Case Study: Increasing Organic Sales and Search Visibility for a Mission Driven Coffee Brand

Grounds for Change is a sustainable coffee roaster focused on offering organic, fair trade coffee while making a positive environmental and social impact. Between November 2024 and July 2025, the brand partnered with our team to improve its technical SEO foundation, enhance content performance, and grow organic visibility across high intent search terms. The engagement focused on strengthening both traffic and conversions, with a clear emphasis on collection-level optimization, internal linking, and site crawl health.

Background & Challenge

Despite strong values and loyal customers, the Grounds for Change website struggled with several SEO issues that limited its visibility. Important keywords like coffee gifts were underperforming, and the site suffered from duplicate URLs caused by Shopify’s variant structure, breadcrumb inconsistencies, and ineffective canonical tags. Many blog posts lacked calls to action and failed to connect readers to relevant products or collections. Additionally, some high authority backlinks pointed to outdated or broken pages, further weakening the site’s authority. To improve the customer experience, we focused on addressing dead clicks, quick backs, and rage clicks, which in turn helped boost their SEO ranking. Without addressing these issues, the brand risked missing out on key seasonal opportunities.

What They Wanted — and How We Got Them There

  • Their Goal

    The primary objective was to grow monthly organic traffic and increase performance on commercial keywords like coffee gifts. We also aimed to resolve technical SEO issues that were limiting crawlability and visibility, while strengthening internal pathways between content and products to improve conversions.

  • Our Solution

    We began by conducting a comprehensive SEO audit using Sitebulb and Ahrefs. This initial phase included cleanup of image alt text, improvements to metadata on product and blog pages, and a review of Shopify’s URL logic. We rewrote all blog meta descriptions to improve click through rates and flagged duplicate URLs caused by the Quick Add feature. We also shortened overly long meta descriptions to align with search best practices.

    In the following months, we focused on repairing canonical and breadcrumb logic using Shopify metafields. We updated robots.txt to remove unnecessary URLs from crawling and increased the number of related product links on each product detail page to improve internal linking. We identified over thirty product pages that were underlinked and created a strategy to connect them with relevant content across the site. We also recommended building an HTML sitemap to support site structure and discovered a broken wholesale form that was later fixed.

    We continuously monitored for 404 errors and broken links and began reclaiming backlinks that pointed to removed or outdated pages. On the content side, we enhanced blog posts with internal links to product and collection pages and added clear calls to action. We cleaned up the blog title structure and improved indexing issues to ensure more consistent performance in search. Seasonal planning was introduced to capture traffic for topics like iced coffee, Father’s Day, and holiday gifts. Collection pages for espresso, decaf, and coffee gifts were rewritten with 150 to 200 words of original SEO optimized copy to better support rankings and conversions.

Results That Moved the Needle

+12%
Increase in revenue
+200x
Sessions to site
+12.9%
Conversion Rate

By the end of July 2025, Grounds for Change had resolved its major SEO issues and was well positioned for continued growth. Organic traffic more than doubled over the engagement, increasing from approximately 2,200 to over 4,100 visits per month. The site reached the number two ranking for the term coffee gifts, which drives over 14,000 searches per month. Technical fixes helped improve crawl efficiency and search clarity across the entire catalog.

From November 2024 to July 23, 2025, the site recorded over 54,000 sessions, which was slightly above the previous period. More importantly, overall performance significantly improved. Total sales reached 595,570 dollars, a twelve percent increase, and the site completed over 7,000 orders. The conversion rate improved to 12.09 percent, up four percent compared to the previous period. These gains reflect the direct impact of better visibility, stronger technical health, and a more strategic approach to content and internal navigation.

Results

• 54,143 sessions (up 0.5%)

• $595,570.14 in total sales (up 12%)

• 7,063 total orders (up 4%)

• 12.09% conversion rate (up 4%)

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