Nordhaus sold well-reviewed outdoor gear but relied on paid ads for four fifths of its revenue. Every price rise on the ad platforms came straight out of margin.
The site had 2,000 product pages, thin category copy and almost no content answering the questions buyers ask before choosing kit. Search traffic was flat for two years.
Our approach
We started with the category pages, because that is where buying-intent searches land. Then we built a library of buying guides linked to those categories.
Rebuilt 48 category pages around how people search
Fixed crawl waste from 1,400 duplicate filter URLs
Published 60 buying guides in nine months
Earned links from 35 outdoor and travel publications
The outcome
Organic revenue passed paid revenue in month ten. Paid spend was cut by a third without losing sales, and the buying guides now bring in a fifth of all new customers.
Organic revenue, year on year
+0%
Non-branded search traffic
+0%
Paid spend, with sales held level
−0%
The numbers
Growth that kept compounding
Sessions and revenue rose together every month from the fourth onward, and the curve was still steepening when the year closed.
They told us in month one which half of our budget was wasted. Then they fixed it, and the organic channel they built now out-earns our ads.