Two Ecommerce SEO Results (And Whether Yours Would Look Like Them)

Someone has sent you an ecommerce SEO case study and the number in it is large. Ahrefs took 1M random URLs and found that only 1.74% reached Google's top 10 within a year. Any published win is drawn from that small minority.

Two facts decide what the number is worth to you. The figure the store started from, and the window it was measured over.

Both of those facts sit in the two results below, because they are ours. I am John Butterworth, and Mint SEO publishes its client numbers with the starting figure and the window stated.

My own count is 3M+ organic sessions driven across 11+ years in SEO. Reading other people's reported numbers is most of what I do before a store ever signs anything, and that reading is the skill I can hand over in one article.

You get our two results first, then the five checks I run on anybody else's.

Both Client Results, With The Starting Figures Attached

Two engagements, two very different starting positions. Both numbers are real, and neither is worth much to you until you know what sat underneath it.

BedShelfie And The Twelve Week Window

BedShelfie sells bedroom furniture on Shopify and had been leaning on paid traffic through the gifting peak. We ran a twelve-week seasonal programme built around product and collection on-page optimisation, technical fixes, and buyer-intent content. It produced 256% more sales from Google Search across a 12-week seasonal campaign, and the detail sits on BedShelfie's case study.

Read that as a sales figure. It counts orders that came through Google Search over a stated twelve weeks.

Between them those two facts make the claim checkable by anyone who asks.

Hidden Garden Flowers And The Number Behind The Percentage

When we worked with Hidden Garden Flowers, a Los Angeles florist, we produced the most flattering-looking number we own. I would rather show you how it works than ask you to take it on trust.

Organic search went from 251 monthly organic visitors to 24,021 monthly organic visitors in 12 months, which reads as +9,470% on Hidden Garden's results. We publish that percentage and the 251 together, because only one of them tells you the size of the job.

Look at what those two figures do to each other. Both statements describe the same twelve months, and the percentage is enormous because 251 was small.

A store already sitting at 25,000 monthly visitors would have to reach 2.4 million to post the same percentage. The headline scales with how little a store had, which is our reason for printing the 251.

The Disciplines That Ran On Each Account

Each result came from several disciplines running at the same time, which is how we run every retained account.

On Hidden Garden that meant service and location landing pages aligned to how people really search in LA. Underneath them sat crawl and indexation fixes, plus the content that made those pages competitive.

BedShelfie ran on product and collection on-page optimisation, technical fixes, and buyer-intent content aimed at shoppers at the point of purchase. Five changes carried that campaign, and every one of them is available to you:

1. Group your transactional keywords onto one product page each, so no two pages chase the same buyer.
2. Rewrite the title tag, meta description, H1 and body copy on those pages around the terms you just assigned.
3. Write informational posts that answer the questions around those products, and link them down to the pages that sell.
4. Add contextual internal links between your product, collection and blog pages using descriptive anchor text.
5. Fix the product titles, descriptions and category taxonomy in your Google shopping feed.

Work is what transfers between two stores. Headlines tell you what happened to somebody else, while a tactic list tells you whether the same programme is available to you.

For the sequencing behind that kind of programme, we set it out in what to fix on a store and in what order.

How To Read A Published SEO Result Before You Trust The Number

Five checks. Run them on anyone's numbers, mine included.

The Baseline Underneath The Percentage

Percentages are ratios, so the denominator does all the work. At 251 monthly visitors a modest absolute gain reads as thousands of percent.

Scale that up and the arithmetic turns against you. At 25,000 the same percentage would be a far bigger job than anything in our own results.

So ask for that figure first. Until you have it, the percentage is not information you can act on.

There is a second reason the baseline matters, and it is newer. What an organic click was worth changed between 2025 and 2026, so an older result is not directly comparable to a current one.

Seer's study covered 5.47 million queries and 2.43 billion impressions between January 2025 and February 2026. That sample spans exactly the period the older case studies in front of you were measured in, which is what makes it usable as a yardstick. Over that period, click-through rate on Google's AI Overviews bottomed out at 1.3% in December 2025 and then climbed to 2.4%.

Those averages hide the number an online store needs. In that same study transactional queries ran at 5%, against 3.3% CTR where there was no AI Overview at all.

That second figure is the one that matters to a store, because product and collection pages live on transactional searches. A traffic figure won before this shift was won in a different market to the one your store trades in now.

Core Updates Inside The Reporting Window

Core updates, in the reporting on them, "involve broad changes to Google's ranking systems". They re-score whole result sets and they land whether or not a store has changed anything. A store can therefore gain or lose positions inside a reporting window without touching its site.

The March 2026 core update completed in 12 days, which was faster than the December 2025 update took. Anything a store published in those twelve days was re-scored alongside every competitor at the same time.

Google then released the May 2026 core update with the rollout potentially taking up to 2 weeks to complete. A twelve-month reporting window in 2026 therefore holds at least two of them, and a twelve-week window can sit inside one.

None of that makes a twelve-month number worthless. Ask which weeks the movement happened in.

Google says much the same in its guidance on debugging search traffic drops. You will likely want to wait a few weeks before reading whether your work had a beneficial effect on ranking position.

That same guidance points you at the last 16 months as the comparison range. It also names "errors that can prevent Google from crawling" your pages as one cause of a change. A new trend or seasonality in what people search for is another.

Branded Traffic Or Not

People searching your brand name were mostly coming anyway. The ones searching for what you sell were not, and a result that reports a single organic total has folded those two audiences together.

That split used to be manual. A branded query filter now ships inside Google Search Console.

Google's definition is wider than an exact brand match. Google puts it plainly. A branded query is a query that includes your brand name, variations or misspellings of the brand name, plus brand-related products or services.

That definition matters less than what Google says the two query types are for. Branded queries typically lead to higher-ranking pages from your site and result in higher click-through rates.

Non-branded queries do the opposite job. They show how new users find your content without any initial intent to go to your site. You can apply this filter across all search types in the search results performance report.

Two minutes on your own property settles it. Run the filter, read the non-branded line, and treat that as the number your SEO spend has to move.

Sessions Or Orders, And Which Is Harder To Inflate

BedShelfie's figure counts sales, and that is why I put it first. An order has to survive a payment step. That makes it the harder number to inflate by accident.

Session counts move for reasons that never involved a human arriving. Describing what he sees on his own properties in an r/SEO thread on analytics discrepancies, u/baudien321 says GA4 "will still record hits from bots if they execute the tracking script, especially if they're hitting old URLs or scraping pages at scale."

In that same thread u/Direct_Push3680 makes the mechanical point. "Server logs and GA measure completely different things. Logs capture every request to the server, while GA only fires when the tracking script executes in the browser".

None of that makes a sessions figure worthless. It does mean a revenue or order figure is the stronger claim.

Before you convert one into the other, it helps to know what a good ecommerce conversion rate looks like.

How Old The Average Page Above You Is

This last check decides whether any of it transfers, and it costs nothing to run. Look at who currently holds the positions you want.

Patrick Stox, an SEO consultant, writes in the Ahrefs ranking study that "on average, the #1 ranking page in Google is 5 years old", against just 2 years old back in 2017. Every ecommerce SEO case study you read was run against one specific field, and the headline will not tell you which.

Age is a proxy for accumulated links and brand strength, and a store cannot add either quickly. In that same study 72.9% of pages in the Top 10 are more than 3 years old, so you are usually asking to displace something with a long head start.

Two programmes, one run against a soft field and one against an entrenched field, produce the same shape of write-up. The write-up alone cannot tell you which you are buying.

Working out which one you are in is the first thing we do, and it is the job a site audit exists to answer.

Those five checks, with the figures to hold them against:

The Ecommerce SEO Case Studies Nobody Publishes

Everything above assumes you have a result in front of you. The harder question is what the results you never see would have said.

The Base Rate Underneath Every Published Win

Write-ups exist because there was something worth reporting. The set you can read has been selected on outcome before you ever open one.

That same Ahrefs study measured the base rate underneath the selection. Its authors "took 1M random URLs seen by our crawler in September 2023 and looked if any of them made it to the top 10 within a year".

Only 1.74% of them did, as that same study records.

As that same study shows, the other 98.26% produced no write-up, because there was nothing in them to report. That same study describes the population every published ecommerce SEO case study is drawn from.

Six Months Of Page Level Work Against An Authority Deficit

Here is the ecommerce SEO case study nobody writes up. Posting in an r/SEO thread about his own store, u/Design_Inspire_1354 recorded six months in which he had worked through "100+ key commercial pages (title/meta, H1s, high-quality content, keyword research)".

Internal linking was strong and the site had no crawl problems. Nothing moved.

Replies from other operators did not find a mistake in the work. Writing from his own experience of the niche in the same thread, u/Shrtaxc put the cost of competing at links that "cost over 2k usd per link".

What separates the two stores is accumulated authority. Better titles and headings do not close an authority deficit.

If you recognise your own store in that, the useful next read is which ecommerce SEO job to do first.

We saw the same selection effect running across a whole genre of write-ups in our post on published ecommerce migrations.

Have Us Read Your Own Numbers With You

Your own result is the one you cannot look up. Your baseline, your branded split and the age of the pages sitting above you are all knowable today, and none of those three appears in anybody else's write-up.

Reading your own figures against a published result is what the free 30-minute consultation is for. You get me on the call. We work to a model we call eight disciplines, one job, and it covers:

• where your store currently ranks
• the biggest quick wins I can see
• a rough 90-day direction

Bring your Search Console figures and we will go through them together. Book your free consultation and you will leave knowing which published results are reachable from where your store sits today.