Client identity withheld.
eCommerce / SEO / CRO / Dual-Brand Strategy
Rebuilding a specialist toy retailer's site from the ground up, moving off a domain borrowed from a supplier's brand name and broken product data onto a properly structured dual-brand foundation.
I was appointed to carry out a full site audit and lead a complete commercial transformation of the business, moving it off a domain built around one of its suppliers' brand names and onto infrastructure the business could own outright.
The business had a genuinely strong trading position. Solid revenue, an exceptionally low return rate, and a loyal customer base across two well-established collectable ranges. What it didn't have was a site built to reflect any of that. A technical crawl and a full review of Search Console, Google Ads and Shopify data confirmed a business undermined not by weak products or weak demand, but by broken foundations.
Every product on the old site looked like this, before this project: collectable-figure-line-poseable-foal-13949 became Collectable Poseable Foal Figure
The Brief
The business needed a site that matched the quality of what it was selling and gave both its ranges room to compete properly. Key objectives included:
- Correcting product data across all 800 lines so listings could be indexed and trusted
- Giving the secondary range, generating over a quarter of total revenue, a proper brand presence for the first time
- Moving off a domain built on a supplier's brand name onto one the business owns outright
- Rebuilding structured data so it represents products accurately rather than working against them
- Reducing dependence on paid search by making organic listings worth clicking
- Delivering all of this in time for the November to December Christmas peak
My Approach
I started with a full technical crawl of the existing site alongside a manual audit across SEO, conversion rate optimisation and user experience, then cross-referenced the findings against twelve months of Google Search Console, Google Ads and Shopify data to build a complete commercial picture. From there, the transformation covered:
- A premium theme selection and build, designed around two equal brand pillars rather than one
- A dual-brand architecture giving each range its own landing pages, navigation and identity
- A mega navigation structure, including a cross-range Collections strand organised by theme
- A full product data overhaul across all 800 products, sourced properly from each brand's own trade resources
- Structured data rebuilt from scratch across every product and collection page
- A domain migration to a new, business-owned domain with full 301 redirect mapping and SEO protection
- Brand and category landing page content, plus initial blog content to support both ranges
Week One Results
One week after the domain moved across, the numbers confirmed the redirects were doing their job. The normal pattern with a domain migration is a dip before recovery. That didn't happen here.
Visibility across the tracked keyword set rose 15.91 percentage points to 25.05%. Estimated organic traffic nearly tripled, up 36.15 points to an index of 55.34. Average position across the tracked keywords improved from 44 down to 8.08, all within seven days.
Of the 52 keywords tracked, 37 improved within the first seven days, a net swing of nearly 14 percentage points in the site's favour.
The Result
The rebuild gave the business a domain it owned outright, a catalogue Google could index and rank properly, and a secondary brand that finally had somewhere to live. Products were named correctly. Structured data represented the business accurately. The homepage no longer carried traffic it was never built to convert.
The work was completed and delivered in good time for the site's most important trading period, giving search engines the runway needed to crawl, reindex and surface improved listings before the Christmas peak. The business ended up with a properly structured asset: clean product data, correct measurement, and a domain built to accommodate future growth rather than one borrowed from a supplier's name.
800 products rebuilt. 2 brand pillars established. 0.51% return rate maintained.
Interested?
If your site is carrying similar problems, product titles that don't read properly, a brand with real revenue but no presence, a domain that doesn't match the business, let's talk. I'll tell you honestly what I find.