Case study · technical audit + keyword plan + link budget

6,714 visits a month. 5,731 of them are the brand name.

A mid-size outdoor apparel store on Shopify, Australian market, around 1,300 indexed URLs. Strong brand, healthy authority — and almost no presence in the searches that bring new customers.

Scope 28-page sample across products, collections, pages, blog Data crawl + Ahrefs, October 2026 Access none — external data only

1The number that matters

This store looks successful in a traffic chart. The breakdown tells a different story.

85%
of traffic from one brand query
983
visits that are not the brand name
145
keywords for ~1,300 URLs

People who already know this brand search for it and arrive. People shopping for hiking pants, a fleece or merino thermals almost never meet it. The top non-brand pages pull 15-20 visits each.

Why this is fragile. Brand search is demand someone else created — paid social, press, word of mouth. The moment that spend pauses, the traffic chart follows it down. Category search is the part that compounds.

2What the crawl found

A 28-URL sample spanning product pages, collections, static pages and the journal.

FindingIn sampleWhy it costs money
The word "EXPLORE MORE" is the H17 / 28 On these pages the main heading is a button label from the theme. The product or category name is not an H1 at all — the clearest "what is this page about" signal is spent on nothing.
No meta description12 / 28 Every collection page checked was missing one. Collections are the pages that should capture category search.
Descriptions truncated at exactly 320 characters14 / 28 Identical length across unrelated products means they are auto-generated from body copy and cut mid-sentence. Google rewrites most of them.
Two different products share one H12 Same heading on separate URLs — the pages compete with each other instead of ranking.
One page has no H1 at all1 Storytelling page with no heading structure.
Page weight median 603 KB, peak 1,152 KB28 / 28 HTML alone, before images. On mobile over a regular connection this is the difference between a fast store and an average one.
736 static /pages/ URLs in the sitemapsitewide Spot-checks landed on expired campaigns — a 2023 mid-year sale sign-up, a giveaway, duplicate "our mission" variants, an orphaned sitemap page. Each is ~234 words of nothing, all submitted to Google for crawling.
What is already right. Canonicals are correct on every URL checked, collection filters and sort parameters resolve to the base canonical, product URLs do not duplicate across collection paths, 404s behave, and there is no mixed content. The platform is doing its job — the theme and the content are not.

3The demand they are missing

Australian monthly search volume for categories this store already stocks.

SearchPer monthDifficultyStore's position
fleece jacket8,8001not ranking
hiking pants5,2000not ranking
rain jacket5,0000not ranking
camp chair4,4000not ranking
merino wool thermals2,1000not ranking
camping gear1,9006not ranking
hiking sandals1,4002brand variant only
hiking clothes1,2000not ranking
travel pants1,0000not ranking
hiking shirt5000not ranking
merino base layer4500#2
zip off pants2000#5
32,150 searches a month, and ten of these twelve sit at difficulty 0-2. Where the store does appear — merino base layer at #2, zip-off pants at #5 — it is already close. These are not markets that need to be broken into. They need collection pages that say what they sell.

The content plan, in order

  1. Fix the theme's H1 first. Seven of 28 sampled pages give their main heading to a button. This is one template change that touches the whole catalogue, and nothing else in the plan works around it.
  2. Write the top twelve collection pages properly — unique description, a real H1 matching the category search, 300-500 words of buying guidance above or below the grid. Start with fleece, hiking pants, rain jackets and camp chairs: 23,400 searches between them at difficulty 0-1.
  3. Replace the auto-cut 320-character descriptions on the products that matter with written ones.
  4. Audit the 736 static pages — keep what sells, redirect expired campaigns, remove them from the sitemap. A store of 150 products should not be asking Google to crawl 736 brochure pages.
  5. Keep the journal doing what it already does. One editorial post ranks #1 for a 900/month topic and outperforms every product category — proof the site can rank on content when the content exists.

4Link profile — and the competitor that proves the point

41
domain rating
962
referring domains (live)
5,257 → 1,583
backlinks ever → still live

Authority here is genuinely decent: 41 is competitive in this market. Note the third figure — roughly seven in ten backlinks ever earned are gone. That is normal attrition for a brand built on press and collaborations, but it means the profile needs maintenance, not expansion.

Who ranks instead, and with what

CompetitorAuthorityTrafficKeywords
Global outdoor brand, AU store4375,4102,074
Heritage outdoor brand, AU store5328,2392,800
Technical apparel brand, AU store4425,0672,684
Small merino specialist311,144200
This store416,714145
Read the last two rows together. The merino specialist has less authority — 31 against 41 — and ranks for 200 keywords against 145. A store cannot be out-linked by a weaker domain and conclude it needs more links. The gap is category pages, not backlinks.

Link budget

ItemVolumeWhy
Reclaim lost links~50-80 targetsOf 3,674 backlinks that went dead, the ones from press and partner sites are often a single email away from being restored. Cheapest authority available.
Broken-link and redirect auditone passCatches the links pointing at retired campaign pages before those pages are deleted.
Editorial placements (outdoor press, gear roundups)4-6 per quarterThis niche genuinely links to products it has tested. Aligned with the journal content that already ranks.
Paid link placements0At difficulty 0-2 for the target categories, paying for links would be buying the wrong thing.

5What we would do in the first 90 days

Weeks 1-3 — the template

  • H1 fixed across the theme
  • Duplicate product headings resolved
  • Collection meta descriptions written
  • Page-weight pass on the heaviest templates

Weeks 4-9 — the categories

  • Twelve collection pages written properly
  • Auto-cut product descriptions replaced on bestsellers
  • Internal linking from journal posts into collections
  • Seasonal category plan for the next two quarters

Weeks 10-13 — cleanup and links

  • 736 static pages triaged: keep, redirect, remove
  • Sitemap trimmed to what should rank
  • Lost-link reclamation outreach
  • Measurement in place for the next report
Realistic first result. Fleece jackets, hiking pants, rain jackets and camp chairs are 23,400 searches a month at difficulty 0-1, against collections that already exist and already index. Moving from "not ranking" to page one on even a third of that demand changes the shape of the traffic chart — and this time the brand owns the demand instead of renting it.

6What is not in this report