Ecommerce SEO strategy: why we stopped chasing big search volume (and grew one client's organic traffic by 2000%)

One of our clients operates in one of the most competitive categories we work in. Established players, big marketing budgets, years of domain authority built up ahead of them. On paper, the obvious SEO move was to go after the biggest search terms in their category. The ones with the eye-catching monthly volume.

We didn't.

Chasing the biggest search terms only works if you can actually rank for them. Domain authority decides that more than intent does. A smaller or newer brand going after the highest-volume terms in a category dominated by giants is fighting a battle it is structurally unlikely to win, however good the content is. The search volume might be real. The ranking position never comes.

Will, who leads our SEO thinking, took a different view for this client. Instead of chasing the biggest numbers, we went after commercial keywords: more niche, lower volume, but carrying far higher buying intent. Terms this client could realistically win, searched by people much closer to actually purchasing. Then we built content clusters around those terms, on the website and off it. Blog content, product content, video, photography and scripts, all pointed at the same set of terms from multiple directions, rather than one page trying to rank in isolation.

It was Will's idea. Our content team wrote it. Our video and photography teams produced around it. The whole team pointed at one commercial goal, at the same time.

That client's organic traffic is up by more than 2000%. It is still growing.

Here is why I think this matters beyond the one result.

Search volume is a vanity metric if you cannot rank for it. A keyword with a hundred thousand searches a month is worth nothing to a brand sat on page four. A keyword with a thousand searches a month, filled with people who are ready to buy, that you can actually rank for, is worth more to the business every time. The number that looks impressive in a keyword research tool is not the number that matters. The number that matters is the one that eventually shows up in revenue.

This is a trap a lot of e-commerce brands fall into with SEO, and with marketing more broadly. It is easy to report on the wrong number, because the wrong number often looks better. Impressions look better than clicks. Reach looks better than conversion. Search volume looks better than rankability. None of those numbers pay invoices.

The part of this that matters to me as much as the percentage is how it was delivered. This was never an SEO project running on its own. It worked because SEO, content, video and photography were all pointed at the same commercial goal at the same time. If our SEO team had picked the keywords and handed them to a content team working from a different brief, or if video and photography sat separate from what the written content was trying to achieve, this would not have worked anywhere near as well. It worked because everything sat under one plan, built and run by one team.

That is the bit I actually want e-commerce brands to take from this, more than the percentage. When you are looking at your own marketing, or at an agency's reporting, ask whether the number in front of you is a real commercial number or a number that just looks good in a slide. Search volume, impressions and reach can all be true and still mean nothing for the business. Ask whether your SEO, your content and your creative are genuinely working from the same brief, or just coexisting under the same account.

We are still growing this client's traffic. The biggest keyword in their category is still sat there, still mostly out of reach, still owned by a competitor with a decade's head start. We are not chasing it. We do not need to.

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