We help you sell moreRequest a Free QuoteTraffic was up and sales were down. Between September 2022 and March 2023, Canada's Pool & Hot Tub Depot saw revenue fall 25% against the year before while it paid more for ads to stand still. Eight months of speed, user experience, and keyword work on its BigCommerce store turned that into 11% growth.
Published . Updated .
The challenge
MAK Digital built PoolAndHotTubDepot.com on BigCommerce in 2021, and for its first year the store performed well. Then the ground moved. Google confirmed seven ranking updates between September 2022 and March 2023: two core updates, two product reviews updates, a helpful content update, and two spam updates. Competitors in pool and spa parts kept investing, and the store's organic keyword positions slipped.
In February 2023 the owner, John, came back to us with the numbers. He had raised his Google Ads budget to hold sales where they were, and visits were in fact up 12%. The extra traffic did not replace the buyers organic search used to bring. Conversion rate fell from 4.66% to 3.22%, orders dropped 33%, and revenue was down 25% against the same months a year earlier.
A store in that position has two problems at once: it is losing the search visibility that brings buyers for free, and the visitors it still gets are not buying the way they used to. We set out to fix both.
What we did
We began with a full SEO and UX audit, then worked from the foundation up: first how fast the store loads, then how easily a shopper buys, then how well the store matches what Canadians search for.
Step 1 of 5
Google measures how a page is served as well as what it says, so speed and layout stability came first. In May 2023, early in the project, the store failed the Core Web Vitals assessment on phones and on desktop. Its mobile performance score was 12 out of 100, and on desktop the layout moved so much while loading (a layout shift score of 0.69) that about four in five page loads rated poor.
Our developers went through the Stencil theme line by line:
By late 2023 the store passed Core Web Vitals for real Chrome users on desktop and scored 97 for performance, with 100 for accessibility, best practices, and SEO. A follow-up test in October 2024 showed the gains had held: all three vitals in the good range on phones and desktop, and a mobile layout shift of zero.
The full reports: before, May 2023 (mobile, desktop), and after, October 2024 (mobile, desktop). The methods are written up in our speed optimization guide, and the same work is available as BigCommerce speed optimization.
| Measure | Before: May 2023 | After: October 2024 |
|---|---|---|
| Performance score, mobile | 12 | 68 |
| Performance score, desktop | 53 | 93 |
| Accessibility score | 88 | 100 |
| Best practices score | 75 mobile, 83 desktop | 100 |
| Layout shift (CLS), real users | 0.24 mobile, 0.69 desktop | 0 mobile, 0.01 desktop |
| Largest Contentful Paint, real users | 2.5 s mobile, 2.1 s desktop | 1.4 s mobile, 1.5 s desktop |
| Interaction to Next Paint, real users | 129 ms mobile, 64 ms desktop | 100 ms mobile, 75 ms desktop |
Scores are Lighthouse lab scores out of 100. Real-user figures are from the Chrome UX Report at the 75th percentile. The desktop report pictured here, from late 2023, scored 97.
Step 2 of 5
With the pages loading fast, we turned to what shoppers did once they arrived. Parts pages are long: a description, specifications, reviews, questions. By the time a shopper had read enough to decide, the buy button was far above them.
We studied how shoppers moved through product pages and added an Add to Cart bar that stays in view as they scroll, on desktop and on mobile. It appears on scroll, so it never covers the page when it first opens. Conversions rose right after it launched.
This kind of change is the core of our eCommerce user experience work: find where buyers stall, then shorten the path.
Step 3 of 5
A repair rarely needs one part. To help shoppers finish the job in one order, we built a custom upsell component, "Don't Leave Without These!", that offers the small items a repair usually calls for next to the main product.
Store staff attach upsell products to a single item or assign a group of them to a whole category, and priority flags decide which group shows when more than one applies. It runs on BigCommerce product and category metafields, managed from the admin with the Space48 Metafields Manager app, so changing an offer takes no developer.
Custom features like this one are part of our BigCommerce development service.
Step 4 of 5
Pool & Hot Tub Depot sells online and from two retail stores in Canada. For a shopper with a failed pump, waiting for a delivery is the worst part of the purchase, and many of them live within driving distance of a counter that has the part.
We used the Google location API to work out how far each Canadian visitor is from the nearest store and showed that distance in the header and on the product page, beside BigCommerce's buy online, pick up in store option. Shoppers close to a store could order online and collect the part without waiting for shipping, which raised conversions among the customers least willing to wait.
For stores with physical locations, this pairs well with local SEO.
Step 5 of 5
Keyword research reshaped the menu. The most valuable search terms moved into the top-level navigation, where crawlers and shoppers both find them first. Company and utility links moved up into a Help Center dropdown in the header. The remaining categories went into a department side menu, built as a responsive React component with icons that are easy to recognize.
We added a Parts section whose landing pages each answer a Canadian search: Hot Tub Parts Canada, Canada Pool Parts, Canada Jetted Bathtub Parts, Canada Plumbing Parts. Those pages run on custom category templates written for the Canadian market, and the content of each category was rewritten for organic search.
This is the approach behind our BigCommerce SEO services: structure first, then content.
The results
From April through November 2023, revenue ran 11% ahead of the same months in 2022. Measured from where the store started, 25% behind, that is a 36-point swing. Orders went from 33% down to level with the year before, and the store was adding customers again.
Organic search traffic grew 35% and Google Ads spend came down by nearly 60%, so the growth cost less to earn. It happened during the largest wildfire season on record in Canada, about 15 million hectares burned, in a summer that was hard on the pool supply trade.
| Metric | Before: Sep 2022 to Mar 2023 | After: Apr to Nov 2023 |
|---|---|---|
| Revenue | Down 25.23% | Up 11.12% |
| Orders | Down 32.77% | Up 0.17% |
| Customers | Down 24.83% | Up 3.85% |
| Conversion rate | Down 30.9% (4.66% to 3.22%) | Down 7.65% (3.40% to 3.14%) |
| Average order value | Up 11.2% ($185.54) | Up 10.94% ($197.19) |
| Visits | Up 11.85% (256,004) | Up 14.83% (439,274) |
Source: the two BigCommerce store overview reports shown on this page. Conversion rate was still below the year before, but the gap closed from 31% to 8% while visits kept growing.
We reached out to MAKDigital desperately looking for a solution after another company delivered an incomplete site and abandoned us. The initial consult with Mary and her team was great, she had a plan for our site and advised short term band aid solution to mitigate issues with the old site until they could develop a complete new site. Outstanding experience, the new site poolandhottubdepot.com is doing very well in SERP and lots of positive comments from our customers. Highly recommend MAKDigital, they are now our go-to company.
What it shows
The details belong to one Canadian parts retailer. The pattern shows up in stores on every platform.
Visits were up 12% while revenue fell 25%. Watch orders and conversion rate by channel alongside sessions. When paid traffic grows as organic shrinks, the ad budget is covering for a ranking problem.
Core Web Vitals are measured on real visitors. A store that passes them gives every later change a fair chance to rank. You can test any page with our free website speed check.
The phrases people search belong in the navigation and on category pages built for them. A menu written around internal department names leaves that demand to competitors.
A buy button that stays in view, the extra part offered at the right moment, a pickup option with the distance shown: each removes a reason to leave. Rankings bring the visit, and the page has to close it.
What we did, what it produced, and what it means for a store in the same position.
Five things over eight months in 2023: we rebuilt the store's front-end performance until it passed Core Web Vitals, added a sticky Add to Cart bar, built an upsell component that staff manage through BigCommerce metafields, showed each Canadian shopper the distance to the nearest store for in-store pickup, and restructured the navigation and category pages around keyword research for the Canadian market.
Revenue went from 25% below the previous year (September 2022 to March 2023) to 11% above it (April to November 2023), a 36-point swing. Orders went from 33% down to level, and customers from 25% down to 4% up. Organic search traffic grew 35% and Google Ads spend fell by nearly 60%.
The comparison on this page covers eight months, April through November 2023. Some changes paid off right away: the sticky Add to Cart bar lifted conversions as soon as it launched. Ranking gains from the speed, navigation, and content work built up over the following months, which is normal for organic search.
Organic rankings had slipped after a run of Google updates, so the owner raised his Google Ads budget to replace the lost visits. Total visits rose 12%, but conversion rate fell from 4.66% to 3.22% and orders dropped 33%. More traffic did not bring back the buyers that organic search had been sending.
In May 2023 the store failed the assessment on phones and desktop, mainly on layout shift (0.24 on mobile, 0.69 on desktop). By late 2023 it passed on desktop for real Chrome users: Largest Contentful Paint 1.7 seconds, Cumulative Layout Shift 0.04, and Interaction to Next Paint 78 milliseconds. In October 2024 mobile measured 1.4 seconds, 0, and 100 milliseconds. Google's limits for a good score are 2.5 seconds, 0.1, and 200 milliseconds.
Yes. Core Web Vitals are part of how Google evaluates page experience, and they are measured on real visitors to your store. BigCommerce hosts the platform, but the theme, the images, and every installed app decide how fast a page feels. On this store the work centered on how scripts, third-party apps, and images were loaded, and the desktop performance score went from 53 to 97. Our BigCommerce speed optimization service covers the same work.
It did here. As organic search traffic grew 35%, the store cut its Google Ads spend by nearly 60% and still grew revenue 11%. Ads and SEO work best together: ads for the searches you cannot rank for yet, organic for the ones you can. We manage both, including eCommerce PPC.
The method carries over to any store: audit first, fix speed, remove the points where buyers stall, then build navigation and content around what people search. Results depend on your market and where you start. A free SEO audit shows where your store stands, and our BigCommerce SEO services page explains how an engagement runs.
We will look at your speed, your rankings, and where shoppers leave, and tell you what we would fix first.
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