A gifting ecommerce store starting from almost nothing. GTmetrix graded the site at 42 percent and organic search was a rounding error in the traffic mix.
Up from 1,847
Up from 1,142
Across core gifting terms
Improved over the period
Fewer than 2,000 sessions in six months, a performance grade of F, and no keyword targeting on category pages. The store was invisible for every commercial gifting term in its market.
The site barely appeared for the terms its buyers were searching, so almost all traffic was direct or referral.
Monthly sessions were small enough that no content test could produce a readable result.
Few links, and few from sites with any authority in the niche.
Render blocking scripts, uncompressed images and no browser caching.
Titles and descriptions repeated across pages, and absent on others entirely.
Pages sat isolated, so authority never flowed from the strongest pages to the commercial ones.
Deferred JavaScript, browser caching, image compression, redirect chains removed and gzip enabled.
Keyword research, then titles, H1s, alt tags and metadata rewritten around the terms that carried commercial intent.
Internal linking restructured so authority reaches the money pages, and anchor text made descriptive.
Links from relevant sites in the niche, guest posts, and a link intersect analysis against competitors.
Positions and search volumes as recorded in Ahrefs. Screenshot of the same data is in the evidence section below.
Watermarked only. Figures are read directly from Analytics, Ahrefs and GTmetrix as they appeared at the time.
This project was delivered for a client in United Arab Emirates. The method is the same one we use in Australia, but the market, competitors and search behaviour were different.
Search has changed since then. Some of what worked here still works, and some of it has been replaced by newer requirements.
Your starting position, competition and budget are different. This is evidence of method, not a forecast of your result.
Every number here comes from the screenshots shown above. We have not rounded up, restated or recalculated anything.
No invented testimonials anywhere on this site. Where results were not verified, we say so on the page.
Two months of local SEO for an Australian local business, measured year on year.
Read the case study →Crawl errors cleared from 58,614 to 36 in a full technical rebuild.
Read the case study →Position 2 for a commercial term at 3,700 searches a month.
Read the case study →