*The updated category pages drove a +42% increase in organic clicks, outperforming the control group (+30%) by an additional +12% organic clicks.
SEO CASE STUDY // Restoring PLP Organic Visibility
Client Background
Market: United States, nationwide
Industry: Big-box retail chain // Housewares, furniture, and specialty items
About: Household name with once over 600 stores nationwide
Jump to: Project Goals | SEO Strategy | Project Results
Following a recent website redesign, the client noticed a decline in organic search visibility for several category landing pages. Their internal team wanted to understand the root cause, and whether the decline was related to the redesign or driven by external SEO trends in their industry.
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Current SEO state
The client decided to change their website infrastructure and platform, and understood that this migration can harm their search visibility and rankings. There was nobody within the organization who had enough SEO expertise to take-on this project.
Problem & Project Goal
Problem: Decline in organic search visibility and non-branded traffic for L3 Product Listing Pages (PLPs).
Goal: Restore rankings and improve organic search visibility of selected landing pages.
Strategy
The objective was to determine whether the decline was industry-wide or caused by changes on the client’s website. We followed a data-driven process:
1) Compare performance trends with top competitors to identify any global impact on category pages visibility.
2) Investigate potential on-site causes impacting ranking loss and traffic performance.
3) Provide actionable updates to restore equity lost during the redesign.
4) Set up a controlled test to measure the impact of updates.
What we did
We started by identifying the category pages that declined the most in traffic and ranking performance. Next, we compared their trends with the main competitors targeting the same non-branded keywords. There were no similar declines on competitor pages, ruling out a global trend.
To investigate possible on-site causes, we aligned the traffic and ranking drop with recent website updates. The data showed a clear decline shortly after the redesign went live. To uncover what changed, we compared historical and current versions of the pages using the Wayback Machine. The comparison revealed missing internal links that previously pointed to related L3 category PLPs.
After confirming the root cause, we:
- Recommended restoring a block of links pointing to related L3 product category PLPs.
- Guided the placement and format of the block for relevance and crawlability.
- Set up a test in Google Looker Studio to compare updated pages (L3 PLPs) vs. a control group of non-updated pages (L1 and L2 PLPs).
The results
The average position for target non-branded keywords improved from 9.5 → 6.5 (gain of +3 positions).
Across all other PLPs, the average non-branded rankings improved only slightly from 9.5 → 9.0 (gain of +0.5 positions).
