3x organic traffic for an established ecommerce brand.

The challenge

US Wellness Meats (USWM) was one of the first businesses to sell grass-fed beef and other sustainably-raised meats online. Since 2000, they’ve expanded their online shop to offer hundreds of all-natural health food products, and are one of the most reputable brands in the category.

I was first brought on while they were preparing to launch a completely new website. For a site of their size, with so much history and authority, there was significant work to do to preserve existing rankings and to set the stage for future growth.

Nearly a decade in, we’re still working together. The SEO consulting engagement has evolved over the years from technical foundation work to a content-led growth strategy that drives a substantial share of the site’s organic traffic today.

The approach

The technical foundation

The first stretch of the engagement was about getting the new site launched cleanly without losing what the old site had earned. With years of accumulated authority and a long tail of traffic-driving pages, the migration required careful redirect mapping (matching every existing URL to its destination on the new site), a thorough technical audit, and cleanup of long redirect chains and duplicate-content issues introduced by URL parameters and pagination. Standard launch hygiene at the time, executed thoroughly enough that the launch was clean and the rankings held.

From there, before any of the content work that came later, we spent over a year on keyword research and on-page optimization across the commercial side of the site, making sure every product and category page was actually competing for the terms it should compete for. That groundwork is part of why the later content work compounded so cleanly: by the time the content engine started, the commercial pages were already in position to convert the traffic.

The content engine

The shift from “established brand with a clean site” to “established brand with a content moat” happened over years, not months. Every month, I direct two new SEO-driven blog posts: keyword-researched, briefed, and built around what their customers are searching for, then handed off to a writer who executes against the brief. The topics span the full spectrum of how someone discovers a grass-fed-meat brand: recipes (tri-tip, thin-cut steaks, slow-cooker basics), nutrition explainers (organ meats, cuts and macros), and practical kitchen how-tos (cooking from frozen, prep techniques).

That cadence, sustained for years, has compounded into something significant. Over the past 12 months, the blog drove roughly 80% of total organic traffic to the site, and SEO-driven posts specifically accounted for 90%+ of that. Translation: a single content workstream, executed two posts at a time, is responsible for roughly three-quarters of everything organic search delivers to the business.

A single content workstream — two posts at a time — is responsible for roughly three-quarters of everything organic search delivers to the business.

Ongoing optimization

Alongside the content engine, the work covers what an established ecommerce site needs to stay competitive: occasional technical updates as the site evolves, UI and design refinements that affect search visibility, and (increasingly important as AI search has changed how informational queries get answered) a methodical re-optimization of the on-page elements that drive rankings on key category and product pages, where someone is ready to buy, not just learn.

The results

Across a multi-year arc, organic traffic has grown more than 3x from where it started. And even as AI Overviews and ChatGPT have reshaped how informational queries get answered across consumer-facing content, the site continues to outperform its starting baseline by a wide margin.

The content engine is the throughline:

• The top 50 blog posts drove ~360,000 organic clicks over the past 12 months
• The top three posts alone drove more than 74,000 of those clicks
• Across the full site, 80% of organic traffic comes through the blog, and 90%+ of that comes from SEO-driven posts specifically

This is what happens when SEO is a sustained partnership rather than a one-time project: the early technical and on-page work earned the platform, and the years of content work have compounded on top of it.