About the project
zolotakoroleva.ua is an ambitious case in one of Ukrainian e-commerce's most competitive niches. The goal — turn a site with a good technical foundation into a full market leader able to compete head-on with giants Ukrzoloto and Zolotiy Vik.
The audience is broad, but the core is women 26–55 buying both for themselves and as gifts. The niche demands both strong SEO and fine work on conversion and advertising.
Starting metrics and barriers
Strong internal base
An abnormally high URL Rating (UR) 43 for the niche — quality structure and per-page optimisation.
Authority deficit
Despite high UR, overall Domain Rating (DR) was just 33 vs 46–52 for leaders. A 'glass ceiling' on high-volume queries.
Technical debt
Over 9,700 errors: duplicate/missing Title and Description, missing H1 on 3,128 pages.
Lost filter traffic
Catalogue filters ran on dynamic URLs — the project lost a layer of long-tail traffic ('585 gold earrings').
Deep audit and SEO optimisation
Work began with a detailed niche analysis: UR 43 was the best figure among competitors, but DR 33 lagged the leaders significantly (ukrzoloto.ua — 52, zolotiyvik.ua — 46). We cleared critical indexing errors and optimised the code.
Meta tags for filters
Unique Title and Description for categories and filters: previously, picking a carat didn't change meta, hurting long-tail ranking.
Clean URLs vs dynamics
Moving from parameter-based dynamic URLs to human-readable addresses — recovered filter-page traffic.
H1 and headings
Restored H1 on 3,128 pages, built a correct heading structure.
Content & outreach
Category rework, schema and outreach to grow authority.
UX/UI and conversion uplift
The usability audit showed the site was less appealing than competitors'. We added menu expansion without reload and a product-count indicator in categories; in the card we moved photos to the start of the gallery, added clickable specs and instalment icons (Mono/Privat); built an interactive 'Find your size' calculator for rings; and fixed a bug returning deleted items to the cart.
Performance Max with regional segmentation
We reworked the ad strategy toward automation and regional segmentation on a $4000 budget. P-Max campaigns became the main sales driver, and we saw a sharp difference in effectiveness by region.
| Region | ROAS |
|---|---|
| Odesa | 116.77 (leader) |
| Chernihiv & Kharkiv | 24.2 |
| Zaporizhzhia & Dnipro | 9.1 |
Source: Google Ads, zolotakoroleva.ua P-Max campaigns, $4000 budget.
We reallocated budgets toward effective cities; in 'expensive' regions (Kyiv) we narrowed audiences and tested new creatives.
Results by the end of 2025
| Metric | December 2024 | December 2025 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Search impressions | 169,526 | 960,936 | ×5.6 |
| Organic traffic | 45,000 | 51,900 | +16% |
| Traffic from AI chats | 0 | 1,500 | new channel |
| ROAS (overall) | 2.8 | 5.1 | +82% |
Source: web analytics and Google Ads for zolotakoroleva.ua, December 2024 — December 2025.
Key wins: Ukrainisation — traffic to the Ukrainian-language version became dominant and the brand query 'zolota koroleva' grew; thanks to schema, clicks on product snippets rose from 1.4k to 7.8k; smartphones became the main traffic source; and a new channel appeared — traffic from AI chats.
Further growth
The project moved into a scaling phase. Plans: strengthen DR via quality outreach and expert media; video consultations and AR jewelry try-on; deep AI-search optimisation (its traffic is more engaged than classic Google); and bid automation based on each item's margin.
Project team
The project was led by Nikolay Shmychkov — SEO strategy (deputy director, SEOquick). Full team and roles on the 'About' page.
What's next
A similar e-commerce case with a technical cleanup and growth: SEO for the Sunshouse store. Have an online store in a competitive niche? The concrete next step is an SEO + ads audit.