Solstice Sunglasses shines in search, online sales soar

Luxury sunglasses retailer boosts e-commerce performance with site redesign.

Solstice Sunglasses offers designer sunglasses at its brick-and-mortar locations, as well as online. But up until June 2018, the retailer’s digital presence was JavaScript-heavy. That made it difficult for Google to crawl the Solstice website, ultimately hurting search rankings and online traffic.

In an effort to make its site more HTML-friendly, the company underwent redesign twice in eight months. However, faced with the task of optimizing its overhauled site with thousands of individual product URLs, Solstice decided to implement the Searchlight content intelligence platform from marketing software provider Conductor.

Leveraging the capabilities of Searchlight, Solstice revamped its product description pages and content, enabling the retailer to move up in search engine results pages (SERP) and rank higher in search results. Insights from Conductor Searchlight also informed Solstice’s approach to its physical stores.

In eight months, Solstice experienced a 73% increase in conversions, a 66% rise in web traffic, and a 101% jump in revenue per site visit. Conductor Searchlight’s technical integrations with site auditing tools such as DeepCrawl and Google Analytics helped Solstice eliminate technical problems that were causing pages on the site to underperform on Google. From April 2018 to April 2019, Solstice’s page-one rankings rose by 168%.

“How do we understand how the customer’s shopping, whether they’re on their phone or desktop and/or transacting in store?” said Monica Swendsrud, marketing director, Solstice Sunglasses. “The data from Conductor Searchlight drives those digital efforts that are not only impacting what we do online, but what we do to drive store business as well.”