What the work looked like, and what it did

Arteza · February 2020 – April 2021

Arteza: from 40 collections to 120, organic traffic nearly fourfold

What the data showed. People were not searching for “markers.” They were searching for alcohol markers, acrylic markers, fine tip markers, markers for beginners. Every one of those searches was a customer naming the department they wanted to walk into, and we were sending all of them through one general door. The products were already in the warehouse. The demand was already in the search data. The page connecting them did not exist.

What we did. We harvested the searches from Search Console, internal site search, and keyword tools, split them into departments with real demand, and built a collection for each one from products we already sold. No new inventory and no big content budget: short page copy, plus the internal linking that wires the collections together so each one lifts the others. In fourteen months the store went from about 40 collections to about 120.

My part. I ran SEO and led the method. The pages were built with the catalog and content teams, so the result belongs to the team. This is the exact process the book teaches in Chapter 3.

Chewy · April 2018 – February 2020

Chewy: organic traffic doubled on one of the biggest pet stores in the world

Three pieces of work I owned or co-owned:

• Filter combinations into collections. When shoppers combined filters, say grain-free plus small breed inside dog food, the store showed them a product set on a filtered URL that could not rank. Where people searched for that same set as a phrase, we built a static collection for it, and the demand that was bouncing off the filters started landing.
• Blog acquisitions moved onto the store. Chewy bought several pet-health blogs, one with roughly a thousand articles and others small but unique to their niche. I classified the content with machine learning, worked with the content team on what to keep and refresh, and 301-redirected the old URLs so their links now counted for Chewy.
• Live chat as a demand source. Customers were telling support agents, in their own words, what they were looking for and could not find. I got access to the chat logs through the business analyst who owned that integration, ran them through NLP, and handed the SEO managers the real language and needs of buyers. This one was never quantified, and I do not put a number on it.

The thread between them

Both stores had the demand already. It was sitting in search data, in filters, in old blogs, and in support conversations that nobody in marketing read. The work was to turn that demand into pages and assets the store keeps, and to connect them so each new one makes the others stronger. That is the idea behind everything I build now: growth should compound, not reset.