E-commerce SEO Case Study — Baby & Newborn Apparel
12 months, 200% organic traffic growth for a premium newborn apparel brand.
The client
About Moonlight Layette
Newborn layettes
Baby apparel
Designer labels
Footies
Rompers
Cardigan & lounge sets
Occasion wear
Seasonal collections
New arrivals
Gifting
Infant essentials
Scope of work
6 problems between a boutique catalogue and page one
1,241 organic visits a month
The website attracted limited search traffic, with few parents discovering the brand online at all. SEMrush recorded 1,241 organic visits a month across the entire catalogue — a fraction of what the store's inventory and price point could support.
Priority terms nowhere near page one
Important target keywords ranked low on Google, severely limiting visibility. None of the twelve priority label terms — together worth more than 15,000 searches a month — held a position that produced meaningful clicks.
Slow loads and pages Google struggled to reach
Slow load speeds, crawlability problems and other technical limitations were affecting performance across an image-heavy catalogue, where every product page carries multiple high-resolution photographs.
Meta tags and headings with no strategy behind them
Meta tags, headings and internal linking lacked consistency and strategic alignment, so collection and product pages gave Google no clear signal about which term each page was built to win.
Nothing on the site answered the search
The site had insufficient high-value, intent-driven content to engage potential customers — no buying guidance, no seasonal context, and nothing to hold a parent who arrived on a label search but hadn't yet chosen a product.
The labels rank for their own names — so does every stockist
Searches like little parni new arrivals and lil legs cardigan lounge set are contested by the designer's own site and by every competing boutique carrying the same drop. Winning them meant building pages more specific to the query than the brand's own.
Scope of work
he 6-phase build, in the order it had to happen
Keyword research & intent mapping
Targeted high-impact, audience-relevant keywords and gave each one a single owning page, so collection pages, product pages and new-arrivals listings stopped competing for the same label term. Content was planned against search intent from the outset rather than retrofitted to it.
Technical SEO & site health
Enhanced site speed and the mobile experience across image-heavy product templates, then fixed errors, broken links and crawlability issues. Over the engagement crawl errors fell by 95% and site speed improved by 50%.
Site architecture & internal linking
Improved indexing with an organised site structure, and strengthened internal linking so authority flows from collection hubs into individual products and back into new-arrivals pages — the pages that change most often and need re-crawling most.
On-page optimisation across the catalogue
Optimised meta tags and headings against target keywords, and rebuilt page copy as clean, structured content written for readability — matching how a parent phrases the search rather than how the catalogue is internally organised.
Off-page authority & link building
Built authoritative backlinks to lift domain credibility, ran strategic outreach and placements, and reinforced brand authority through consistent off-site work — the difference between one stockist among many and the site Google trusts on a label term.
Content, measurement & iteration
Developed content aligned with search intent across seasonal drops and buying decisions, then continuously optimised existing pages for ranking maintenance, reviewing Search Console and GA4 to keep the twelve priority terms held.
Results — 12-month comparison
6 metrics, 12 months, every one up
Organic traffic
Total users
Sessions
Search impressions
×3
Three times the organic traffic and 12 label terms taken to #1
Twelve months in, SEMrush records 3,722 organic visits a month against 1,241 at the start, alongside a 96% increase in the number of terms the store ranks for. GA4 shows 271K total users across 698K sessions, up 119.3% and 140.6%, with returning users up 118.8%. In Search Console, clicks moved from 79.3K to 100K and impressions from 865K to 1.22M — the store is being shown far more often, and clicked far more often as a result.
| SEMrush & Search Console | BEFORE | AFTER | CHANGE |
|---|---|---|---|
| Organic traffic | 1,241 | 3,722 | +200% |
| Organic keywords — SEMrush | 1135 | 2230 | +96% |
| Website clicks — Search Console | 79,300 | 100,000 | +26.2% |
| Impressions — Search Console | 865,000 | 1,220,000 | +41.4% |
| Total users — GA4 | 123,600 | 271,000 | +119.3% |
| Sessions — GA4 | 290,100 | 698,000 | +140.6% |
| Returning users — GA4 | 2,300 | 5,100 | +118.8% |
SEMrush — organic traffic 1,241 → 3,722
GA4 — 271K users, 698K sessions
Search Console — 100K clicks, 1.22M impressions
Google rankings
15.4k monthly searches at position #1, across 12 label terms
| KEYWORDS | VOLUME | BEFORE | AFTER |
|---|---|---|---|
| little parni new arrivals | 1800 | NA | #1 |
| parni maxi dress | 1590 | NA | #1 |
| little parni ss25 | 1500 | NA | #1 |
| retro infant clothes | 1330 | NA | #1 |
| parni new arrivals | 1300 | NA | #1 |
| little parni clothing | 1280 | NA | #1 |
| retro newborn clothes | 1240 | NA | #1 |
| liette sale | 1200 | NA | #1 |
| lil legs romper | 1130 | NA | #1 |
| liette footies | 1120 | NA | #1 |
| retro kids | 1050 | NA | #1 |
| lil legs cardigan lounge set | 936 | NA | #1 |
Key Results
Successfully ranked #1 on Google
Rank #1
12 months, 12 #1 rankings, 1 catalogue thatnow outranks the labels it stocks
Own the label searches We target the designer-label terms stockists are told they can't win — little parni new arrivals, lil legs romper, liette footies — then support them with collection and product pages built for exactly that query.
Technical foundation first Crawl errors down 95% and load speed up 50%, so an image-heavy catalogue is reachable, fast and fully indexed before a single new page is published.
Structure that compounds Internal linking wired from collection hubs into products and back into new arrivals, so authority earned on one label term lifts the rest of the catalogue instead of stopping at a single page.
Measured monthly Search Console and GA4 reviewed every month, with budget pushed toward the terms producing orders and cut from the ones producing sessions alone.