Attackletics doubled sales with a neon storefront that opens like a plain one.
A smart batting tee and a finished coaching app, sold from a stock theme. Rebuilt in neon and scanlines, without making the phone pay for it.
2×Sales
+35%Order value
Migration · 7 weeks
Gud Tonics deleted most of its site and was indexed in two days.
Alcohol-free kava and kratom tonics, positioned as the drink you have instead. Typing the brand name into Google returned nothing, because the site was buried under mass-generated content.
ClientGud Tonics
SectorFunctional beverages
MarketUnited States
Timeline7 weeks
ServicesSEO, Shopify Development, Migration, CRO
2 daysTo indexed
$10k+Daily sales
01The challenge
Gud Tonics make alcohol-free kava and kratom tonics, sold as the drink you have instead of the one you were going to. The product is good and the position is clear, which is more than most drinks brands start with. People who tried it bought it again. What failed was everything before the trying.
Google would not show the site. Not for a product term, and not for the brand name. Somebody had filled it with mass-generated articles, hundreds of pages saying the same thing in slightly different words. A shopper who had heard the name and went looking for it found competitors instead.
The instinct in that position is to publish better material on top of the old. It does not work, because the duplicated pages keep drawing the same judgement. They have to come out first. The founder had commissioned that library and was not keen to throw it away, and that was the argument the project had to win first.
02Our approach
UX
The buying decision here is a substitution. Someone is choosing this instead of a beer or a third coffee, usually at a particular time of day. So the store leads with the occasion, then the effect, then the ingredients. Flavour and format come last, because nobody switches drinks for a flavour.
Technical
Removal came before anything else. We planned to review the article library page by page and delete rather than improve it, keeping only what a customer would actually read. Removed pages would return a clean gone status rather than a redirect to the homepage, because a redirect tells a search engine the page still means something.
Conversion
The brand name came first in the rewrite. A shopper who has heard the name and cannot find the site is a customer somebody else gets. So the pages answering for the brand were written before any chasing product terms. Product and ingredient pages followed, one subject each. Being findable for your own name matters more than any other term.
03Design & UX
The homepage leads with the moment rather than the bottle. What you are having instead comes first, the effect second, the ingredients third. Flavour and pack size sit lower, where a decided buyer will find them. The article rail, the related-posts blocks and the tag clouds all went, because they were furniture built for pages that no longer exist.
On a phone the whole site is now short enough to read. Each page covers one subject and ends with a way to buy, so nobody has to navigate back to a menu. Navigation shrank with the page count, which made the menu something a thumb can use rather than a directory of articles.
Design & UX image
assets/img/cases/gud-tonics-seo-recovery-design.jpgOccasion before flavour
People switch drinks for a moment and an effect, not for a taste, so the page argues in that order.
Gone, not redirected
Deleted pages return a gone status instead of a redirect, which tells search engines the content is withdrawn rather than moved.
One page per subject
Every topic is covered once and properly, so nothing on the site competes with anything else on the site.
Brand pages written first
The rewrite started with the pages that answer for the name, because that was the search the business was losing.
04Development & technical implementation
The old library was reviewed page by page, by hand, and most of it was deleted. Removed URLs return a gone status, the sitemap was rebuilt to match, and internal links were rewritten so nothing points at a page that has been withdrawn. Search Console was used to confirm what had been dropped from the index.
What remained was rebuilt on Shopify, with Liquid templates for products and ingredients. Structured data describes the brand and the products in terms a search engine can read. The surviving pages were rewritten by people in the brand voice, fewer of them, each about one thing. GA4 and Search Console were set up to watch indexing from the first day.
Klaviyo carries the repeat purchase side, because this product is bought again rather than bought once. The team now publishes its own pages in the same templates. The rule they kept is one page per subject, written once, which is the rule the old library broke. The rebuild took 7 weeks.
Development image
assets/img/cases/gud-tonics-seo-recovery-build.jpg05
Key solutions.
The parts of the build a visitor would point at.
01
Findable for the brand name
Typing the brand into a search engine now returns the store, which is the first thing a curious customer tries.
02
A library worth reading
The pages that stayed cover products, method and ingredients, each written once, so visitors find an answer rather than a variation.
03
Occasion-led shopping
The store opens with the moment the drink replaces, which is how the decision is actually made, then works down to format.
04
Light, fast pages
Fewer pages and simpler templates mean the site loads quickly, which matters on the phone where most of this traffic arrives.
05
Clean removal signals
Withdrawn pages return a gone status and the sitemap matches, so search engines drop them instead of holding them against the site.
06
Repeat purchase email
Customer records feed the email programme, so people who liked the tonic hear about it again without another search.
06
The result.
What the work changed, in the numbers the client reports.
2 daysTo indexed
$10k+Daily sales
The site was indexed within 2 days of relaunch. For a brand that had been invisible even for its own name, that is the difference between having a website and not having one. No advertising was involved. Removing the duplicated pages is what let the real ones be seen.
The store now takes $10k+ in daily sales. The product and the position had not changed. What changed is that the people who went looking could arrive. That is the commercial value of removal, and it came without a single new advert or a larger content library.
07
The finished site.
Live, and running the business it was built for.
The store is live on Shopify, smaller than it was and easier to read for it. Search the brand name and it comes back. What is left is the product, how it is made, what is in it, and a way to buy.
Visit the live site“
We could not find ourselves on Google by typing our own name. Two days after launch we could. That was the whole problem, solved.
— Founder, Gud Tonics
09
Tech stack.
What it is built on, and what it talks to.
ShopifyLiquidSearch ConsoleGA4Klaviyo
10
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03
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