From 274 to 1,349 monthly clicks
Home From Home Foods has been selling Caribbean and African food since 1976 — three storefronts on a shared OpenCart install, plus physical shops in the Midlands. Fifty years of trading, and a website Google had crawled 11,734 pages of and refused to index.
5.3× click growth over six months, all territories
queries ranking on page one
queries in the top three
Google Shopping clicks in 28 days, up 20.4%
reduction in not-indexed URL waste
A working platform with its hands tied
A business trading since 1976 does not lack for reputation. What it lacked was any way for someone searching online to find it.
Three storefronts — the main retail brand, a wholesale arm and a sister speciality range — on one OpenCart 3.0.2.0 multistore install. The stack functioned, but the constraints were real.
- No control panel accessFTP for files, direct database edits through HeidiSQL. Nothing that assumes a hosting dashboard was available.
- Three cache layersNitro, LiteSpeed and OpenCart’s own. Every template change needed two separate purges before it went live.
- 11,734 URLs crawled but not indexedLegacy product pages, faceted-search permutations and pagination duplicates, all consuming crawl budget that should have reached pages that sell.
- A Shopping feed rejecting most of its productsIt existed. It was not working.
- No local presencePhysical shops in the Midlands, and effectively zero visibility for anyone searching locally.
The work, and what each part returned
- Product schema and rich resultsAudited the markup, fixed missing and malformed schema across the catalogue, and made every product page emit valid Product, Offer and AggregateRating data. This is now the single largest driver of clicks on the site — 73% of recent traffic arrives through product snippets rather than plain blue links.
- The Google Shopping feed, rebuiltWorked through the full catalogue resolving GTIN matching, image quality, category mapping and missing attributes. The feed now runs at 665 of 667 products approved — one not approved, one under review — and produces 2,480 clicks in 28 days, up 20.4% on the previous period. Merchant Center rates the shop Great for overall quality and delivery time.
- Index hygieneIdentified the URL patterns generating the waste and applied canonical consolidation, parameter handling and redirects. Not-indexed URLs fell from 11,734 in March to 6,286 in June. Indexed pages held steady, because this was pruning rather than publishing.
- Local SEO for the shopA dedicated location page plus full Google Business Profile optimisation. The page ranks on page one and returns 53 clicks at 3.67% CTR, nearly three times the site average. The brand holds position 1 for its name plus town, at 14.47% CTR.
- Allergen compliance across 515+ productsCatalogued in line with the Food Information Regulations 2014, with a structured flow so every product page surfaces it consistently rather than burying it in a description. Compliance is the floor; the search benefit is that structured allergen data improves rich-result eligibility.
- Fulfilment and stock fixesVerified order-status logic against inventory, integrated the third-party logistics export, and resolved an out-of-stock add-to-cart fault that had been quietly allowing checkout on unavailable products.
The curve, month by month
| Month | Clicks | Impressions | CTR |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nov 2025 | 274 | 16,470 | 1.66% |
| Dec 2025 | 524 | 32,168 | 1.63% |
| Jan 2026 | 683 | 41,787 | 1.63% |
| Feb 2026 | 620 | 45,123 | 1.37% |
| Mar 2026 | 974 | 66,489 | 1.46% |
| Apr 2026 | 1,311 | 103,737 | 1.26% |
| May 2026 | 1,349 | 116,192 | 1.16% |
| Jun 2026 | 1,635 | 134,820 | 1.21% |
| Jul 2026 | 2,225 | 165,139 | 1.35% |
July UK clicks are 8.1× November’s, on 10× the impressions. All figures UK only, so the totals are consistent down the column.
Since May it has climbed back: 1.16%, then 1.21%, then 1.35%. Clicks are now growing faster than impressions, which is what happens once the schema and Shopping work matures and the listings start converting the impressions the site already had. Reach first, then conversion.
Three patterns that decide the priorities
- Mobile is 82% of clicks3,519 of 4,273 in the last 90 days. Mobile page speed, checkout flow and product imagery matter more than their desktop equivalents — not equally, more.
- Product snippets carry 73% of clicksThe same result with schema firing properly earns several times what it does without. On an ecommerce site, schema is not a technical nicety.
- Shopping is now the biggest single channel2,480 clicks in 28 days against a 99.7% feed approval rate. When the feed is clean, Shopping placements sit above the organic results and catch buyers at the point of decision.
Where the site sits now
Position 1 across a spread of commercial and product terms — brand searches, the shop’s town searches, a hero seasonal product, the flagship spice brand, and category terms including “caribbean food online” and “jamaican supermarket online uk”, alongside specific product searches driving steady order flow.
193 queries hold positions 1–3 in the UK and 793 sit on page one. Equally important, the site now appears for over a thousand distinct queries each quarter. Breadth matters as much as headline positions — a long tail of product searches each contributing a few orders compounds faster than one hero term.
The systems we wrote from scratch
SEO was the reason we were hired. A fair amount of what we have delivered is software, because on a constrained platform the fix is often something that does not exist yet.
- Abandoned basket recoveryA PHP and Mailjet system that identifies customers who leave a basket or drop out mid-checkout and follows up automatically. Built and in deployment — currently waiting on DNS authentication records before the sending domain goes live.
- EPOS to OpenCart price syncPrices are maintained in the till system, not the website. We built a VAT-aware synchronisation tool so the two cannot drift apart, which on a catalogue of 667 products is not a job anyone should do by hand.
- Automated offsite backupsA Python backup routine writing encrypted, deduplicated snapshots to offsite storage. The site had no backup system at all when we arrived — on an ecommerce operation, that is the risk that ends a business rather than inconveniences it.
- Broken link monitoringA crawler that checks the full catalogue on a schedule rather than only when someone notices a dead page. Ecommerce catalogues break constantly as products come and go.
- Redirect deployment at scale319 broken links resolved with 301s in the first phase, plus robots directives to stop faceted-search parameters generating URLs Google would only crawl and discard.
- “Goes well with” cross-sellProduct pages now suggest genuinely complementary items rather than whatever the platform picked at random. On a food catalogue the pairings are obvious to a person and invisible to software, so the logic had to be written rather than configured.
- Courier and fulfilment integrationOrder export wired into the third-party logistics provider, so despatch does not depend on anyone rekeying addresses.
- Offers and free deliveryA dedicated offers category, plus free delivery thresholds surfaced where customers see them before checkout rather than after. Basket value is a conversion lever most ecommerce sites leave on the table.
Why off-the-shelf software was not enough
Platform constraints on this project meant standard SEO tools could not do the job. Most of the engagement runs on software we built ourselves.
- Master AuditorMulti-page technical audit with PageSpeed integration, used to baseline and re-baseline at intervals.
- Rank TrackerIndependent rank monitoring with per-client exclusions and geographic targeting. Currently tracking 114 keywords for this client.
- Internal Link AuditDistinguishes templated navigation from in-content links, used to strengthen product-to-category linking.
- Schema Validator and Redirect Chain MapperVerifying every change leaves the site cleaner than we found it.
- Price SyncEPOS-to-OpenCart synchronisation, VAT-aware, built specifically for this engagement.
What is not finished
A second Midlands location page, mirroring the pattern that worked for the first. Continued index cleanup to get the not-indexed count below 5,000 — it is 6,286 today, down from 11,734, but that is still thousands of URLs consuming crawl budget for nothing.
Broader schema across category pages, and an OCMOD fix for the remaining out-of-stock add-to-cart behaviour. The Shopping feed is re-audited quarterly — approval currently sits at 99.7%, with one product rejected and one under review.
The trajectory has not plateaued. May was the first month above 1,300 clicks and the impression curve suggests there is further to run.
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