Case Study: Recovering from an 85.4% Traffic Drop in 2 Weeks

Every online store owner’s worst nightmare is losing nearly all of their organic traffic overnight.

This small DTC brand had interns occasionally writing blog posts but wasn’t optimizing for how their customers actually searched.

After hitting 2,004 organic visitors, they lost 85.4% of their traffic within weeks.

When I stepped in, the goal was clear:

  • Align product and collection pages with the right keywords

  • Revamp thin blog content

  • Fix technical issues holding the site back

Content Refresh

Their blog content was thin, lacked keyword alignment, and didn’t guide readers to their products.

I came in and:

  • Aligned every blog post with strategic keywords

  • Optimized on-page SEO across the board

  • Reverse-engineered top-ranking competitors to create stronger assets

  • Internally linked each blog to the most relevant collection page

If your blog isn’t answering what people are searching and leading them to the right product, it won’t drive results.

By turning each blog into a helpful, keyword-optimized asset that connects directly to the products people are already interested in, we increased relevance, improved rankings, and gave traffic a place to go—which is how blog readers become buyers.

Strategic internal linking was one of the biggest wins in this project.

After fixing the content and aligning it with what customers were actually searching for, we built a tight internal linking structure—connecting blog posts to the right collection pages, linking related articles together, and creating clear topic clusters.

People search in steps. They don’t go straight from Google to checkout. They explore and compare. 

By guiding them through that journey—and making it easy for Google to understand how deep we go on each topic—we turned a scattered site into a connected experience.

Organic traffic nearly 4x’d in just two weeks because we helped the content work together.

This Shopify site was slow and bloated.

It had a performance score of 64, a First Contentful Paint of 3.2s, and a Speed Index of 5.6s—all red flags for both user experience and SEO.

So we tackled the technical side as well:

Image Optimization

We compressed oversized product images, converted them to WebP format, and enabled lazy loading to reduce load times without sacrificing visual quality.

Keyword Cannibalization

Multiple pages were unintentionally competing for the same keywords. We cleaned up cannibalization by consolidating similar content, clarifying search intent, and adjusting internal links to point to the right pages.

Over-Optimization & Theme Bloat

We audited the site’s theme and removed unused apps, excess JavaScript, and unnecessary code. We also updated keyword usage to focus on clarity and relevance—not stuffing. This cleaned up the codebase and improved Core Web Vitals.

These store owners got a taste of what SEO could do for their business—and lost it overnight because they didn’t have a strategy to sustain it.

They were getting traffic, but it wasn’t built on a solid foundation. No keyword research. No content structure. No technical upkeep.

When Google shifted or competitors stepped up, they had nothing to fall back on.

That’s the danger of relying on momentum instead of strategy.

Because SEO is about getting traffic, compounding it, and turning it into consistent revenue over time.

Let’s hop on a call if you want to learn how to do this for your DTC ecommerce brand. 

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