As of September 2025, Quarra Stone's website had achieved significant SEO gains following a sustained optimization effort by [1]'s marketing team at Asymmetric. The results were reviewed in a [2] and represent a meaningful inflection point in organic search performance.
The core strategy combined technical site health improvements, content consolidation, blog publishing with structured Q&A sections, and paid advertising — all working together to build domain authority.
| Metric | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | baseline | +178% | ↑ significant |
| Keywords in top 3 (Google) | — | 21 | — |
| Keywords in top 10 (Google) | — | 52 | — |
| Keywords ranked (any position) | — | 73 | — |
| Backlinks (referring domains) | ~1,300 | ~2,300 | +77% |
| Site health score | <100 | 100 | ↑ perfect |
| AI search visibility (Gemini) | none | appearing | new |
The site health score was brought to 100 through systematic technical cleanup. Simultaneously, the total number of indexed pages was reduced — a deliberate consolidation strategy ("Marie Kondo'd the site") that improved signal quality. Fewer, stronger pages outperformed a larger set of weaker ones.
Blog posts were written with structured Q&A sections appended to each post. This was a deliberate tactic to capture AI-generated search results (particularly Google Gemini), which tend to surface content that directly answers questions. The Q&A format makes it easier for AI systems to cite the page as a source.
Backlinks roughly doubled from ~1,300 to ~2,300. These function as third-party referrals in Google's ranking model — other sites linking to Quarra's content signal credibility and relevance.
Mark Hope noted from experience that Google ad spend and organic performance are correlated in practice, even if Google officially treats them as independent. Clients who paused ads saw immediate organic drops. Maintaining ad spend appears to support overall domain trust.
Quarra Stone began appearing in Google Gemini results as of this period. This is considered a compounding milestone: once a site earns AI citations, visibility tends to grow. The Q&A blog structure was the primary mechanism credited for this result.
"Some of the secrets to AI results is when you write a blog, you put those Q&A at the bottom of the blog, because almost everybody that's using AI is asking it questions." — Mark Hope
The number of crawled pages was actively reduced while performance improved. This reflects a quality-over-quantity philosophy: Google rewards well-structured, authoritative pages over large volumes of thin content. The downward trend in page count correlated directly with the upward trend in organic traffic.
This SEO progress was discussed alongside several other active workstreams:
This case illustrates several broadly applicable SEO principles: