Lots of Products, but No Traffic: How We Kickstarted SEO Growth for Those Who “Build”

Launching an online store sounds like a no-brainer when you already have a network of offline stores. At first glance, everything looked great: a wide range of products, profitable offline locations, and solid brand recognition. However, behind the scenes, the picture was different: organic traffic wasn’t growing, search rankings were not the best, and sales from organic channels were far below expectations.

In January 2025, we jumped into a project with exactly these challenges. Our client is a major online retailer of construction and renovation equipment, with over 300,000 website pages and around 40,000 SKUs. The site resembled a giant warehouse: everything was technically there, but finding a specific item was difficult for both users and search engines.

Our goal wasn’t just to “tweak” SEO but to make search one of the client’s primary growth channels.

SEO Strategy for the First Three Months

We started with a full technical audit. And it didn’t take long to spot the real issue — not the assortment of product volume but the technical and semantic site architecture:

• Excessive redirects (301s), which slowed down load time.
• Hundreds of pages (especially product images) returned 404 errors.
• Even more returned 500 errors due to an underpowered server.
• Product images were several megabytes each, which slowed down loading speed.
• The website lacked clear structure from Google’s perspective (how one page differed from another, what it was about, and why it deserved to be ranked).

Once we had a full picture of what was going wrong, we rebuilt everything — from the category structure to optimizing target pages and meta tags with relevant keywords. For every high-priority page (including the homepage, which was the biggest traffic magnet), we compiled detailed semantic data, wrote unique meta tags, and built a system that automatically generates metadata for new products as they are added to the catalog.

The technical upgrades were no less crucial. We performed the website migration to a more powerful server, optimized image sizes, fixed redirect chains and 404 pages, which made the difference immediate. Search engines noticed. And so did the users.

We fixed one of the big UX blockers when someone added a product to their cart, but it wouldn’t show up there until they refreshed the page.

We also improved the product card visuals, filled blank sections on product pages with useful content, and added auto-linking blocks like “Similar Products,” “Frequently Bought Together,” and “Recently Viewed.” At the same time, we started strengthening the site’s backlink profile by acquiring high-quality external links.

Let’s Talk Results

By mid-February, things really began to move. We jumped from an average of 40–50 clicks a day to 90–110. And on March 31, we hit a new yearly record of 149 clicks and 6,000 impressions on Google.

But the most important thing was not just the traffic but more sales. Between January and March, the number of purchases and incoming calls increased. In fact, total revenue from organic traffic grew by nearly 447%.

Key Takeaways

Having lots of products in your online store is not enough. Each item has to work for the business. SEO turned out to be the tool that not only helped show the site search results but transformed it into a sustainable, profit-generating system.

If your traffic is stuck and search isn’t bringing the sales you expected, it might be time to clean up your SEO. At Livepage, we solve complex SEO challenges by focusing on results. Send us a message, and we’ll help you find the SEO solution that fits your business.