Northwind arrived with forty thousand indexed catalogue pages, of which roughly six hundred had ever received an organic click. The rest were burning crawl budget and diluting every topic they cared about.
The problem
Faceted navigation had generated a near-infinite URL space. Sales leads were attributed almost entirely to “direct”, so nobody internally believed search was worth funding.
What we did
- Collapsed the facet space and consolidated 38,000 thin URLs into 900 curated category pages.
- Rebuilt product schema and internal linking around purchase intent.
- Fixed attribution so lead source survived the quote request form.
- Ran a nine-month editorial programme against genuine buyer questions.
The result
Organic sessions rose 212% over fourteen months. More importantly, cost per qualified lead fell by a third, and the sales team stopped arguing that search traffic “never buys”.
