Ecommerce SEO Case Study
6 months, 350% session growth and 10 #1 rankings for a bulk detergent supplier.
Total users
The client
About Ultra Soap Direct
Bulk liquid detergent
5-gallon pails
55-gallon drums
Wholesale powder
Detergent pods
Fabric softener
Dish soap
Household cleaners
Commercial & industrial
Dispenser systems
Scope of work
6 problems between a bulk detergent brand and page one
Stagnant organic traffic on a catalogue built to sell
The website was drawing organic traffic that barely moved month to month. Product depth existed; the search demand attached to it wasn't reaching the pages.
High-priority keywords stranded past page three
The terms carrying commercial intent — bulk, wholesale, commercial, industrial — ranked beyond page 3 on Google, which for a purchase decision is the same as not ranking at all.
Slow loads, broken links, crawl paths that went nowhere
Page speed was dragging, broken links were scattered through the catalogue, and crawlability issues meant Google wasn't reliably reaching or refreshing product and collection pages.
Meta tags, headings and internal links pulling apart
Titles, descriptions, heading structure and internal linking were inconsistent across the store, so no single page was clearly the owner of any given term.
Too few quality links to hold a commercial term
A thin backlink profile capped domain authority — and on head terms where competitors had years of accumulated links, that ceiling decided the rankings.
Nothing written for how bulk buyers actually search
There was no targeted content for buyer-intent and long-tail queries — the sizing, comparison and use-case questions a facilities manager works through before committing to a drum.
Scope of work
The 6-phase build, in the order it had to happen
Keyword research & intent mapping
Ran in-depth research across high-volume head terms and long-tail buyer queries — bulk, wholesale, commercial, industrial, hotel, container-size — then assigned every term a single owning page, so collections, product pages and guides stopped competing with each other.
Technical SEO & crawl health
Optimised site speed and mobile performance, fixed broken links, redirects and crawl errors, and implemented structured data and XML sitemaps so the catalogue was indexed completely and refreshed reliably.
On-page optimisation across the money pages
Rewrote meta titles, descriptions and headings against focus keywords, restructured internal linking and content hierarchy, and optimised images with alt text — matching how buyers phrase the search rather than how the catalogue names its SKUs.
Content built for bulk-buying intent
Created SEO-focused content answering real purchase questions — sizing, cost per load, formulation, use case by industry — and systematically updated and re-optimised existing pages so older URLs kept climbing instead of decaying.
Off-page SEO & authority building
Built a quality backlink strategy through guest posting, local citations and outreach campaigns, and placed the brand in niche-relevant publications to lift the domain authority the commercial head terms required.
Measurement, refresh & iteration
Tracked GA4 and Search Console monthly across users, sessions and event count, pushing effort toward the terms converting into orders and pruning the ones producing traffic alone.
Results — 6-month comparison
6 metrics, 6 months, every one up
Sessions
Total users
Event count
Ranking keywords
×4.5
Four and a half times the audience and 475 new keywords ranking
| GOOGLE SEARCH CONSOLE | BEFORE | AFTER | CHANGE |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sessions | 16K | 72K | +350% |
| Total users | 14K | 59K | +321% |
| Active users | 14K | 59K | +321% |
| Event count | 103K | 473K | +359% |
| Organic traffic | 2,390 | 4,651 | +94.06% |
| Ranking keywords | 1,253 | 1,728 | +37.9% |
GA4 — sessions 16K → 72K
GA4 — total users 14K → 59K
Organic traffic — 2,390 → 4,651
0Device and demographic data reinforce the profile: the majority of users arrived on desktop, consistent with a professional, procurement-led audience, and traffic came primarily from the United States, Europe and Asia — evidence of reach well beyond the domestic shipping base.
Google rankings
10 commercial buying terms at position #1 -10,420 searches a month.
| KEYWORDS | VOLUME | BEFORE | AFTER |
|---|---|---|---|
| Bulk laundry detergent | 1,900 | NA | #1 |
| Wholesale laundry detergent | 1,300 | NA | #1 |
| Commercial detergent laundry | 1,200 | NA | #1 |
| Washing detergent in bulk | 1,000 | NA | #1 |
| 5 gallon Gain laundry detergent | 990 | NA | #1 |
| Laundry powder wholesale | 900 | NA | #1 |
| Industrial laundry chemicals | 880 | NA | #1 |
| Laundry detergent for hotels | 800 | NA | #1 |
| Bucket of laundry soap | 750 | NA | #1 |
| Laundry detergent bucket | 700 | NA | #1 |
Key Results
Successfully ranked #1 on Google
Rank #1
6 months, 10 #1 rankings,1 catalogue where a single search is worth a recurring order
Won the commercial head terms We targeted the bulk, wholesale and industrial terms most ecommerce brands are told to avoid, then supported them with the sizing, formulation and use-case pages marketplaces can't personalise.
A catalogue that crawls clean Speed, broken links, redirects, structured data and sitemaps handled first, so every product and collection page earns rankings instead of leaking crawl budget.
Content mapped to purchase volume Buyer-intent content built around how facilities and households actually decide on a 5-gallon pail or a 55-gallon drum, wired back to the collections it supports.
Measured monthly GA4 and Search Console reviewed every month, with effort pushed toward the terms producing orders and pulled from the ones producing traffic alone.