I ranked this Shopify fitness brand for their target keyword in just 3 months, which is even faster than I expected.

I'm going to break down the exact strategy I used, starting with how much their business has grown in those 3 months, then getting into the technical, on page, and backlink tactics I used to make this happen so quickly. Make sure to stick around till the end of the video so you can replicate this step-by-step for your brand and rank #1 for your dream keyword in just a couple of months.

Let's get into it.

Growth Stats:

We started working together in November 2024, and since that time, the brand's organic search revenue has grown 51% from $5652 in November 2024 to $8,726 in January 2025.

Clicks have increased by 47% in this same time period, growing from 3768 in November to 5542 in January. And the brand now ranks for 327 new money page keywords in the top 3 spots of Google, including #1 for their most important keyword.

Their Rankings

Background

This brand had never intentionally done any SEO prior to working with us, but even so, they actually ranked fairly well for some terms. I showed the Founder on our discovery call that they already ranked on page 1 for some product pages and he was shocked — now they rank #1 for those same pages, plus a ton of others, and he's stoked.

The brand has been around for about 15-20 years so their domain age definitely helped out when we started our campaign, it's also why they had a few page 1 rankings when we started — they'd simply just been around a long time which Google prefers, especially compared to a new site.

This brand is not your standard DTC brand — they spend $0 on Meta or any other paid social platforms. They've tried, didn't really care for it — so they scrapped it. They are an entirely search driven brand with SEO & Google Ads, plus their word of mouth & legacy do some heavy lifting for them as well.

The Strategy

Technical

You know I don't like to spend a ton of time on technical SEO because you simply cannot "technical SEO" your way to #1 spot on Google. Content and links will get you there, technical will not. In any case, we took care of the core issues we see on 99% of Shopify stores:

• restructuring their robots.txt file to noindex /tagged/ pages from blogs, products, etc.

• eliminating duplicate & thin content pages that result from pagination & improper canonicalization

• added schema

• fixed broken links

It was completed in the first 72 hours, alongside the custom strategy build. No long, drawn-out technical SEO audits — just simple & fast.

Too many agencies WASTE too much time and money on technical SEO. For 99% of eCom stores, technical SEO will not be a big needle mover — on page and off page SEO will be.

This is standard for most websites we work on. On page and off page SEO move the needle MUCH MORE than technical SEO. It doesn't make sense to spend weeks on technical SEO for 1% gains when you could write content and build links to earn 10% gains. This is a major problem with most SEO agencies — if they tell you that the first 3-4 weeks are spent on technical SEO, save your money — they will sit on their hands and do nothing for an entire month while you wait for results.

On Page

Update Existing Collections

The brand had 10-15 existing collections, some of them ranked for some super low volume keywords but there was obviously room for growth. We ran our Collection Page optimization workflow that we run with nearly every single brand we work with, analyzing the content of each page against the Search Console data to look for underperforming queries and easy wins.

For some collections, it was as simple as changing the meta title and updating a few words within the collection description. For others, we had to fully rewrite the collection page copy or add it for the first time.

Less than a week after updating the live pages, all positions moved up at least 3 spots, as is typical with this workflow.

Build New Collections

The initial focus of the campaign was the brand's lifting belts, they wanted to rank #1 for "lifting belts," which thanks to us — they now do!

Their initial setup was a singular collection with all of their lifting belts. This isn't unusual and it's not necessarily bad practice, but I knew building a few new lifting belt collections would give us more leverage.

So in addition to optimizing the primary lifting belt collection, we also built out collections for:

• women's lifting belts

• olympic weightlifting belts

• powerlifting belts

• and lever belts

Now, there are 5 belt collections, each of which is optimized for a more specific version of lifting belt. All 5 of these rank #1 or #2 now for their respective keywords.

This has also had a positive impact on conversion rate, as a powerlifter searching for a powerlifting-specific belt is much more likely to convert on a powerlifting collection page rather than just a general lifting belt page.

As of February, we've just now gotten into blog content — the initial focus was on the collections as it always should be in eCommerce. Our plan is to focus strictly on middle and bottom of funnel content, targeting keywords like:

• pros and cons of lifting belts

• types of weight lifting belts

• do weight lifting belts help lower back pain

• prong vs lever weight lifting belts

• and the like

We've also now moved onto a new batch of collections to focus on moving them into the #1 spot. That's how I prefer to operate — concentrated effort on one part of the site at a time, rather than diluted effort across the entire site. This method enabled us to rank #1 so quickly, because all of our efforts were directed at those few keywords.

Backlinks

On top of the content strategy, we've built an average of 5-10 backlinks each month. We're running with a mix of reactive PR links and link insertions.

The reactive PR links are branded anchor homepage links from sites that are typically DR 60+ and have hundreds of thousand of monthly organic visitors.

Link insertions are much more niche, we've targeted fitness & health websites and built a mixture of insertions to their collection pages and home pages. This is our favorite link strategy for our clients and it continues to work even in 2025.

Each strategy we build is custom-made for each brand, with varying amounts of pages built & optimized each month, and different link volumes & tactics — but we draw inspiration from the principles that work across all of our brands. So while they're all bespoke to the individual brand, at an extremely high level, the methodology is the same.

If you're a 7 or 8 figure Shopify brand that can't quite seem to crack SEO — book a discovery call with me below, I'll take care of it for you.