Transforming SEO Performance in the clothing niche

Background

This project began with a sports clothing brand that already had a strong footprint across the UK, Europe and the USA. They were an established retailer with steady organic visibility, but their top-of-page rankings, commercial performances, and AI search presence didn’t reflect the true strength of the brand.

My role was to modernise their search foundation, strengthen their authority and position the brand for both traditional Google SEO and the fast-growing world of AI-driven discovery, including Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT Search and Perplexity.

1. The Challenge

When I began working with this sports clothing brand, they already had a solid presence across the UK, Europe and the USA. Traffic was steady and rankings were generally healthy — but the real issue lay in their top-end visibility.

Although the site ranked across page one for many terms, their positions 1, 2 and 3 were significantly weaker than expected. This limited their click-through rates and overall brand exposure.

As AI-driven discovery grew in importance, a second challenge emerged: improving how the brand was interpreted, cited and recommended across AI and LLM search environments.

The goal was clear:
Strengthen top-rank performance while improving brand perception and visibility across Google AI Overviews, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT Search and Perplexity.

1. Magento → Shopify Migration (Foundation Work)

The project began with a full migration from Magento to Shopify, which provided a more scalable and SEO-friendly foundation.
During the migration, we:

• mapped all legacy URLs to prevent ranking loss

• rebuilt templates with stronger content structure

• improved site speed, user experience and technical SEO

• enhanced internal linking

• introduced cleaner schema and entity reinforcement

Within the first three months, the new foundation delivered a clear uplift in page one and top-three rankings.

2. Competitive Growth Through Authority Building

With the technical base strengthened, the next focus was improving high-competition, commercially valuable keywords.

We executed a high-quality branded link strategy, including:

• authoritative editorial link acquisition

• product-focused content campaigns

• video-led brand placements

• competitions and PR initiatives

• unique branded content assets

This approach was intentionally slow and deliberate — many top-tier links required 3–4 months to earn — but the sustained impact on rankings and trust signals was strong.

3. AI Visibility & LLM Perception (Ongoing Work)

As search continues shifting toward AI-first discovery, we began optimising the brand’s visibility within LLM-powered search platforms. This work is still in progress, but focuses on:

• improving presence in ChatGPT Search, Perplexity, Google AI Mode and AI Overviews

• enhancing entity clarity and factual consistency

• restructuring content for easier AI summarisation and citation

• strengthening trust signals that influence AI recommendations

• increasing branded share of voice within AI-generated results

Early indicators show improved brand understanding and more frequent inclusion within AI answer sets — especially for category-level queries.

Results

Within the first six months, the clothing brand experienced a 43% increase in page-one keyword visibility — equating to more than 300 new page-one rankings.

Across the following 12 months, this translated into strong commercial performance, with revenue increasing by 65% year-on-year and the site’s conversion rate improving by an additional 1.2%.

Most recently, the brand has begun gaining a stronger share of voice across LLM and AI-driven search platforms, improving how they are referenced, surfaced and recommended in AI-generated answer results.

These combined outcomes strengthened both their traditional organic search footprint and their emerging presence across AI search channels.