Kiki McDonough

Kiki McDonough has been putting colour into British fine jewellery since 1985, a fifth-generation jeweller and the first woman in the family line, and her Chelsea boutique at 12 Symons Street stands in what was once the family butcher's.

The house signature is the Detachable Drop, an earring designed in 2004 whose first design is now held in the V&A, and the collections still lead with the gemstones, blue topaz, peridot, green amethyst, garnet, fire opal. In 2026 the house was granted a Royal Warrant as jeweller By Appointment to HM The Queen, forty years after the first pieces were sold, and it is a house we are proud to look after.

The site's authority had sat flat for five years while the brand itself kept growing. The search presence never caught up with the standing of the house. Then the brand committed to a complete rebuild of the store for March 2026, which put every accumulated ranking at risk on a single go-live date.

A relaunch handled well is also the one moment when structural problems can be fixed wholesale, so the engagement was planned in three phases, protect the launch first, then rebuild the commercial vocabulary, then build the topical layer on top of it.

Launch protection came first. The redirect map for the new site was weighted by backlinks, so the URLs carrying the most earned authority got mapped with the most care, and the heading structure, breadcrumb standardisation across the collection pages, schema and metadata all went in before go-live, because fixing those after a launch means asking Google to re-read the site twice.

The off-site side started even earlier, with a full audit of the link profile in the first weeks of the engagement and a disavow filed against the legacy links doing more harm than good.

The keyword work started with the brand's own vocabulary, so the commercial terms would sound like the house. From there roughly 850,000 raw terms were narrowed to a working set of around 200 commercial keywords.

The collection and product metadata was then rewritten against that set, with rotating trust signals across the descriptions and every title written to a budget that accounts for the brand suffix the platform appends automatically.

The topical build is running through earrings first, the house's signature category, its first design held in the V&A. Seven collection pages now carry visible editorial content on the page itself, signed off with the brand's team, and a blue topaz pillar guide with five supporting articles is publishing at one a week.

The collection migration underneath reuses the existing URL handles as collections move from manual to smart, so the merchandising logic gets rebuilt without a single earned URL changing.

The newest layer of the work is aimed at buyers who may never see the website at all, the ones asking a shopping agent to find the right pair of earrings for them. The first baseline test of what an agent could see came back with thirteen of twenty-eight standard customer questions unanswered and the returns window quoted wrong.

The store now carries an agent-facing description of the brand, a knowledge base answering all twenty-eight questions in one place, and a rebuilt schema layer specified for the brand's developers, so a machine reading the store gets the same facts a customer would get on the shop floor.

Off the site, the house already held the strongest authority signals a British luxury brand can carry, a Royal Warrant on the official register, a first design in the V&A, a book published for the fortieth anniversary, and almost none of it was stated where a machine could read it. That authority is now written into the store itself, through the structured data, the agent-facing description, and the knowledge base. The standing the brand holds offline reaches every system that reads about it.

The engagement runs on a weekly half-hour call every Tuesday, with the brand's ecommerce lead each week and the managing director joining fortnightly, email carrying the substantive work in between, and a shared board keeping every action visible to the brand, its development agency and us at the same time.

Phase by phase the capability moves inwards. The metadata standards, the content patterns and the knowledge base all live in the brand's own store and its own documents. What has been built stays with the house.