One of my favourite kinds of projects is working with a business that’s already doing beautiful work but isn’t showing up online the way they deserve to. That was exactly the case with Rustica Custom Finishes, an Abbotsford-based candle and home décor brand with a genuinely gorgeous product line — but a website that wasn’t pulling its weight in search.
The starting point
When we started working together, Rustica’s Shopify store had a handful of technical and content gaps that were quietly holding back their visibility:
- Product and collection pages without SEO-optimized copy
- Missing or generic image alt text across the site
- A Google Business Profile with some completeness and photo issues
- No blog or content strategy to build ongoing search relevance
What we did
We started with a full live SEO audit, tracking a baseline score before making any changes. From there, we worked through:
- SEO-rich collection and product copy — rewriting descriptions to naturally include the keywords real customers search for, without losing Rustica’s warm, handcrafted brand voice
- A full image alt text audit — making sure every product photo was properly described for both accessibility and Google Image search
- Google Business Profile troubleshooting — diagnosing and fixing issues with their cover photo, review visibility, and product listings (including a shipping weight data issue in Shopify that was quietly causing product listing rejections)
- A blog content strategy built around the actual search terms candle and home décor shoppers use
- Google Search Console setup, so Rustica’s team can keep monitoring their own search performance going forward
The results
The takeaway
Rustica’s story is a great example of something I tell clients all the time: beautiful products and a beautiful website don’t automatically mean people can find you. SEO is the bridge between the two — and it’s rarely one big fix, but a series of smaller, deliberate ones that compound over time.
If your website feels like Rustica’s did before we started — great products, quiet search presence — let’s talk about an SEO audit for your business too.
