A beautiful bowl that the English-speaking web could only buy second-hand.
International buyers found Hakuro only through marketplaces; its own site had 12 referring domains and no English authority.
Two potters, one wood-fired kiln in the hills above Kyoto, and a waiting list of collectors in Copenhagen, Melbourne and Portland. Yet almost every overseas sale passed through a marketplace that took its commission and kept the customer relationship.
The studio’s own site was a quiet Japanese-language catalogue. Search engines had little reason to trust it in English: no editorial links, no English pages, and a brand name that marketplaces owned in the results.
12
The audit traced every crack to a cause we could mend.
12
referring domains
Seven of them were marketplace profile pages and directory stubs; none was an English-language editorial link.
Mended by Digital PR
34
unlinked mentions
Kyoto press, tea blogs and two museum-shop newsletters named Hakuro without a link to the studio site.
Mended by Link reclamation
9
dead backlinks
A 2019 platform move left old product URLs returning 404 — the links pointed at nothing.
Mended by Link reclamation
0
English pages
Product copy was Japanese-only with no hreflang, so overseas searches for the kiln landed on marketplaces.
Mended by Bilingual outreach
#4
for its own name (EN)
Three marketplace listings outranked the studio for “Hakuro Kiln” in English results.
Mended by Digital PR
1
photo of the kiln
No press room, glaze notes or firing imagery — nothing a journalist or creator could build a story from.
Mended by Creator collaborations
Four kinds of gold, laid along the cracks that mattered.
The engagement was built on our Authority plan: earned authority rather than bought links, with every placement pointing at a page built to rank in English.
Digital PR
Three story angles pitched to design and interiors journals: the 36-hour wood firing, the glaze palette drawn from Kyoto river stone, and the two-potter rhythm of a kiln that fires only four times a year. Each pitch offered exclusive imagery from a new English press room.
22 design-journal domains · Europe, North America, Asia-Pacific
Bilingual outreach
Every pitch written natively in English and Japanese rather than translated, with English studio pages and hreflang pairs so coverage on either side linked to the right language — and so the authority it carried landed on pages that could rank.
22 Japanese press & craft domains · 41 EN product pages
Creator collaborations
Studio visits for ceramics, tea and slow-living creators, plus a limited collaboration chawan series. Each piece got its own landing page with the firing story, giving writers something specific and permanent to cite.
31 creator & blog domains · 6 collaboration pages
Link reclamation
A redirect map for the 2019 migration restored dead links, then a courteous bilingual sweep asked every site that already named Hakuro to add the link. Repeated after coverage generated new mentions.
34 mentions reclaimed · 9 dead links restored
Month by month, one seam at a time.
Month 1 · Reclaim
+3 → 15 domainsRedirect map for the 2019 shop migration; dead links to old product URLs restored with 301s.
Month 2 · Reclaim
+6 → 21 domainsPolite bilingual requests to the Kyoto press and blogs that named Hakuro without linking.
Month 3 · Story
+8 → 29 domainsEnglish studio pages, a press room with glaze notes, kiln-firing photographs and potter bios.
Month 4 · Pitch
+9 → 38 domainsFirst design-journal pitch: the 36-hour wood firing, offered as an exclusive photo essay.
Month 5 · Creators
+11 → 49 domainsSix ceramics and tea creators visit the studio; each publishes a process piece linking the shop.
Month 6 · Pitch
+12 → 61 domainsNorth American interiors titles pitched with a glaze-colour story tied to autumn tableware.
Month 7 · Creators
+13 → 74 domainsLimited creator-collaboration chawan, each with its own English landing page to earn citations.
Month 8 · Pitch
+14 → 88 domainsAustralian and Singaporean design outlets; Japanese-language pitch to domestic craft media.
Month 9 · Amplify
+14 → 102 domainsGift-guide placements in three languages; follow-up on every earlier story for refreshed links.
Month 10 · Amplify
+13 → 115 domainsSecond reclamation sweep for mentions the coverage itself generated.
Month 11 · Mend
+9 → 124 domainsCoverage slows by design; internal links pass authority from press pages to product collections.
Month 12 · Whole
+6 → 130 domains130 referring domains; the English site now ranks above the marketplaces for its own name.
The whole bowl
Mended, and more valuable for it.
12 → 130
Referring domains
+221%
International direct orders
3 → 47
EN keywords top 10
80% → 46%
Marketplace share of sales
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
Where the 118 new links came from
- Reclaimed mentions34
- Creator & blog collaborations31
- Design journals22
- Japanese press & craft media22
- Restored dead links9
Three continents: Europe 41 · Asia-Pacific 39 · North America 38.
English rankings (Google, US/UK/AU blended)
| Keyword | Month 0 | Month 12 |
|---|---|---|
| kyoto ceramics shop | #14 | #1 |
| kyoto pottery studio | #23 | #2 |
| handmade chawan | #37 | #3 |
| handmade stoneware tea bowl | #48 | #4 |
| shino glaze cups | not ranked | #6 |
| japanese stoneware mugs | not ranked | #7 |
| buy japanese pottery online | #61 | #9 |
| japanese pottery gift | #72 | #10 |
Get a plan like this
If your best customers can only find you through someone else’s storefront, the cracks can be mended — patiently, and in gold.