Case Study · Ecommerce / Vitamins and Supplements
Irwin Naturals: From 71 to 113 Top-100 Keywords in Ten Weeks
71 to 113 top-100 keywords in 10 weeks (fixed 189-keyword set)
Irwin Naturals is a nationally distributed supplement brand, but in late 2022 its own Shopify store was nearly invisible for the commercial searches its catalog should own. Beginning December 2022, the engagement rebuilt the store's technical foundation, collection content, internal linking, and structured data. On a fixed set of 189 tracked non-branded keywords, top-100 rankings grew from 71 to 113 and top-10 rankings from 35 to 46 in roughly ten weeks.
Results SnapshotThe Situation
The Challenge
Irwin Naturals had the brand recognition of a supplement-aisle staple and almost none of the search visibility that should come with it. In the week of January 5 to 11, 2023, only 73 of 197 tracked non-branded keywords ranked anywhere in Google's top 100, a visibility score of 11.99 percent. Entire commercial categories at the heart of the catalog, including several of its highest volume supplement lines, had no ranking at all.
A December 2022 technical audit of the site's 247 crawlable pages explained why: 58 errors, 796 warnings, and 650 notices, including 19 duplicate title tags, 18 pages of duplicate content, 59 over-length titles, and 240 pages with a low text-to-HTML ratio. Shopify's flat collections architecture had left the store with no real taxonomy, no breadcrumbs, and no HTML sitemap, while spam vendor-query pages sat in Google's index. Sold-out products displayed "Out of Stock" in Google's rich results, costing clicks and rankings on pages that would soon be back in inventory. Discontinued products had piled up 404 debt: a single cleanup file eventually carried 474 broken paths.
The Work
What Was Done
A full technical audit first
I delivered a 50-slide audit built on the December 2022 crawl, covering every error class with a specific fix: information architecture, structured data, page speed, robots.txt, and backlink profile, then worked through it with the in-house team in weekly sessions across the first half of 2023.
Collection pages rewritten in the platform's own language
I rewrote SEO copy for 16 collection pages in the first batch and delivered it as ready-to-paste minified Liquid code with before and after columns, so implementation required no interpretation. Follow-on batches added rewritten titles and metadata for 30 collections and proposed dozens of new collections, giving the flat Shopify architecture a taxonomy that matched how people actually search for supplements.
Internal linking built to last
I hand-coded a rules-based related-collections module in Liquid that generates contextual links from product attributes, refined it through five revisions, and audited its companion related-searches module across 179 pages. The module earned its keep: it was still live on Irwin product pages in a February 2025 check, two years after launch, and became the use-case basis for a productized Shopify internal-linking app.
Redirect and 404 cleanup
I mapped and imported 474 redirects in a single February 2023 batch, followed by 17 more in April, and audited the site's redirect chains to keep the fixes from creating new problems.
The out-of-stock fix
I crawled the catalog to inventory 545 sold-out product pages, then documented a structured-data change so temporarily unavailable items stopped advertising "Out of Stock" in rich results, paired with back-in-stock email capture to recover the demand.
FAQ content with schema
I wrote question-and-answer content for product and collection pages with matching FAQPage schema, starting with an eight-page batch and expanding to a 31-page working list.
Competitive intelligence at scale
A keyword gap analysis against 19 competitors, including Vitamin Shoppe, GNC, iHerb, CVS, Walgreens, and Target, produced a combined dataset of 81,932 keyword rows and drove the new-collections roadmap.
Page speed specs the developers could act on
Three rounds of developer-ready documentation covered resource hints for eight external domains, CSS and font preloads, deferred JavaScript, explicit image dimensions, and a critical CSS build.
The Payoff
Results
All figures below are from the same SEMrush Position Tracking campaign for irwinnaturals.com (US, mobile), comparing the fixed set of 189 non-branded keywords tracked in both periods: the week of January 5 to 11, 2023 versus the week of March 16 to 22, 2023. Specific keywords are confidential to the client; verified data available on request.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Keywords in top 100 | 71 | 113 |
| Keywords in top 10 | 35 | 46 |
| Keywords in top 3 | 24 | 27 |
| The site's top money keyword | #62 | #9 |
| A new product category query | unranked | #4 |
| A competitive category query | #90 | #21 |
Within that fixed set, 40 keywords improved position and 43 entered the top 100 for the first time, against 6 that declined and 1 lost. Other movers in the same window included a competitive supplement category query, from #80 to #23, and a product format query, from unranked to #7. By a May 9, 2023 snapshot from the same campaign, 59 of the 82 tracked keywords mapped to product pages sat in the top 10.
Tools used: SEMrush, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Google Search Console, Google PageSpeed Insights, Majestic, Shopify admin and theme tooling
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