31% Traffic improvement for specialist aquarium retailer

Passion can be a powerful driver of success, and when channeled effectively, it can evolve into a thriving career or even a passive income stream.

This is an example of how a popular aquarium specialist eCommerce store, fueled by passionate hobbyists, overcame significant technical challenges to achieve remarkable growth in organic traffic.

The Challenge

The blog, known for its engaging content and deep expertise in aquarium care, was generating revenue through affiliate links and display advertising.

However, a migration to a custom WordPress theme led to an alarming decline in traffic. Key traffic-driving articles began losing their search engine rankings, with some disappearing from search results altogether.

The numbers told the story:

• 31% Increase in Organic Sessions (YoY)
• 71k Ranking Keywords (Globally)
• 3.2k Position 1-3 Keywords (Google US)

Diagnosing the Issues

Despite the high-quality content produced by the blog’s passionate authors, the new WordPress templates introduced several technical SEO problems:

1. Internal Linking Erosion: The redesign removed many internal linking features to achieve a "modern" and "clean" aesthetic. This resulted in some articles having a click depth of over 10, making it difficult for both users and search engines to navigate the site effectively.
2. JavaScript-Rendered Blog Categories: Blog category pages were served using JavaScript without any pre-rendering. As a result, the initial HTML lacked plain HTML links, causing search engines to struggle with crawling and indexing these pages.
3. URL Structure Changes: Updates to the URL structure for category pages and custom post types were implemented without proper redirects, leading to a significant loss of previously established link equity.

Implementing the Solution

A lightweight technical SEO audit quickly uncovered these critical issues. I collaborated with the development agency to prioritize and address the problems. Over the course of a few months, the following solutions were implemented:

• Reinstating internal linking features to reduce click depth and improve site structure.
• Introducing server-side rendering for JavaScript-heavy pages, ensuring that search engines could access plain HTML links.
• Setting up 301 redirects to preserve link equity and guide users to the correct URLs.

Additionally, we leveraged Cloudflare Workers (Edge SEO) to expedite changes and enhance site performance.

Results

Once the changes were implemented, Google began rediscovering previously ranked content and indexing new articles and guides. The performance improvements were evident:

• Organic traffic rebounded significantly.
• Ranking positions improved, with more keywords climbing into the top 1-3 spots.
• User engagement increased, further boosting site visibility.