Overview

After two years of failed SEO attempts with other eCommerce SEO agencies, we transformed this Shopify puzzle brand's organic revenue in just 5 months with Shopify SEO, taking their organic revenue from $1,011 to $8,000/month.

Here's the exact strategy we used to achieve these results:

In this comprehensive Shopify SEO guide, you'll learn:

• How we fixed critical technical SEO issues in under 18 hours

• Our collection page optimization workflow that drives real revenue

• Strategic keyword targeting for immediate Shopify SEO wins

• How we ranked for 195+ money keywords on page 1 of Google

• Creative collection page strategy that outperformed traditional approaches

Contrary to popular belief, implementing effective SEO for ecommerce websites does not have to be a long process, and this case study shows how we were able to 8X organic revenue in just 5 months.

Growth Stats:

• Started working together in August 2024

• 747% increase in organic search revenue from $1,011 in July 2024 to $8,567 in November 2024

• 453% increase in clicks from 456 in July 2024 to 2526 clicks in November 2024

• 195 money page keywords on page 1 of Google (started with zero keywords anywhere near page 1)

Their Revenue

Their Rankings

Their Search Console

The Brand's SEO Background

This brand previously worked with 2 popular SEO agencies, both founded & operated by famous SEO gurus. The first agency charged them $4000/month — no results. The second agency charged them $5000/month — still, no results.

Both of those agencies stole well over $100,000 from that brand for 2 years straight — highway robbery. And while notably committed to SEO, the brand didn't invest in any other channels aside from trying Google Ads for about 60 days. We're in discussion to get them started on Meta & Google Ads to help them scale faster, just working to find the right partners for them.

I've made all of this money for them purely on SEO — no branded search assistance — and I did it all on our lowest tier retainer. This retainer is about half of what those other agencies charged them, and I've delivered quite literally 7.5x more revenue for them in a QUARTER of the time that each of the other agencies had.

The Strategy

Technical

The founder of the previous agency was largely a technical-focused SEO, so it's strange that there were still tons of technical SEO issues on the site.

Here's what we fixed in the first 72 hours of signing the contract:

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

• sorting pagination with proper canonicals to avoid duplicate content

• 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.

On Page

Update Existing Collections

The previous agencies built just 3 collections and wrote 12 blogs — all of it was clearly unedited AI content. Unsurprisingly, none of it ranked. The collections were optimized for keywords that were WAY too competitive for the brand — the blogs drove a few clicks each month but were more or less useless.

We ran our Collection Optimization Workflow (as we do with every brand) on their 3 existing collections. Rankings jumped IMMEDIATELY after doing so (ranking changes shown 1 week post-workflow):

The original collection pages were 2000+ words long, full of unedited AI content that was literally missing the target keyword in some instances. We immediately trimmed them to 800 words, removing any unnecessary sections and using GSC data to enrich the page content with specific queries.

This is the easiest win we get for literally every single client.

Create New Collections

Most brands incorrectly believe that SKUs are limited to just one collection — this is untrue. The brand has 4 products, basically 4 different puzzle sizes. The other agencies created 3 collections to target different descriptive puzzle keywords, technically on the right track and what I would've done.

The problem was that the keywords were too competitive — they should've flagged this right away and found less competitive keywords they could actually win.

I found out later that the agency created 7 other collections but never published them. Pathetic, honestly. But even worse, they targeted bogus keywords like "wedding anniversary gifts." They sell puzzles — it would be statistically impossible to rank a collection page full of puzzles for the keyword "wedding anniversary gifts."

We swapped this particular page to target 'wedding anniversary puzzles.' Only 40 searches/month but insanely easy. We rank #5 already and they've actually sold a few of them, something the last guys never accomplished.

We then built out 35 new collections targeting tons of long-tail, transactional keywords. These were then separated into one of a few categories:

• For Someone (wedding anniversary, birthday, etc)

• By Holiday (Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc)

• Season (Summer, Winter, etc)

All of these collections featured the same 4 products, just optimized for different searchers that had specific puzzles in mind. These new pages are a major factor in their SEO conversion rate soared to 3.19%, a 139% increase from before.

Recap:

This brand started at literal 0, and we've made them more money in the last 5 months than the last two agencies made in the last 24 months COMBINED.

Why it works

This strategy's biggest advantage was our creativity. Instead of just building 3 collections and hoping they rank, we brute forced 35 new collections to ensure the brand could make back the money that those other agencies practically stole from them. For this brand, we built a ton of collection pages. For others, we're more link building and blog content focused.

The key is knowing which elements are most important to the particular brand, not just reusing the same cookie cutter strategy over & over, praying it works.

If you're a Shopify brand that wants insane results like this with a fully DFY service, book a discovery call with New Seas below.