Case Study · Ecommerce / outdoor and hunting apparel
SITKA Gear: Turning a Beloved Brand Into a Non-Branded Search Contender
7 of 12 top non-branded keywords on page one, up from zero (Oct 2020 to Oct 2021)
SITKA Gear, the W.L. Gore & Associates hunting apparel brand, had a devoted following searching its name but almost no visibility for the category terms hunters actually type into Google. Over a three-year engagement beginning July 2020, the SEO program built roughly 200 new category landing pages, cleaned up tens of thousands of indexed filter URLs, and rebuilt the site's technical foundation. A year into the work, non-branded organic clicks were up 62 percent year over year, and seven of the brand's top 12 non-branded keywords sat on page one of Google, up from zero.
Results SnapshotThe Situation
The Challenge
SITKA had the brand equity most retailers dream about. Hunters searched for SITKA by name and bought by name. What the site could not do was capture the far larger audience searching generically: the category's head keyword drew roughly six times the monthly search volume of its branded equivalent, and SITKA had almost no indexable category pages built to compete for those terms.
The initial audit made the gap concrete. In December 2020, the category's head keyword sat at position 21, a broader gear query at position 25, and the top men's category keyword at position 13. A year-over-year review in October 2021 confirmed that twelve months earlier, zero of the site's top 12 non-branded keywords had been on page one of Google.
Underneath the content gap sat serious technical debt. Faceted navigation had leaked tens of thousands of filter-parameter URLs into Google's index, eventually measured at more than 58,000 filter pages collecting impressions and competing with the real category pages. Google Search Console flagged over 3,500 Cumulative Layout Shift issues from missing image dimensions and shifting layouts on product and category templates.
The Work
What Was Done
A 90-day action plan that became a three-year roadmap
The engagement opened with a prioritized plan covering more than 20 workstreams: templated titles and metadata for dynamic pages, faceted navigation handling, internal linking, page speed, log file analysis, and structured data.
Category pages built for how hunters actually search
The program identified the non-branded content gaps and drove creation of static product listing pages to fill them, batch after batch, until SEO-built PLPs numbered around 200. Those pages became the destination for most of the site's top organic traffic. Each page launched with keyword-briefed copy; 92 content orders were briefed and managed through the engagement, alongside on-page optimization batches that mapped nearly a thousand keywords to existing pages.
Index cleanup at enterprise scale
With 58,000+ filter URLs diluting the category pages, the fix had to be systematic: canonical-tag recommendation sets exceeding 17,000 rows, deduplication of metadata across 429 product pages, and parameter handling rules that pointed Google back at the pages built to rank.
Technical foundations
More than 1,100 internal link recommendations rewired equity toward the new category pages. FAQ, Video, and Event structured data programs added rich-result eligibility across thousands of URLs. The Core Web Vitals workstream turned 3,500+ layout shift issues into dev-ready fixes, and the site reached 'good' standing in Google's Page Experience report by early 2022.
Product-level optimization
Campaign work went as deep as color-variant metadata on individual product lines, with dozens of product detail pages optimized per campaign.
Replatform migration support
When SITKA rebuilt the site on a new platform in 2023, the engagement covered the migration checklist, staging crawls and QA, server-side rendering requirements, redirect mapping in the thousands of rows, and two full post-launch technical audits to catch regressions from the new build.
The Payoff
Results
All movement below is from Google Search Console and SEMrush for sitkagear.com, with time windows as labeled. Exact traffic figures and keywords are confidential to the client. Performance data available on request. Given the collaborative nature of the engagement, results reflect growth during the SEO program.
| Metric | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
| Top-12 non-branded keywords on page one | 0 (Oct 2020, 90-day average) | 7 of 12 (Oct 2021, 90-day average) |
| Non-branded organic clicks | Trailing 90-day baseline (Oct 2020) | +62% YoY (trailing 90 days, Oct 2021) |
| Non-branded impressions | Trailing 90-day baseline (Oct 2020) | +100% YoY (same window) |
| Top men's category keyword | Position 13 (Dec 2020) | Position 1 (Jan 2022) |
| A women's category keyword | Position 15 (Dec 2020) | Position 1 (Jan 2022) |
| Another competitive category query | Off page two | Position 1, up 67 spots (Jan 2021 to Jan 2022) |
| Tracked keywords at position 1 | 13 (Jan 2021 to Jan 2022) | |
| Site-wide organic clicks | Fall baseline (Sep to Dec 2019) | +17% (same window, 2020) |
| Site-wide impressions | Spring baseline (Feb to May 2020) | +71% (same window, 2021) |
Within eighteen months, the category pages built for non-branded demand were carrying real weight: over a 16-month window ending January 2022, the men's category page was the second-highest organic traffic earner on the entire site, behind only the homepage.
Tools used: Google Search Console, Screaming Frog SEO Spider, SEMrush, Textbroker, PageSpeed Insights, Lighthouse, WebPageTest, and batch CSV import workflows into the CMS.
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