the first option is harder to implement, we chose to return a 304 response using the Last-Modified header.
Part of the requirements for the Last-Modified header
Finally, on the technical side, we optimized robots.txt, sitemap.xml, pagination pages, page-load speed, and more. Since not all tasks can be completed quickly on the client’s side, and some are still in progress, we decided to move toward actions that would give us the classic 80% of results with 20% of effort, namely, meta-tag optimization.
Part of the requirements for page-speed optimization
For meta-tags, we moved in two directions at once. First, a full meta optimization of category pages and product cards. The goal was not just to cover commercial non-branded queries, but to create relevant, clickable meta titles and content that resonate with the real search intent of potential buyers. Most categories have now been addressed in terms of structure, content, and semantics.
Part of the requirements for optimizing the «Gold rings with pearls» category page
We also refined meta-tags for filter pages that are open to indexation, and for pages that sort by geolocation, city. Given the above structure for filter pages and the rules for forming their URLs, we effectively covered the ongoing optimization needs for these pages as a whole.
Part of the requirements for forming meta-tags for filter pages
Part of the requirements for forming meta-tags for city pages
It is also worth noting that these optimizations were applied not only to the Ukrainian version. We developed parallel briefs for the global site, with certain adjustments, for example, by country or region.
Moving closer to content-driven growth, we proposed creating a Knowledge Base and a blog, including author pages. This would bring additional traffic to informational queries and form a kind of funnel for the customer. Over time, we regularly issued briefs for blog posts with the right meta-tags and keywords.
Part of the requirements for the blog’s author pages
By working this way, we added new content to the blog, categories, and product pages, while periodically checking the site for new technical issues. This approach enabled us to achieve the results we see now and fulfill one of the client’s wishes: better visibility for non-branded queries.
Growth in the number of non-branded queries for the site
Comparing spring 2025 with spring 2024, we can see strong growth in both non-branded queries and overall traffic, along with top results for the category pages we prioritized.
Growth in the number of keywords by intent in spring 2025 versus spring 2024
The second direction was off-site optimization, where we chose an approach to link building that is truly uncommon for the Ukrainian market. Instead of buying links with ready-made content on exchanges, we created unique articles in-house with the company’s copywriters. This lets us keep high relevance and maintain flexible quality control over the texts. The links were somewhat more expensive, but this approach delivered results, stronger topical coverage, higher trust from search engines, and top positions for the category pages that mattered.
Top traffic-driving pages on SOVA in 2025
In parallel, we carried out a systematic cleanup of the backlink profile. Every month, we analyzed new domains and removed toxic links that could harm overall site trust, especially given possible competitor attempts to attack SOVA through low-quality mentions on questionable platforms. This regular process helped keep the profile stable even under external pressure. The profile now includes about 1,200 referring domains.
SOVA backlink profile dynamics
Overall, the strategy we built not only expanded the business’s audience reach but also secured the brand’s presence in search results for target commercial non-branded queries that align directly with the defined target audience’s interests.
Plans for the Future
In our continued work with SOVA Jewelry House, we plan to maintain the chosen pace and task structure, as this consistent and non-templated strategy has already proven effective for both the client and us. Over nearly a year of collaboration, comparing spring 2025 with spring 2024, we achieved:
- Click growth of 40,000, up 29%, and impression growth of 2.23 million, up 140%.
- Total revenue from conversions up 135%.
- Total number of buyers up 46%, with new buyers up 31.5%.
- Average revenue per user from purchases up 99.2%.
- Total number of purchases (conversions) up 63.2%.
Our main focus will remain on promoting target categories, with an emphasis on those that generate the strongest demand and have higher conversion potential. We will continue systematic optimization of metadata and on-page content for these sections, expanding their semantics and improving snippet click-through in search results.
We will also keep a dedicated focus on link building. We will continue acquiring links through outreach articles written by our copywriters, with full control over quality and content. This approach will not only increase the number of referring domains but also build durable trust in the brand within the niche.
Monthly monitoring of the site’s technical health and cleaning the backlink profile of toxic domains will remain a mandatory part of our process, since external risks to the site do not disappear. Additionally, we plan to delve deeper into internal linking to enhance the distribution of internal link equity across categories, particularly for new products and newly created collections.
