I was hired by a well-known footwear and fashion brand renowned for its iconic boots and shoes, to help amplify their online presence and drive organic growth.
Key Points
- Partnered with a global footwear and fashion brand to reverse declining organic performance and unlock growth.
- Identified major strategic issues with PLP structure, titles, and cannibalisation, then re-mapped and optimised the entire category ecosystem.
- Delivered rapid impact through hands-on implementation, technical fixes, and a revised canonical strategy, while building a long-term SEO roadmap.
- Doubled organic traffic in 6 months (500K to 1M monthly), driven by high-intent, non-branded product category rankings.
Their situation
The team wanted my outside perspective as an external consultant whilst behaving as part of the team, with full access to all of their internal systems, an internal email address and permissions to edit the site directly. This was a unique opportunity to get optimisations implemented quickly and look to tackle internal barriers that can sometimes block progress.
Traffic had been slowly declining due to a combination of factors, some of which were to do with the general search landscape and general brand searches. The manager in charge of SEO had a lot on her plate and wanted a fresh review of the situation, giving free reign to focus on areas where we might have the greatest impact on sales.
APPROACH
I conducted a thorough PLP (product landing page) audit, technical audit, content audit, and keyword research deck, and quickly identified the key issue holding them back.
I found enormous issues with the titles of the product category pages due to a lack of focus, lack of strategy and lack of understanding around the nuances between men’s, women’s and unisex products. Titles were being used to stuff information in which was causing cannibalisation with other pages, and every page was treated like a single entity rather than part of a wider ecosystem.
I strategically mapped out every PLP URL, looking at them holistically to be able to clearly see crossover and to create consistency in approach. I then rewrote all titles and recommended the changes be urgently implemented.
In the meantime, I started working through granular optimisations of priority PLPs, improving their clarity, comprehensiveness and focus. I cut out poor practices and provided guidance documentation to the team to encourage best practices. Ultimately, I worked through improving the user experience of the pages in great detail.
Technical
I then turned my attention to key technical fixes, some straightforward (broken links, duplicate content, missing H1s), and some more complex. I made a big strategic decision to fundamentally shift their canonical strategy for unisex pages, opening up much bigger avenues for traffic.
Long term planning
After the immediate opportunities were covered, it was important to plan out a long term strategy.
I used keyword research to find hundreds of opportunities for new PLPs based on combinations of search terms, for products they already had but were only available by non-indexable filtered pages. These included variations of colours, styles and materials. I then ordered them by search volume and presented back the biggest opportunities to begin building pages.
From there I hosted a content workshop, looking to glean insights and ideas from the team on the types of high relevance informational topics that could be covered on the site, and conducted keyword research to validate those ideas and develop a content plan.
Impact
The project lasted 6 months and so much of the long term strategy is still being implemented, but despite that, organic traffic has doubled from around 500K per month in March 2025 to 1M per month in December 2025.
This includes ranking for highly competitive non-branded transactional keywords for types of footwear, with high intent to purchase. Unfortunately, I don’t have the sales figures to share, but virtually every page that experienced growth is a product category page so the conversion rate is likely to be high.
The company hired an in-house SEO specialist during this project, and I was able to pass on the strategy and findings I’d uncovered during the project for him to run with. I also worked to up-skill individual teams on best practices for web, ecommerce and SEO, and I produced documentation to help ensure longevity. I implemented new processes and attempted to foster a culture of user-first approaches to building out the site.
If you’d like to find out how I can help your website with SEO support or website management, feel free to get in touch, I’d love to hear from you.
