Case Study · Ecommerce, industrial safety equipment
PK Safety: Eight Years of Ecommerce SEO Across Three Replatforms
46% organic revenue growth on 4% fewer visits (April 2021 window)
PK Safety, an online retailer of industrial safety equipment, kept the same SEO consultant on the account for nearly eight years, from July 2017 through April 2025, working through the MarketMindshift agency alongside the client's developers. Over that span the site went through three replatforms with full pre and post launch SEO QA each time, recovered from a documented ranking slide, and reported 46 percent organic revenue growth in the April 2021 client deck even as organic visits dipped 4 percent. The engagement closed with 18,700 related-search internal links deployed across 4,566 Shopify products.
Results SnapshotThe Situation
The Challenge
PK Safety sells respirators, gas detection, fall protection, and other work safety gear to buyers who search with high commercial intent. The catalog was large, but the category pages meant to capture that demand were nearly empty: an October 2019 audit found priority categories carrying as little as 14 to 30 words of content.
The bigger recurring threat was change itself. The site relaunched in 2017, moved to BigCommerce in November 2018, added a Shogun frontend in 2022, and migrated to Shopify in December 2024. Replatforms punish ecommerce SEO when they go unmanaged, and the files show exactly what was at stake: after the 2018 launch, one priority category keyword fell from an average position of 13.7 to 85.3 and several keywords dropped out of the rankings entirely. By February 2020 a year-over-year comparison showed the site's top money keyword sliding from position 1 to 6, with a substantial estimated annual click loss on that keyword alone. Then COVID whipsawed demand: one pandemic-driven product query collapsed to one fortieth of its April 2020 peak within a year. On top of all that, a February 2019 diagnosis found blog revenue untracked since an analytics merge and AMP product pages that could not complete an add-to-cart flow.
The Work
What Was Done
Migration QA, three times over
For the 2017 relaunch I ran staged audit checklists and more than 20 crawls across the staging, soft-launch, and live sites. For the November 2018 BigCommerce move I audited the dev site before launch and built a pre and post launch Search Console comparison that separated wins (a competitive category query improved from average position 2.68 to 1.61) from losses that needed triage. The 2022 Shogun launch got a 19-item prioritized audit checklist, a final redirect map of 1,934 rows, and a 6,216-row redirect test sheet. For the December 2024 Shopify migration I wrote the SEO priorities document covering flat URL structure, faceted navigation handling, 301s, and metadata transfer, then ran post-launch crawls and cleanup imports for 404s, redirects, alt text, and PDF links through April 2025. Across the whole engagement, redirect management alone spans more than 70 dated worksheets.
Category content at scale
The 2019 audit scoped 43 priority category pages to roughly 250 words each with rewritten title tags and related questions, out of 133 categories reviewed and 93 flagged. On-page optimization ran in batches from 2017 through 2023, backed by keyword-to-page mapping and monthly category updates.
Architecture and content strategy
I delivered siloing recommendations for top categories and brand-plus-category combinations, hierarchy mockups for a core product category, sub-categories, how-to content, and a resources hub, a gap analysis aggregating more than 20 competitors, and monthly keyword-researched content outlines and editorial calendars of roughly nine to ten pieces per month.
Internal linking, productized
A related-searches concept first mocked up for the BigCommerce site in 2020 became a production deployment on Shopify in February 2025: 18,700 related-search internal links across 4,566 unique products, refined through several iteration rounds before the final import.
Two satellite sites, same playbook
In 2017 and 2018, gassniffer.com and confinedspace.com each received full crawls, soft-launch audit checklists, top-5-page optimization with keyword baselines (confinedspace.com held position 2 for its primary target query), and crawl-error and redirect cleanup.
Diagnostics beyond rankings
The engagement also covered the 2019 analytics and AMP investigation, a toxic backlink audit, a video XML sitemap, FAQ schema examples, Algolia and Klevu site-search analyses, page speed audits, developer SEO requirements, and a conversion audit after the Shopify migration.
The Payoff
Results
All growth is shown as relative movement with time windows as labeled, sourced from Google Search Console and Google Analytics for pksafety.com. Exact traffic figures and keywords are confidential to the client. Performance data available on request. This account is reported honestly: the same files that document growth also document the dips each replatform risked, which is exactly why the QA work mattered.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Organic revenue | Prior-period baseline | Up 46% (April 2021, as reported in the client deck) |
| Clicks on a pandemic-driven product query | Dec 2019 baseline | 3x by Dec 2020 |
| Clicks on a competitive category query | Dec 2019 baseline | 4.2x by Dec 2020 |
| Clicks on the site's flagship blog post | Dec 2019 baseline | 1.5x by Dec 2020 |
| Average position for a competitive category query across the Nov 2018 replatform | 2.68 (Jan to Nov 2018) | 1.61 (Nov to Dec 2018) |
| Blog referral revenue | Dec 2018 baseline | 12x month over month (Jan 2019) |
| Clicks and impressions on a core category page | Prior 6 months | Doubled (trailing 6 months, per April 2021 deck) |
The April 2021 revenue growth arrived while organic visits were down 4 percent: better qualified traffic, not just more of it. The December 2020 keyword recoveries followed the ranking slide diagnosed in February 2020, and by early 2019 the blog had grown into a significant standalone organic traffic channel in its own right.
Tools used: Google Search Console (including API-based pulls), Google Analytics and GA4, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner, PageSpeed Insights, BigCommerce, Shogun, Shopify with Matrixify, Algolia and Klevu site-search data, the Related Searches Shopify internal linking app, and Loom for client walkthroughs.
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