Talking Stones

Talking Stones is a manufacturing business that specialises in the creation of hand-engraved memorials to honour beloved people and pets. Along with memorial pieces, they also create home and building signage and unique hand-engraved gift pieces. Given the nature of their products and services, they wanted a renewed website that would make it easier for users to find the right product for their needs with clearer visuals and an improved user experience.

Talking Stones approached us with the following key challenges:

• Restricted search discoverability,
• Outdated site structure that impacted their SERP placement.
• A total site migration was needed to improve usability and navigation,
• SEO content was also limited.

As is the case for any successful site migration, planning and strategies started prior to the migration itself.

The first step was in ensuring all URLs were set up to properly redirect to the new Shopify site by implementing a robust 301 redirect strategy to preserve link equity and traffic. A technical SEO audit was also performed so that every new Shopify page was optimised from the get-go – this included key factors such as meta tags and meta descriptions, properly structured data, and focused keyword targeting.

Post-migration support continued with ongoing SEO improvements that focused on building quality backlinks to the website, updating product content so that it was better-aligned with high-intent keyword searches, and extensive internal linking through the site’s various pages. Through this entire process, we tracked the performance of the SEO efforts and made refinements as needed to ensure ongoing post-migration success and long-term growth.

The Talking Stones migration showcased how, with the right strategy and a considered SEO approach, a major website update can be achieved with near-immediate benefits, resulting in improved search rankings and organic traffic.

Comparing post-migration organic performance on Google vs pre-migration performance, the key results were as follows:

3-Month Search Performance (Post-Migration: Aug to Oct 2025 v Pre-Migration: May to July 2025)

• Search result click-throughs: Post-Migration 3.36K search clicks (av. CTR of 1.9%) v Pre-Migration 2.71K search clicks (av. CTR of 1.4%)
• Search impressions: Post-Migration 182K search impressions v Pre-Migration 189K search impressions – impressions capturing more qualified traffic, driving higher resulting click-throughs
• Search result positions: Post-Migration 22.5 average position v Pre-Migration 27.6 – average improvement of 5 positions in search results in Google
• Significant increase in keyword performance: By October 2025, 147 keywords ranked on page 1 in the top 3 Google results; 198 keywords ranked in the top 10 Google results. In total, 345 keywords/keyphrases showed notable improvements in their total rankings.