Case Study: Fixing a Bloated Store and Rebuilding Growth for a Specialty Coffee Equipment Retailer

The challenge

The store sold well to returning customers but struggled to win new ones through search. Its problems were:

• Duplicate product copy. Most product pages used manufacturer descriptions that dozens of other retailers also published.
• Empty category pages. They were just product grids with no buying guidance.
• Crawl waste. Filters for brand, price, color and size generated tens of thousands of near-duplicate URLs, and Google was indexing them.
• A flat Shopping account. Every product sat in one campaign with raw supplier titles, so budget flowed to whatever Google favored, not to what was profitable.

Goals: grow non-branded organic revenue, clean up the index, and improve return on ad spend (ROAS).

What we did

1. Index cleanup. We controlled faceted navigation with canonical tags, noindex rules and robots directives, so only valuable filter pages stayed indexable.
2. Category page rebuild. We added buying guides, comparison tables and FAQs to 18 priority categories, such as espresso machines and grinders.
3. Product page rewrite. We wrote original descriptions for the 150 top-selling products, covering use cases, specs that matter and who each product suits.
4. Buying-guide content. We published 15 articles aimed at comparison and “best for” searches, with internal links to the matching categories.
5. Shopping feed optimization. We rewrote product titles with brand, type and key attributes, and added missing GTINs and product categories.
6. Campaign restructure. We split Shopping into campaigns by margin tier, with brand and non-brand search separated and bids tied to profitability.

Organic revenue grew faster than organic traffic, which suggests the content and page rewrites attracted buyers rather than just visitors. In paid search, the same ad budget returned more than €5 in revenue for every €1 spent, up from about €3.

Lessons learned

• Cleaning the index came first, and it paid off. Removing thousands of duplicate URLs let Google focus on the pages that mattered, and rankings improved soon after.
• Category pages are the real prize in e-commerce. Adding genuine buying guidance to category pages moved more revenue than any single product page or blog post.
• Feed quality is a ranking lever in Shopping. Better titles and complete product data lifted ROAS before we touched a single bid.

Client details are withheld for confidentiality.