Page-1 dominance for a retail supplier consulting company.

The challenge

8th & Walton is the leading provider of consulting and training services for Walmart and Sam’s Club suppliers: the businesses that sell their products in Walmart and Sam’s Club stores, on Walmart.com, and through Walmart’s various supplier platforms. Within that niche, they’re the main player.

When they came to me, the site was already in good shape from an SEO perspective but had real untapped potential. The brand had authority within the category, the blog was active, and the team was thoughtful. They were looking for a partner who could turn that foundation into measurable rankings and lead generation across the topics that matter most to their customers.

Nearly a decade later, we’re still working together, across multiple engagement cycles, with each one building on the last.

The approach

Owning the niche

8th & Walton operates in a tight niche, but the upside of a tight niche is that dominance is achievable in ways it isn’t for broader categories. Across the 8–12 primary keywords we track, the site consistently ranks on page 1 for nearly all of them, and #1 for the large majority. For several core commercial terms, the site even holds multiple #1 rankings on the same SERP.

That’s the result of years of foundational work executed thoroughly: keyword research that mapped every supplier-relevant topic to a dedicated page, on-page optimization across the commercial pages and the blog, technical hygiene that compounds over time, and a content cadence that fills in the topical depth around the core terms.

The flagship resource

Early on, we had an idea: there’s no good freely-available Walmart fiscal year calendar online, but Walmart suppliers need one constantly, and would happily exchange an email address for it. So we built one. We wrote the corresponding blog post to rank for the topic, gated the calendar download behind an email signup form, and let SEO do the distribution.

The result has been the single biggest traffic driver on the site by a wide margin, and thousands of new email subscribers over the years. For a business whose email newsletter has long been the lifeblood of customer acquisition, that single resource has done more to grow the list than any other lever in the marketing mix. We’ve since developed a handful of additional downloads that have performed well, but the calendar was the breakout. Alongside the resources, two SEO-driven blog posts go up each month, deepening the topical coverage that keeps the rankings durable.

That single resource has done more to grow the list than any other lever in the marketing mix.

Adapting to the current era

The current scope reflects where SEO is today: part preservation, part new ground. On the preservation side, we’re reviewing pages that have lost traffic year-over-year and recommending updates, tightening the Training and Consulting pages as Walmart’s supplier platforms continue to evolve, and consulting on the development and launch of an upcoming new website to preserve as much of the hard-won search traffic as possible. On the new-ground side, we’re building out a tracking system for AI search visibility across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and similar platforms, then using what the data surfaces to shape content and marketing strategy.

The results

The headline isn’t a single percentage. It’s the sustained position. Across nearly a decade of SEO consulting work, 8th & Walton has remained the dominant search presence for their niche: #1 rankings for the large majority of their core commercial terms, frequently in multiple positions on the same SERP.

Behind that position is years of compounding growth. Organic traffic from search grew dramatically across the early years of the engagement and continued climbing in the years that followed, peaking before the broader AI search reset began changing how Google handles informational queries.

The supporting story is the lead engine that comes with it:

• Long-term page-1 visibility across the topics most likely to bring qualified prospects to the site, the kind of compounding presence that’s hard to displace once it’s established
• A flagship resource (the Walmart fiscal year calendar) that has been the single biggest traffic driver on the site for years, and a quiet workhorse for email list growth
• Two SEO-driven blog posts per month, sustained over years, building the topical depth that keeps the core rankings durable

The niche dominance has held, the lead engine continues to compound, and the work continues.