They were stocking the best brands in Irish surf. Nobody could find them.
How a second-generation Irish surf shop turned its Shopify store into its biggest sales channel. With SEO.
€90k
Average monthly online revenue
(up from €2k)
10k+
Monthly organic visits
(from zero)
350
Top 3 keyword positions
(up from 15)
3x
Conversion rate improvement
(1% to 3%)
A small shop with big store problems
This surf shop and watersports centre has been serving Ireland's watersports community for two generations. They stock premium gear from the likes of O'Neill, Rip Curl, Billabong, Dryrobe, and Red Paddle Co, and they run a busy activity centre for kids and adults on the water.
The owner put it plainly when we first spoke: "We are a small store with big store problems." A catalogue of thousands of SKUs, tight margins, and no budget to throw at the kind of paid marketing the online store clearly needed. Getting the most out of organic search was going to matter.
Industry
Watersports Retail
Platform
Shopify
Location
Ireland
Timeline
Quick wins at 2 months;
transformative results at 2 years
Markets
Ireland
UK
Germany
Services
Shopify SEO
Technical SEO
International SEO
Content Strategy
"It was a completely transformative impact on the store. I had to hire extra staff to handle the orders, and we needed a new warehouse."
A site that couldn't be found, and a store that couldn't be navigated
The biggest structural issue was one that would have hampered the site no matter how good the content was. The Shopify store was sitting on a subdomain of the WordPress activity website. Branded search traffic that should have fed the store was being split across two properties and diluted in the process..
When we audited the store, the scale of the work became clear. Thousands of broken links, mostly from old blog posts pointing to discontinued products and empty collections. A main navigation that gave shoppers no sensible route through the catalogue. Product descriptions copied verbatim from brand websites. Collection pages with no content and no SEO titles. Images large enough to slow a page to a crawl. And a Shopify theme that worked fine for a boutique with a small range, but wasn't built for a store with this many SKUs.
The competition didn't make it any easier. Decathlon, Sports Direct, and Amazon were all investing heavily in SEO on the leisure side. UK surf shops were actively targeting Irish customers. And a couple of Irish surf shops were already running proper SEO campaigns. Our client was invisible for the commercial keywords that mattered.
- Shopify store on a subdomain. A structural SEO handicap from day one
- Navigation with no logical structure. The best selling products and collections were buried
- Shopify's collection-aware URLs creating duplicate content across hundreds of product pages
- Product descriptions copied from brand sites. Compounding the duplicate content issues
- Collection pages with no content and links to sub-collections
- Product URL's that had "copy" or year in them
- Hundreds of unmanaged product tags generating thousands of additional URLs, bloating the site and wasting crawl budget
- Oversized images slowing down product pages
- Thousands of broken internal links from blog content to inactive products
- Shopify theme poorly suited to a large-catalogue store
Fix the foundations. Then build on them.
With any Shopify store of this size, the temptation is to dive straight into content. That would have been a mistake here. The site had fundamental structural problems that would have undermined any content we created. So we worked from the ground up.
The first major move was migrating the store to its own .com domain, which immediately solved the subdomain problem and gave the ecommerce side of the business its own SEO footing. We also added EU countries and the UK as subdirectory international markets from the outset. We are a firm believer in international sales for ecommerce and since Ireland is in the EU, we might as well take advantage.
Alongside this came a complete overhaul of the site navigation and catalogue taxonomy. For large Shopify stores, collections are where most of the organic traffic lands. A well-structured collection page will typically generate far more visits than any individual product. So we rebuilt the navigation architecture from scratch, using historical sales data to identify the most commercially important categories. With this info, we brought these categories to the forefront of the navigation. Top on mobile menu, and top left on Desktop.
Wetsuits alone went from a single catch-all collection to over twenty distinct ones, covering men's, women's, kids', 5mm, 4mm, shorty, and hooded options. All navigable through a new mega menu. This wasn't just good for SEO. It was also just a better experience for a shopper who knew what they were looking for.
We also identified an opportunity most surf shops miss: brand-level collections. When someone searches for "Dryrobe Ireland" or "Rip Curl Ireland", they're already a shopper in market and ready to buy. Creating a dedicated, optimised collection for every brand in the store — and linking every product back to its parent brand — turned out to be one of the most profitable parts of the entire strategy. The Surf shop ended up ranking number one in Ireland for 11 of the international brands they import, outranking the brands themselves in local search.
The content layer came next: new copy on every collection page, a gear guide blog strategy designed to capture top-of-funnel search traffic, and full optimisation of image file names and sizes across the site. We also created individual size guide pages optimised for search, and pulled that data into product pages via Shopify metafields. Some of those size guides now send meaningful traffic in their own right.
We trained the client on how to add new products correctly for both SEO and Google Shopping. Because in a store that's constantly taking in new stock, getting it right first time matters. When a new product from a premium brand drops, being able to get it live and properly optimised before the competition is a real advantage. Not to mention keeping a good house in order and not letting al the good work go to waste.
Finally, Brexit forced the German market launch: a fully translated store using automated translation as a first pass, then reviewed and rewritten by native German speaker in house. Backed up with native German customer support and inexpensive shipping, the store is competitive in EU's largest market.
Technical SEO & Domain Migration
New .com domain, broken link cleanup, Shopify URL canonicalisation, crawl budget optimisation. New store design with theme suited to large catalogues, and image compression across the online store.
Catalogue Architecture & Navigation
Full taxonomy rebuild based on sales data. 20+ wetsuit collections. Organised by product type and metafields not tags. Brand-level collections for every stocked brand. Mega menu for large-catalogue navigation.
Content, Reviews & International
Collection page content, gear guide blog strategy, wetsuit size guides via Shopify metafields, product review integration, German translation and market launch, and client training on product optimisation. Local SEO via Google Business Profile.
What getting found means. In Numbers.
€2k → €90k
Average monthly online sales grew from €2,000 to €90,000. During a rare Irish heatwave one summer, a single month hit €250,000.
10k+
Monthly organic visits
350
Top 3 keyword positions
3–6%
Conversion rate (6% at peak)
€125
Average order value (Ireland)
60/day
Online orders at peak periods
11
Outranking International brands they stock
The Germany Story
When we launched the translated German store, we weren't sure what to expect. Ireland has an unusually high residual traffic share from English-speaking markets — the UK, US, Australia — so a non-English market breaking through was never going to be straightforward. Since Brexit, Lots of shoppers in mainland EU don't buy from English online stores thinking they will be landed with surprise import taxes and duties. Therefore we had to make sure the store was obviously EU based both in English and German.
Germany is now the largest source of traffic outside Ireland. German customers have an average order value of over €250, reflecting a strong appetite for premium watersports gear. Orders arrive every day, from a market that didn't exist for this business two years earlier. Plus orders also increased from border areas in neighbouring countries such as Denmark, Netherlands, Poland, Austria, and Czechia.
The upward curve wasn't instant - but it wasn't slow either
Nobody should promise overnight results from SEO. But there are things you can do early to get earn quick wins. For our surf shop client, the initial technical work and navigation overhaul produced quick wins in the first two months. Sales roughly tripled from a small base, which was encouraging even if the absolute numbers were still modest.
By the six-month mark, the content work and brand collection strategy were taking hold, and the traffic curve was clearly heading in the right direction. The transformative results came closer to the two-year mark: the new warehouse, the extra staff, the 60-orders-a-day peaks. That's not unusual for a store starting from near-zero organic visibility. Building real authority takes time.
One lasting change was the training we gave the team. In a product catalogue this size, with brands redesigning products annually - new stock arrives constantly. Teaching the client how to write product pages properly, covering original descriptions, correct metadata, and Google Shopping compatibility, meant they could get new products live and optimised faster than competitors stocking the same gear. That first-mover edge compounds over time and all the good work doesn't go to waste.
Months 1–2: Foundation work
Domain migration, technical fixes, broken link cleanup, navigation overhaul, new theme. First sales tripled from a low base.
Months 3–6: Content & collections
New collection pages live, gear guide blog underway, brand collections indexed. Traffic curve clearly moving upward.
Year 1: Visibility established
Ranking in top 3 for hundreds of commercial keywords. Brand collections outranking the brands themselves in Ireland. Germany store launched and sending daily orders.
Year 2: Transformative growth
€90k average monthly revenue. New warehouse. Extra staff. 60 online orders a day at peak. €250k in a single summer month.
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