Sample case study for demonstration. This engagement is illustrative: the scenario is typical of the work Axoria does, and the results are described without figures until verified client data is published.
The situation
A mid-market direct-to-consumer apparel retailer sold several thousand SKUs through a Shopify Plus store, with a small in-house marketing team and an external development agency. Organic search was the second-largest revenue channel, but nearly all of it was brand traffic, and paid acquisition costs had been climbing for several quarters.
The retailer approached Axoria for an SEO programme with one condition: any growth in traffic had to show up in revenue, not just in Search Console.
The challenge
Non-brand organic sessions had been flat for over a year despite regular blog publishing. Category pages ranked for brand-modified queries but rarely for the generic terms that bring new customers. Mobile conversion trailed desktop by a wide margin, so a ranking push alone would have leaked most of its value at checkout. The underlying question was whether the site’s own structure was suppressing its category pages, and whether fixing that alone would be enough.
Research and analysis
A Screaming Frog crawl cross-referenced against server log files showed faceted navigation (size, colour, price, fit) generating a very large number of crawlable URLs, with Googlebot spending most of its requests on filter combinations that had no search demand. Canonical tags pointed to the parent category but were being ignored, because internal links and pagination treated filter URLs as first-class pages.
On the conversion side, GA4 funnels and Microsoft Clarity recordings pointed to three mobile friction points: a size selector that required scrolling to find, delivery and returns information buried in an accordion, and an add-to-basket button that vanished once the shopper scrolled past the product image.
Strategy
SEO track
Consolidate the crawlable URL space so crawl budget concentrates on pages that can rank, then give those pages the titles, copy and internal links they need to compete for generic category terms. Prioritise categories by search demand multiplied by contribution margin rather than by raw volume.
CRO track
Rank the observed friction points by estimated revenue impact and test fixes in sequence on mobile product and category pages, using pre-registered hypotheses and a fixed minimum sample size so that results could not be argued with after the fact.
The trade-off was speed. Consolidating facets first meant little ranking movement in the first two months, but writing category copy before the crawl was fixed would have wasted it.
Execution
Winning tests became specifications for the development agency; losing tests were recorded with the reasoning, because a clean failure still narrows the next hypothesis.
Optimization
Once log files confirmed that crawl requests were shifting toward core categories, we widened the programme: a second tier of categories received the same treatment, the buying-guide library grew around questions surfaced in Search Console, and the testing roadmap moved to the category grid and checkout. Monthly reviews used a single Looker Studio report agreed at the start.
Results (illustrative)
Figures are withheld until verified, client-approved data is published. Measured year over year in GA4 and Search Console, the movements typical of this kind of engagement are:
- Organic visibility: non-brand impressions and clicks to category pages rising steadily from the third month, with core categories ranking for generic terms they had not previously appeared for.
- Conversion rate: mobile conversion narrowing the gap with desktop, driven mainly by the sticky add-to-basket and delivery-information tests.
- Revenue: organic revenue growing faster than organic sessions, because conversion gains compounded traffic gains, and blended acquisition cost falling.
What we learned
- Crawl consolidation comes before content. New category copy had little effect until filter URLs stopped competing with the pages it was written for. It is the most common sequencing mistake in e-commerce SEO.
- Prioritise by margin. Ranking categories by demand multiplied by margin put effort where revenue, not traffic, would move first.
- Run SEO and CRO on the same pages. Treating conversion optimisation as a separate project would have left most of the traffic gain unrealised.
- Agree the report before the work. A shared dashboard built on clean GA4 tracking kept reviews focused on decisions rather than on whose numbers were right.