Project overview
Our client supplies building materials to trade and DIY customers across Yorkshire from a WooCommerce store with around 2,400 products.
Organic traffic had flattened while national chains took the top positions. They wanted more profitable online orders from search, especially for high-volume trade products.
A big catalogue Google couldn't make sense of
Our crawl uncovered three problems:
Thousands of filter URLs
Every filter combination created an indexable page, wasting crawl budget on near-duplicates.
Thin category pages
Categories had no helpful copy, so they struggled to rank for broad product searches.
Manufacturer descriptions
Most products used the same copy as dozens of other sites.
What success looked like
- Clean up indexingso Google focuses on real category and product pages.
- Rank top threefor core product categories in Yorkshire.
- Double organic revenuewithin a year.
Our approach, step by step
- 1
Technical clean-up Months 1–2
Set rules for which filters could be indexed, added canonicals, blocked parameter combinations and fixed internal links.
- 2
Category rebuild Months 2–4
Created helpful introductions, buying guidance and FAQs for the 60 most valuable categories, plus new subcategories for high-demand searches.
- 3
Product content Months 3–6
Rewrote descriptions for the top 300 products and added product, offer and review schema.
- 4
Authority building Months 5–9
Published trade guides and earned links from local trade bodies and suppliers.
Before and after: key rankings
Google positions for valuable category searches, month 0 vs month 9.
| Keyword | Before | After | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| plasterboard leeds | 18 | 2 | ▲ 16 |
| timber merchant leeds | 24 | 3 | ▲ 21 |
| buy cement online | 41 | 7 | ▲ 34 |
| insulation boards | 35 | 6 | ▲ 29 |
| building supplies yorkshire | NR | 2 | ▲ new |
The results
Monthly organic revenue more than doubled over nine months.
“Our categories now appear above the national chains for the products that matter, and online orders keep growing.”