- Organic traffic: +312% in 6 months (4,200 → 17,300 sessions/month)
- Pages in TOP-10: from 47 to 312 (+564%)
- Organic revenue: +247% with no increase in ad spend
- LCP reduced from 6.8s to 1.9s after image optimisation
- Product Schema raised search CTR by 34%
The client and market
A mid-market furniture e-commerce store based in Kyiv. At the start: 3 years in business, around 2,000 SKUs, own warehouse. Organic traffic was under 15% of total — the rest was paid. The owner came to us after ad spend rose 40% with no improvement in lead volume.
Starting point: what the technical audit found
847 technical errors, 124 of them critical:
- 412 category pages without canonical — Google was indexing duplicates
- LCP 6.8s — all images in JPEG without any compression
- robots.txt blocking 34% of category pages since initial development
- Zero Schema.org markup anywhere on the site
- Semantic coverage: only 200 queries, rest untapped
Strategy: three priorities
Three priorities for the first 3 months: fix critical technical errors, expand semantic coverage across categories, implement Schema.org for rich snippets.
Technical SEO: what we did
- robots.txt — removed category blocks, kept noindex only for service pages
- Canonical — configured across all 2,000+ catalogue pages
- Images — converted to WebP, added lazy-load. LCP: 6.8s → 1.9s
- Schema.org — Product, BreadcrumbList, Organization site-wide
- Internal linking — cross-links between categories and related products
Content: 180 new category pages
Expanded semantic coverage from 200 to 2,400 queries. Created 180 new category pages targeting long-tail clusters with purchase intent. Each page: 600–1,000 words of unique text answering real user intent, not just a product list.
Month-by-month results
| Month | Traffic (sessions) | Pages TOP-10 | Avg position |
|---|---|---|---|
| Start | 4,200 | 47 | 34.1 |
| Month 2 | 5,800 | 89 | 28.4 |
| Month 4 | 11,200 | 214 | 15.3 |
| Month 6 | 17,300 | 312 | 8.2 |
Key lessons
This case illustrates the core principle of eCommerce SEO: technical foundation first. 847 errors prevented Google from properly crawling the site — no content could compensate for that barrier. Once Google had access to correctly indexed pages, growth followed naturally. Second lesson: intent-driven semantics — long-tail queries with clear purchase intent ("buy grey L-shaped sofa 250cm") reached first positions by month two.
