3.2x organic traffic, 41% lower blended CAC
Client: US-headquartered D2C apparel brand, ~$15M ARR · Timeline: 6 months
The challenge
The client was a direct-to-consumer apparel brand on Shopify, around $15M in trailing revenue, growing on the back of paid social. Organic search traffic had been flat for 18 months and accounted for less than 9% of sessions. Paid CAC had climbed by roughly a third year-over-year, and the founder was clear that the unit economics would break if they kept buying every customer.
The technical foundation was working against them. The site had a flat URL structure, no real category architecture, around 1,400 product pages with duplicate or thin descriptions, and a Shopify theme that shipped four render-blocking scripts on the PLP. Their existing agency was running a content blog that ranked for brand terms only.
Attribution was the other half of the problem. GA4 had been set up in a rush during the UA sunset, conversion events were firing twice on some flows, and nobody trusted the channel reports. Leadership could not tell what organic was actually worth.
The solution
We engaged across two of our Digital Marketing sub-lines: Search & SEO, and Conversion & Analytics.
The first 30 days were a full technical audit using Ahrefs and Screaming Frog plus a manual crawl, a rebuild of the site information architecture, and a GA4 reinstall against a clean measurement plan. We collapsed the flat structure into seven category hubs, redirected 280 orphaned product URLs, and fixed duplicate canonical tags across the entire catalog.
From month two we ran a content engine: two long-form buying guides per week mapped to mid-funnel commercial intent, plus programmatic category landing pages built from the product catalog (fabric, fit, use-case, color combinations). The programmatic pages were the unlock — by month four they accounted for 38% of new organic sessions.
On the conversion side we rebuilt the GA4 setup against a documented event taxonomy, added server-side tagging via Shopify, and stood up a weekly attribution view comparing last-click, data-driven, and a simple position-based model. That gave the founder a defensible read on what organic was actually delivering.
We also ran a quiet internal-link audit each month to push equity from the buying guides into the category and product pages, and worked with the in-house creative team on hero imagery for the top 40 PLPs.
How we delivered
Month 1: audit, IA, and analytics rebuild
We ran a full crawl with Screaming Frog, pulled link and keyword data through Ahrefs, and shipped a 47-page audit in the first three weeks. The headline finding was not a single big issue — it was that the site had no category architecture and the analytics could not be trusted. We rebuilt the information architecture into seven hub categories and reinstalled GA4 against a clean event taxonomy.
Month 2-3: technical fixes and the content engine
We resolved 280 orphan URLs, fixed canonical conflicts across 1,400 product pages, and trimmed render-blocking scripts that were costing the PLPs about 1.4 seconds of LCP. In parallel the content engine started: two buying guides a week, each mapped to a documented commercial-intent keyword cluster and internally linked into the right category hub.
Month 4: the programmatic unlock
We built 112 programmatic category landing pages from the Shopify catalog, combining fit, fabric, color and use-case modifiers. We controlled for thin content by requiring at least 12 in-stock products per combination, original copy blocks, and curated imagery. By the end of month four the programmatic pages were carrying 38% of new organic sessions.
Month 5-6: attribution and scale
We added server-side tagging via Shopify and stood up a weekly attribution view across three models. That let the founder see, for the first time, that organic was contributing roughly $1.8 of revenue for every $1 paid was bringing in — on a fraction of the spend. Paid was throttled back deliberately, and the blended CAC fell 41% across the half.
What we would do differently
- Ship the GA4 rebuild in week one, not month one — it was the single most useful artifact
- Start the programmatic build in month two, not four
- Lock the in-house creative team into the editorial calendar earlier so hero imagery shipped with the pages, not after
Outcomes that matter
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