Hiking gear webshop
A specialist hiking-gear webshop. The owner is an active hiker with 15 years of experience and provided strong input throughout the project. The shop has roughly 1,000 SKUs.
Situation at the start
The shop had been live for several years but grew slowly. The niche is dominated by big retailers, and the owner's expertise and field experience were invisible everywhere except the "About" page. Product descriptions were copy-paste from manufacturers, organic traffic stagnated at ~120 monthly sessions, and revenue averaged €800/month. The shop survived on existing customers who searched by name or had it bookmarked.
What we did during the project
SEO audit
A detailed audit produced a prioritised list of problems with clear fixes, plus proposals for a new structure and a content strategy.
Audit implementation
Executed every change from the audit — technical fixes, category and product changes — with QA at each step.
New structure
Rebuilt categories organised by activity and product. Existing products moved into the new categories and redirects set from old URLs.
Schema markup
Product, AggregateRating and Review schema across the shop. Products began showing in Google results with price, availability and rating — big CTR lift.
Owner-written content
47 detailed expert product reviews (1,500–2,500 words, field photos, model comparisons) and 21 activity guides — all written by the owner, somebody who actually uses the gear in the field.
Authority building
Partnerships with 8 hiking clubs (sponsored tours, member discounts, guest lectures by the owner). Weekly newsletter delivering real value, not just discount promos.
Link building
Articles for niche portals and related sites. 94 backlinks from authoritative domains in 12 months — significantly lifting Domain Authority.
Concrete activities
Numbers that speak for themselves
Why this project worked
The project started with a detailed SEO audit, followed by a new webshop structure, schema markup, and a careful content foundation of 47 expert reviews and 21 guides written by the owner. The numbers followed: significant organic traffic growth and excellent ROI on the SEO and technical investment within the first 12 months.
The lesson: in a niche dominated by giants, the only sustainable edge is real expertise in the content. We could not out-spend the competition, but we could out-write them by hosting the field experience the giants don't have.
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