Case Study · Gymnastics, cheer, and swim apparel ecommerce
GK Elite: Five Years of Multi-Brand Ecommerce SEO for Elite Sportswear
45% click lift on tracked queries after the Sitecore project (5 months vs the prior 5)
Elite Sportswear, the company behind GK Elite gymnastics apparel, Omni Cheer, and Dolfin swimwear, engaged me in September 2018 after a replatform left organic sessions down roughly 45 percent year over year and exactly one page on gkelite.com with a meta description. Over five and a half years I delivered the audits, redirect maps, structured data, content programs, and on-page batches that rebuilt search visibility across three brand sites on two platforms. By the February 2024 wrap-up, Dolfin had climbed from zero number one rankings to 16, Omni Cheer held 44 of its 60 tracked keywords at number one, and GK Elite ranked first for roughly 130 of 196 tracked terms.
Results SnapshotThe Situation
The Challenge
When Elite Sportswear signed on in September 2018, its main gymnastics site was hurting. A replatform earlier that year had coincided with a steep decline in search traffic: comparing the same 30-day window year over year, organic sessions on gkelite.com were down roughly 45 percent.
The October 2018 audit explained why. Exactly one page on gkelite.com had a meta description. The XML sitemap contained 1,046 blank pages, Search Console listed 5,954 not-found URLs waiting on redirects, and nearly every product page existed at four duplicate URLs held together with JavaScript redirects instead of 301s. The product customizer generated a unique indexable URL for every design, title tags were auto-filled from internal naming strings, breadcrumbs were missing, and blog internal links pointed at 404s.
On top of all that, the brand was competing with itself: gkcheer.com and gkelite.com surfaced duplicate product pages in the same search results, splitting rankings that should have belonged to one strong page.
The Work
What Was Done
Audits that set the roadmap
A 41-slide technical audit of GK Elite in October 2018, a parallel Dolfin audit the same month, and recurring Screaming Frog crawls through a fresh full crawl in May 2023 kept a current picture of technical health across the portfolio.
Consolidating two competing brand sites
For the GK Cheer to GK Elite migration, I audited redirects for 523 legacy gkcheer.com URLs, verified 243 resolving correctly, and flagged roughly 278 meta-refresh and JavaScript redirects with fix recommendations, so the two sites stopped competing against each other in Google.
Structured data across the catalog
I wrote FAQ JSON-LD covering 49 GK Elite category pages, completed in February 2022, built FAQs for Omni Cheer, and delivered a 39-slide structured data training deck so the internal team could maintain the markup after handoff.
On-page optimization at scale
Title and meta rewrites for top pages in 2019, navigation and taxonomy redesigns for GK Elite and Dolfin, Shopify internal linking code in 2023, and a final batch of roughly 96 page-level recommendations in November 2023. Behind that work sat keyword-to-page mapping built from 16 months of Search Console data: 24,390 query rows for gkelite.com and 49,824 for omnicheer.com.
A fixed-scope Sitecore project for Omni Cheer
In the second half of 2022, I executed a signed 60-hour SEO implementation directly in Sitecore: internal link fixes, metadata, image alt text, schema, and new content for the top category pages.
Content programs in three sports
Roughly 80 commissioned articles across cheer, gymnastics, and swim topics between 2019 and 2022, plus a fast pivot to a pandemic-driven product category in September 2020 when customer search behavior changed overnight.
Page speed and competitive intelligence
Render-blocking and unused JavaScript priorities documented for homepage, listing, and product templates across 2022 and 2023, critical CSS work in 2019, and repeated competitor gap analyses, including an Omni Cheer study against 20 competitors ranging from Varsity and Chasse to Amazon and Dick's Sporting Goods. Branded monthly reports tracked rankings and traffic throughout.
The Payoff
Results
Growth below is shown as percentage change and ranking movement from Google Search Console and SEMrush position tracking, with time windows as labeled. Exact traffic figures and keywords are confidential to the client. Performance data available on request. The Omni Cheer click comparison covers the five months after the 2022 Sitecore implementation against the five months before it, consecutive periods rather than year over year.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Omni Cheer clicks, 1,266 tracked queries | Baseline (Mar 1 to Aug 1, 2022) | +45% (Aug 1, 2022 to Jan 1, 2023) |
| Omni Cheer impressions, same queries | Baseline (same window) | +32% (same window) |
| Dolfin keywords at #1, of 153 tracked | 0 (Mar 10, 2021) | 16 (Feb 7, 2024) |
| Dolfin keywords in top 3 | 5 (same dates) | 34 (same dates) |
| Omni Cheer keywords at #1, of 60 tracked | 28 (Feb 10, 2021) | 44 (Feb 8, 2024) |
| GK Elite keywords at #1, of 196 tracked | roughly 130 (week of Feb 1 to 7, 2024) |
In the five months following the Sitecore project, Omni Cheer's tracked queries earned 45 percent more clicks than in the five months before it. Not every term moved up: of the Dolfin keywords ranked on both dates, 58 improved, 44 declined, and 1 held steady, the normal churn of a competitive three-year window. The headline moves were substantial. Dolfin's top swim category keyword climbed from position 37 to 1 and a second competitive swim query from position 53 to 2, while one of Omni Cheer's core money keywords went from position 56 to 1 and another from 8 to 1. At wrap-up in February 2024, GK Elite also held roughly 168 of its 196 tracked keywords in the top three.
Tools used: Screaming Frog SEO Spider, SEMrush, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, PageSpeed Insights and Lighthouse, JSON-LD structured data, Textbroker for content production, Shopify Liquid theme work, and Sitecore for the Omni Cheer implementation.
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