Culprit Underwear: 7.5x More Revenue and a 100% Organic Traffic Lift
A national DTC underwear retailer relied on branded searches while Calvin Klein and Tommy John owned the commercial terms. While the site offered a wide range of in-demand styles and served a growing customer base, it faced challenges with SEO visibility in a crowded apparel market, resulting in missed opportunities for organic traffic and sales
The Challenge
The site competed against established giants such as Calvin Klein and Tommy John. Most organic traffic was branded, which meant the store was missing high-intent non-branded searches and revenue on commercial terms like boxer briefs, women’s underwear, and underwear bundles. Our strategy centered on rebalancing branded versus non-branded traffic.
What was holding rankings back
- Organic traffic was heavily branded, meaning the site was not capturing enough non-branded category, product, and commercial search demand.
- Product collection pages were under-optimized for high-intent transactional keywords, limiting visibility for shoppers ready to compare or buy.
- Product detail pages lacked enough unique, search-focused content, making it harder to rank beyond branded or exact product searches.
- Supporting blog content had clear topic gaps, allowing competitors and publishers to capture informational searches earlier in the buying journey.
- Internal linking was weak across collections, products, blogs, and buying guides, reducing crawl depth, topical authority, and equity flow.
- Rankings were inconsistent across high-value commercial keywords because SEO signals were not aligned across the full catalog.
- Google Merchant listings and product feed data were not fully optimized, limiting visibility across free product listings and Shopping surfaces.
- Technical issues such as duplicate content, canonical gaps, indexation noise, and faceted navigation risks were diluting organic performance.
How we turned it around
We performed a comprehensive ecommerce SEO strategy focused on the pages with commercial and transactional intent terms.
Technical SEO Audit & Fixes
We audited the ecommerce site to uncover crawl, indexation, canonical, duplicate content, site speed, structured data, sitemap, and faceted navigation issues that were limiting product and collection page visibility.
Comparative & Competitive Market Share Analysis
We analysed top organic competitors to understand where they were gaining market share across product categories, collection pages, informational content, backlinks, and SERP features, then used those gaps to shape the SEO roadmap.
Keyword Development & Intent Research
We mapped keywords across the ecommerce funnel, from informational searches to category-level comparison terms and high-intent product searches, ensuring each keyword was matched to the right page type and buying stage.
SEO Content Audit & Relaunch Prioritization for BOFU Pages
We reviewed bottom-of-the-funnel pages, especially product collection pages and product detail pages, to identify weak content, missing commercial intent, poor internal linking, duplicate copy, and layout issues affecting rankings and conversions.
Supporting Blog Creation & Optimization
We created and optimized supporting blog content based on topic gaps, buyer questions, comparison searches, and product education opportunities to strengthen topical authority and funnel users toward commercial pages.
Authority Building With Quality Backlinks & PR
We focused on earning high-quality backlinks through PR-led campaigns, relevant brand mentions, and editorial placements to improve domain authority, build trust, and support rankings for competitive ecommerce categories.
Google Merchant Listing Optimization
We optimized Google Merchant Center and free product listings to improve product visibility across Google Shopping surfaces. This included reviewing product feed quality, titles, descriptions, categories, images, availability, pricing, GTINs, and policy compliance to help more products appear for high-intent shopping searches.
The Results
Organic revenue, traffic value, and average ranking all improved month over month, with revenue the standout at +330.8%.
Clicks and impressions climbed steadily after the campaign began in February 2024.
Organic keywords and traffic grew significantly through the engagement, holding through the August core update.
The rise in AI citations shows the LLM-focused restructuring working. Clear summaries, Q&As, and definitions made the content easy for Google AI Overview, Perplexity, and Gemini to extract and cite.
Ready to grow your store beyond branded search?
Book a strategy call and get a clear view of your site’s authority gaps limiting your store’s rankings, visibility, and sales.