Illustrative case study

A fictional business. The figures are a modelled scenario, not a client result.

SEO case study · 15-month ascent

Tundrel Supplements

DTC supplement brand · Denver

Scaling a mountain-sourced supplement brand beyond paid social

+$1.2Mmodelled annual organic revenue

14,00011,2008,400TRAILHEAD · 5,280 FTCAMP ICAMP IICAMP IIICAMP IV+$1.2MSUMMIT · 14,115 FTN

Contour interval: 1% organic shareFig. 1 — the route

Region
North America
Industry
Health & Wellness
Plan
Commerce SEO
Duration
15 months

01 · Trailhead conditions

Paid social was carrying the whole pack

Rising CAC on paid social and a Shopify store with thin collection pages left organic search at under 6% of revenue.

Tundrel Supplements sources adaptogens and minerals from high-altitude growers and sells direct from Denver. Growth had been bought, not earned: every new customer came through Meta and TikTok auctions whose CPMs rose 41% in a year. The Shopify store had 186 products and 52 collections, yet almost none of them could be found for the ingredient-led searches its customers typed every day.

The brief: build an organic channel big enough to let paid social shrink to a prospecting role — without discounting and without a replatform.

Revenue by channel at the trailhead (modelled)
  • Paid social61%
  • Email & SMS18%
  • Direct15%
  • Organic search6%

02 · Hazards on the route

What the audit found before we set out

  • CollectionsSteep

    52 collection pages carried a product grid and nothing else: no copy, no FAQs, duplicate H1s from the theme. Google ranked product pages or Amazon instead.

  • FeedWashout

    412 Merchant Center disapprovals — missing GTINs, bundle prices that did not match the landing page — kept 38% of SKUs out of Shopping entirely.

  • ReviewsLoose rock

    4,800 reviews loaded client-side by an app iframe; no Review or AggregateRating markup reached Googlebot, so no stars in results.

  • SpeedExposed

    23 third-party scripts, a 2.8 MB hero carousel. Mobile LCP 4.6 s, INP 380 ms on the cart drawer; 61% of URLs failed Core Web Vitals.

  • CrawlOvergrown

    Tag and filter URLs generated 9,300 crawlable near-duplicates against 186 real products, diluting every collection.

  • IntentOff-route

    Ingredient queries (‘magnesium glycinate for sleep’) landed on blog posts with no path to the collection that sells it.

03 · Four trails to the top

The route we planned

Built on our Commerce SEO plan: four parallel trails, each owned by a specialist, converging on the same summit — revenue from search that does not need an auction.

  1. Trail 1 · Months 2–3, 10, 13–14

    Product feeds

    Rebuilt the Shopify → Merchant Center feed: GTINs, structured titles, custom labels for margin tiers, a supplemental promotions feed and free listings. The feed became a ranking asset, not an ad input.

  2. Trail 2 · Months 7, 9, 14

    Review schema

    Server-rendered Product, Review and AggregateRating schema on every SKU, a seller-ratings feed and review-request flows aimed at low-count products, so stars show up in organic and Shopping.

  3. Trail 3 · Months 4–5, 8, 11, 15

    Collection page SEO

    52 collections mapped to buyer intent, each with guidance copy, comparison tables, FAQ schema and crawl-safe filters; ingredient hubs link down into the collection that converts.

  4. Trail 4 · Months 1, 6, 12

    Core Web Vitals

    App audit (23 → 9 scripts), AVIF imagery, deferred review widgets and a theme performance budget, so every page we improved also loaded in under 2.5 s.

04 · The ascent, month by month

15 months, five base camps

Month 00 / 15

5,280 ft

Organic share
6.0%
Top-10 collections
3
TRAILHEADCAMP ICAMP IICAMP IIICAMP IVSUMMIT

  1. Month 01 · Core Web Vitals

    Survey the terrain

    Full crawl of 1,140 Shopify URLs, Search Console and Merchant Center baselines, revenue attribution split by channel.

  2. Month 02 · Product feeds

    Clean the feed

    412 Merchant Center disapprovals cleared: missing GTINs, mismatched prices on bundles, sale dates without an end.

  3. Month 03 · Product feeds

    Camp I reached

    Enrich titles

    Product titles rewritten to brand + form + key ingredient + count; custom labels for margin and bestseller tiers.

  4. Month 04 · Collection page SEO

    Map the collections

    Keyword map of 2,600 queries clustered to 52 collection intents; 18 thin tag pages noindexed and merged.

  5. Month 05 · Collection page SEO

    Write the guidebooks

    First 14 collections get 300–600 words of buyer guidance, comparison tables and FAQs under the product grid.

  6. Month 06 · Core Web Vitals

    Camp II reached

    Lighten the pack

    App bloat cut from 23 scripts to 9; hero images to AVIF; mobile LCP 4.6 s → 2.1 s on collection templates.

  7. Month 07 · Review schema

    Mark up the reviews

    Product, AggregateRating and Review schema from the reviews app, rendered server-side, validated on all 186 SKUs.

  8. Month 08 · Collection page SEO

    Internal trail markers

    Faceted filters made crawl-safe; breadcrumb and sibling-collection links added to every collection page.

  9. Month 09 · Review schema

    Camp III reached

    Stars in the results

    Review snippets live on 71% of product URLs; review-request emails tuned to lift volume on low-count SKUs.

  10. Month 10 · Product feeds

    Free listings

    Free product listings and supplemental feed for promotions; Shopping impressions pass 3.5× baseline.

  11. Month 11 · Collection page SEO

    Second wave

    Remaining 38 collections enriched; ingredient hubs (ashwagandha, magnesium, sea moss) linked to their collections.

  12. Month 12 · Core Web Vitals

    Camp IV reached

    Hold the line

    INP fixed on the cart drawer (380 ms → 140 ms); performance budget enforced in theme deploys.

  13. Month 13 · Product feeds

    Re-cut paid social

    Branded and collection terms now owned organically; prospecting budget trimmed 18% without revenue loss.

  14. Month 14 · Review schema

    Merchant ratings

    Seller-rating feed submitted; store rating appears on Shopping and in ads, lifting click-through.

  15. Month 15 · Collection page SEO

    Summit reached

    Summit report

    41 collections in the top 10; organic share of revenue at 24%; next-ascent roadmap for subscriptions.

05 · Summit report

What the climb is modelled to deliver

Organic revenue share

6% → 24%

Collection pages top 10

3 → 41

Shopping impressions

+388%

Blended CAC

−22%

Modelled scenario for a fictional business — not a client result. Rankings and traffic are never guaranteed; see our Terms.

Collection rankings at the summit

Target keywords, their collection page, monthly search volume, and Google position before and after (modelled)
KeywordVol/moMonth 0Month 15
magnesium glycinate gummies/collections/magnesium14,800#47#3
sea moss capsules/collections/sea-moss22,200#61#5
ashwagandha supplement for stress/collections/adaptogens9,900#38#4
electrolyte powder for hiking/collections/hydration3,600—#1
vegan omega 3 algae oil/collections/omega8,100#29#6
lion's mane mushroom capsules/collections/mushrooms18,100#72#8
colostrum supplement/collections/gut-health27,100—#9
supplements made in colorado/collections/all880#12#1

104,680 combined monthly searches, all now landing on a collection that sells the product.

The same search, before and after

Month 0 · position 47

tundrel.example › collections › magnesium

Magnesium – Tundrel Supplements

Shop Magnesium. 6 products.

Month 15 · position 3

tundrel.example › collections › magnesium

Magnesium Glycinate Gummies for Sleep | Tundrel

Rating: 4.8 · 1,214 reviews · $24.00 · In stock

Chelated, third-party tested magnesium from Colorado. Compare forms, doses and which suits sleep or recovery.

Illustrative SERP mock-up; ‘tundrel.example’ is a placeholder domain.

Organic share of revenue, by month

Rust bars mark base camps (every third month).

Your trailhead

Get a plan like this

Feeds, review markup, collection pages and speed — mapped to your store and your margins.

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