From page three to category leader in 11 months
A full category re-architecture, crawl budget cleanup, and 40,000 products of structured data — followed by a link program targeting the trade press.
The Challenge
A retailer with 40,000 SKUs was invisible for every category term that mattered. Faceted navigation had generated hundreds of thousands of near-duplicate URLs, Google was spending its crawl budget on filter pages that would never convert, and category pages carried almost no unique content. Two previous agencies had produced audits; neither had implemented anything.
What We Did
- 01Re-architected the category tree around actual search demand, collapsing 1,200 thin collections into 340 that each mapped to a real keyword cluster.
- 02Took control of faceted navigation with canonical rules and robots directives, cutting indexable URLs by 78% and redirecting crawl budget to pages that sell.
- 03Rolled out product and offer structured data across all 40,000 SKUs, plus review markup that earned star snippets on category-level queries.
- 04Ran a two-season digital PR program: original industry data studies pitched to trade press, earning links category pages could never attract on their own.
The Outcome
By month eleven the site held top-three positions for 1,847 commercial keywords, non-brand organic revenue was up 312%, and organic became the largest revenue channel — ahead of paid for the first time in the company's history.
National Ecommerce Retailer. Client name available on request.