Selected work · 02
The salve is called Harzsalbe. Austria searches for Pechsalbe.
Ariane Baron, Innsbruck's self-styled “modern herb witch,” stirs a spruce-resin salve by hand and sells it only through pharmacies and health-food stores. Before we designed a single page, we measured what her customers type into Google. The result is a website that uses their words and sends every visitor to one of 42 stockists.
Role
Research, design, build
Services
Market & search research · SEO strategy · Brand guidelines · Web design · Development · Hosting & care
Duration
About 12 weeks · ongoing care
Background
A hand-stirred salve from Tyrol that hardly anyone could find online.
Ariane gathers spruce resin in the forests around Innsbruck and stirs it into her HexnGlück Harzsalbe, with organic calendula, chamomile and yarrow and Tyrolean beeswax. There is deliberately no online shop. The salve sits on the shelves of selected pharmacies and health-food stores, and that's where customers should go.
Her old website looked good, but it was a single page, and visitors had to answer a full-screen cookie dialog before they saw anything. In July 2026 Google showed it for just 11 search terms, none of them on page one, for an estimated 20 visits a month. For “harzsalbe,” a partner pharmacy selling her product ranked above the brand itself. And Google's AI answers in Austria never cited hexnglueck.at at all, while Sonnentor was cited 410 times.
Challenge
Customers were searching. Just not in Ariane's words.
In Austria, this kind of salve has been called Pechsalbe for generations. Pech is the old word for tree resin. “Pechsalbe” gets 720 searches a month, “Harzsalbe” 210. Across all variants, 81% of searches start with “Pech…” (Google Ads data for Austria, July 2026). The old site never used the word once. On top of that, the results page for “Harzsalbe” was led by a heavily advertised €80 salve, surrounded by review articles along the lines of “rip-off, or does it actually work?” Building on “Harzsalbe” alone meant inheriting that reputation.
Three more conditions came from the business itself. With no shop, every visit has to end at a stockist or it's lost. Ariane's growth goal is more partner pharmacies, but pharmacies don't find their suppliers on Google: of the 35 supplier search terms we tested, the biggest got 30 searches a month in all of Austria, and most got none. And in a pharmacy channel there are no healing promises and no superlatives. Trust comes from facts.
Before
Good-looking, but just one page.
The colors and typefaces came from the old site and stayed. We unified them and wrote Ariane's first brand guidelines from them. What was missing: subpages, the word “Pechsalbe,” structured data for search engines, and a first impression without a cookie wall. On a phone it took 3.2 seconds before any content appeared (Lighthouse, mobile, October 10, 2026).
How we worked
Measured first, designed second.
Before the first draft, Ariane got a 9-page report (July 31, 2026), built with professional SEO tools: 42 customer search terms with Google Ads search volumes, 35 terms from the pharmacy side, 9 Google results pages read in detail, and every Google AI answer on the topic. Two weeks later we measured again and corrected whatever had moved.
Her product name, her customers' word.
The salve is still called HexnGlück Harzsalbe. But “Pechsalbe” appears in every relevant title, heading and first paragraph, and a page of its own tells the story behind the word. Each page owns one cluster of real searches, from “pechsalbe wirkung” to “ringelblumensalbe” (calendula salve) with 2,900 searches a month. No page competes with another.
Every visit ends at a stockist.
Without a shop, only one thing counts: can people find the nearest pharmacy? The stockist finder lists 42 pharmacies and health-food stores, filterable by region, each with a website link and directions. Every buy button on the site leads there.
A partner page that does the selling.
Pharmacies arrive through Ariane's visit or a colleague's recommendation, not through Google. So the page for pharmacies answers everything they need to decide: pharmacy product codes for every size, a starter pack, delivery in 2–3 days, display material and the product folder to download, an inquiry form. The research itself became the pitch: “Pechsalbe” is searched 720 times a month in Austria. Existing partners reorder through their own online form.
After launch
Two days live, on page one for “pechsalbe wirkung.”
On October 7–8, 2026, the first day of Search Console data after launch, hexnglueck.at appeared for “pechsalbe wirkung” (what Pechsalbe does, 480 searches a month) at an average position of 8.6, and for “ringelblumensalbe wirkung” (the calendula equivalent, 1,300 searches a month) at 7.6. Both are page one.
14 of that day's 21 search queries were about Pechsalbe, calendula salve or resin salves. In the 15 days before, on the old site, not a single query contained “pech” or “harz.” The impressions landed on exactly the pages the research had planned for them: Pechsalbe, calendula, spruce resin, chamomile, yarrow.
This is an early signal, not traffic yet: nobody had clicked on these queries so far. But the knowledge pages were working from day one, and we can see it because Search Console was running from the start.
What's behind it
Facts checked at the source
The resin pages cite four peer-reviewed Finnish studies on spruce-resin salve (Sipponen 2008 and 2012, Rautio 2007 and 2012), each checked in PubMed. Where Ariane's draft promised too much, we toned it down together. In a pharmacy channel, credibility is the product.
Checked in a real browser
Every page was checked in light mode, dark mode and on a phone before launch. We tested the cookie banner by hand: “decline” really sends nothing. Old addresses and the old product folder redirect to the right pages, and the QR codes on her printed folders and counter displays still land on the site.
Search Console from day one
Indexing requested on launch day. Two days later all 10 core pages were in Google's index (URL Inspection, October 8, 2026). From here on we measure what the site does instead of guessing.
Readable for search engines and AI
Structured data on every page: the salve with all its sizes, answers to common questions, Ariane as the person behind the content, and each of the 42 stockists with its address. The old site had none. It's the entry ticket to AI answers that had never cited HexnGlück.
Privacy that holds
No tracking until a visitor says yes. Analytics run on EU servers and count only page views, clicks and forms. Fonts are self-hosted, so nothing goes to Google before consent. The cookie wall became a small banner.
Her content, her voice
Ariane writes her copy in a spreadsheet; we brought it in over five rounds between July and October. The ingredient pages name her real partner farms, from Mary's Biokräuter in Afling to the organic beekeeper Robert Andres. Provenance is the trust argument, and it's true.
The new website is online and I'm super happy with the result. SEO- and GEO-optimized all the way.
Ariane Baron
Founder, HexnGlück
The new site
Outcome
- Page 1
- for “pechsalbe wirkung” and “ringelblumensalbe wirkung,” two days after launch
- 14
- of the 21 first-day search queries were about Pechsalbe, resin or calendula salve (before: none)
- 42
- stockists, filterable by region, each with directions
- 1 → 13
- pages instead of a single one
- 1.3 s
- until content shows on a phone, down from 3.2 s (Lighthouse, October 2026)
- 7×
- lighter homepage: 0.75 MB instead of 5.3 to 7.2 MB
Working together
Do you know what your customers search for?
We measure it before we design: real search volumes, real results pages, and a report you read before you commit to anything. Tell us what you sell and who should buy it.