The brief

Salter & Sons is a fourth-generation family preserves business that moved D2C in 2022. By 2024 they were doing £140k/month with 78% of revenue coming directly from Meta ads. Blended ROAS had fallen from 4.2× to 2.1× over eighteen months, and they were spending more to stand still.

The diagnosis

The SEO foundation was effectively nonexistent — homepage ranking nowhere relevant, product pages duplicated and thin, no schema, no content for the queries their buyers were actually searching. Meanwhile the Meta programme was running at saturation: same audiences, same creative formats, fatigue measurable across every campaign.

The approach

We started with SEO — technical rebuild, category architecture, product page rewrites, schema, and a content programme targeting “best [category] UK” and “[category] gift” queries that mapped to their actual purchase behaviour. As organic traffic grew, we shifted Meta spend down month-on-month, redirecting some of the saved budget into lifecycle (which they had also neglected).

The outcome

Organic traffic: +340%
Organic revenue: from 8% of total to 31%
Meta spend: reduced 40%, blended ROAS recovered to 3.6×
Total revenue: +22% over twelve months
The business is now structurally less dependent on paid spend efficiency

“We thought we needed to find new ad channels. Lumos told us, politely, that we needed to fix the foundation. They were right. We’re running the same business at lower paid dependency than we’ve had in three years.”

— James Salter, Managing Director

Surfaces involved: SEO (primary), Paid (rebalanced), Lifecycle (secondary)