A fictional business. The figures are a modelled scenario, not a client result.
SEO case study · Commerce SEO
Cordonnerie Vaucel
Shoe repair & leather care, 5 shops · Lyon, France
organic ecommerce revenue · 10 months
01 · The challenge
Their in-house polishes and care kits had loyal walk-in buyers but no online visibility, and product pages lacked any structured data.
Three generations of the family have resoled Lyon's shoes, and for twenty years they have mixed their own waxes and creams in the back of the Croix-Rousse shop. Regulars bought them by the jar. Online, the same products sat on a single unstructured page that Google treated as a list of strangers.
The brief: turn a cobbler's shelf into a national shop, without losing what makes the five Lyon shops matter: repairs, done by hand, nearby.
Every engagement starts like a repair: inspect the whole shoe before touching it. Each finding was written up as a ticket and closed on the bench.
Technical
No Product, Offer or AggregateRating markup. Google could not read price, stock or GTIN, so none of the polishes were eligible for rich results.
Feed
The shop platform could export a feed, but nobody had switched it on. Zero products in free listings, zero Shopping surfaces.
Content
Waxes, creams, brushes, laces and trees sat in a single 140-item grid. No category URL to rank for 'cirage cuir' or 'kit entretien chaussures'.
Content
Titles like 'Pot n°3 – brun' meant everything to walk-in regulars and nothing to a shopper in Rennes. No leather type, no colour family, no size.
Technical
Each of 22 polish shades had its own thin URL with near-identical text, splitting signals and wasting crawl on duplicates.
Local
Shop pages never mentioned the products sold at the counter, and product pages never offered a drop-off for repairs at the nearest Lyon branch.
02 · The strategy
Built on our Commerce SEO plan: product feeds, category pages, merchant center, schema markup, worked in that order.
TOOL 01
One clean feed, threaded through every product, with the attributes Google actually asks for.
TOOL 02
Shaped the catalogue around how people search, the way a last shapes a shoe.
TOOL 03
Opened the account, verified the shop and pierced every disapproval until the catalogue sat clean.
TOOL 04
Blind-stamped every page with the facts machines read: price, stock, reviews and which shop repairs what.
03 · The making
Cut, last, stitch, finish: the order a shoe is made in, and the order the shop was rebuilt in. Each punch-hole is a month.
Month 1 · Cut
Crawl, catalogue export and search-demand map for 140 SKUs.
Month 2 · Cut
Account verified, first feed submitted, 61 items flagged.
Month 3 · Last
Eight category URLs live; flat 'Boutique' grid redirected.
Month 4 · Last
All 140 product titles and descriptions rewritten for search.
Month 5 · Stitch
Product, Offer and review markup validated on every page.
Month 6 · Stitch
Zero disapprovals; local inventory live for five shops.
Month 7 · Stitch
Product pages offer drop-off at the nearest Lyon shop.
Month 8 · Finish
Category advice expanded; internal links from guides to kits.
Month 9 · Finish
Care-kit category pushed for the December gifting peak.
Month 10 · Finish
Feed rules and schema documented for the family's own team.
04 · The results
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
05 · The ledger
A sample of tracked terms on Google France: national category searches that the new pages earned, and the Lyon repair searches that kept the shops busy.
| Search term | Searches / mo | Before | After | Movement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| cirage chaussures cuirleather shoe polish · Polish & cream | 6,600 | #47 | #4 | |
| crème rénovatrice cuirleather renovating cream · Polish & cream | 2,900 | — | #3 | |
| cire pour cuir naturellenatural leather wax · Polish & cream | 1,300 | #62 | #2 | |
| cirage bordeauxoxblood polish · Polish & cream | 720 | #18 | #1 | |
| kit entretien chaussures cuirleather shoe care kit · Care kits | 3,600 | — | #5 | |
| coffret cirage cadeaupolish gift box · Care kits | 1,600 | #71 | #3 | |
| kit entretien sac cuirleather bag care kit · Care kits | 880 | — | #6 | |
| brosse crin de chevalhorsehair brush · Brushes & trees | 2,400 | #39 | #7 | |
| embauchoir bois cèdrecedar shoe tree · Brushes & trees | 1,900 | — | #8 | |
| lacets ciréswaxed laces · Brushes & trees | 1,000 | #54 | #4 | |
| cordonnerie lyonshoe repair Lyon · Repairs | 2,400 | #6 | #1 | |
| ressemelage lyonresoling Lyon · Repairs | 590 | #9 | #1 | |
| réparation talon lyonheel repair Lyon · Repairs | 320 | #14 | #2 |
“—” means not in the top 100. Monthly searches are modelled Google France estimates.
Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.
Feeds, categories, Merchant Center and schema, cut to your catalogue and stitched by hand.