How We Doubled Organic Traffic for a Shopify Store in 6 Months

A pet accessories brand with strong products and a loyal customer base had been relying almost entirely on paid social and word of mouth for new customer acquisition. They had a Shopify store, a blog they'd posted to twice in 2022, and a Google Search Console account they'd never properly looked at. Organic search was an untapped channel — and within six months, it became their largest.

Baseline Assessment

At the start of the engagement, the store was receiving approximately 8,000 organic sessions per month, almost all from branded queries. Non-branded organic visibility was essentially zero. A Screaming Frog crawl revealed 340 technical issues including duplicate title tags across collection and product pages, missing H1s, and 118 pages returning 200 status codes that were actually duplicates of paginated collection pages.

Phase 1: Technical Foundation

• Fixed duplicate title tag issue caused by Shopify's default collection/product URL structure
• Added canonical tags to all paginated collection pages
• Resolved 47 broken internal links across the site
• Implemented structured data for products (price, availability, reviews)
• Improved crawl budget by disallowing unnecessary URL parameters in robots.txt

Phase 2: Content Architecture

We identified five core topic clusters aligned to high-intent keyword categories: dog harnesses, cat enrichment, dog training, pet travel, and pet nutrition. For each cluster, we audited existing content gaps using Ahrefs and produced a 12-week content calendar. Each piece was written to target a specific keyword, answered a genuine user question, and linked back to at least two commercial collection pages.

Collection Page Optimisation

Shopify collection pages are often under-optimised because they default to a product grid with no descriptive copy. We added 150-word introductory sections above the fold on the 12 highest-traffic collection pages, targeting head terms and including FAQ schema. These pages moved from page 4–6 to page 1–2 on their primary terms within 10 weeks.

Phase 3: Link Building

We ran a digital PR campaign around a pet owner survey, generating coverage in four national publications and 14 pet-focused websites. The campaign earned 28 new referring domains in six weeks — a significant boost to domain authority for a site that had previously had very little external coverage.

Results

• Organic sessions: 8,000 → 19,000/month (138% increase)
• Non-branded keyword rankings: 0 → 340 in top 10
• Organic revenue grew by £28,000/month
• 28 new referring domains earned via digital PR