Unlocking potential traffic to break 1.15 million views in 2025

Brief

Dead Threads is a lifestyle apparel brand with a strong, loyal following and high brand recognition. When they engaged our eCommerce SEO experts, the business was performing well commercially, but organic growth had stalled.

Around 85% of all organic traffic, keyword rankings, and revenue were coming from branded searches. In simple terms, Google was only sending people who already knew the brand. That capped acquisition and limited long-term growth.

The brief was clear: turn organic search into a non-branded acquisition channel that could bring in new buyers at scale.

Challenges

• Extreme over-reliance on branded search, limiting exposure to new customers
• Category pages built around internal merchandising rather than real search demand
• Large product grids with weak indexing certainty
• Minimal visibility for non-branded, high-intent apparel searches
• A strong brand masking a weak search architecture underneath

This was not a content problem. It was a structure, taxonomy, and intent-alignment problem.

Strategy

We designed a full SEO campaign focused on architecture, not blogs.

1. Sitemap and category architecture rebuild

We restructured the site to reflect how people actually search, not how products were merchandised internally.

• Built dedicated category and subcategory pages based on real search demand
• Targeted sports, cities, clubs, teams, and product types individually
• Created clean semantic structures for every collection, with a single H1 and supporting H2s
• Built intent-driven subcategories such as Basketball apparel broken out by city
• Rewrote meta titles and descriptions to improve click-through rate

The depth of this architecture is visible in the live “Shop by Sport” navigation.

2. Product-grid structured data

We implemented structured data across large apparel grids to:

• Improve Google’s understanding of category pages
• Increase eligibility for visual shopping features
• Improve crawl confidence and indexing on high-volume product collections

3. FAQ blocks with FAQPage schema at scale

We added contextual FAQs at both category and product level.

• Captured long-tail, high-intent queries
• Increased SERP real estate through enhanced results
• Reduced reliance on blog content for question-based searches

4. Semantic clean-up

We stripped the site back to what search engines need to understand relevance.

• Rewrote headings for clarity and intent
• Removed bloated styling divs
• Enforced a clean H1, H2, H3 hierarchy
• Strengthened entity and topical relevance for Google’s NLP systems

5. Non-branded keyword capture

This is where the ROI landed.

Instead of only ranking for branded terms like “Dead Threads hoodie”, the site began ranking for:

• Basketball apparel plus city modifiers
• Hockey apparel plus team and city modifiers
• Shirts and hoodies by sport
• Lifestyle niches such as national parks merch and lifting clubs

Many of these pages went from invisible to page one in a single update cycle. In multiple cases, keywords moved 80 to 100 positions almost immediately.

Results

• Clicks increased by approximately 76%
• Organic search traffic grew 55% year on year compared to the same period pre-engagement
• The site reached 1.15 million views in 2025
• Google Discover traffic grew 756% year on year
• Non-branded visibility expanded dramatically across commercial apparel terms

Why this worked

This was not a content play.

There were no blog funnels, no link schemes, and no keyword padding.

This campaign was built on search-intent engineering through architecture, taxonomy, structured data, and semantic clarity. The result was a shift from a brand-dependent site into a scalable acquisition engine.

For a lifestyle brand like Dead Threads, that shift changes the ceiling on growth.