217% Increase in Organic Traffic for E-Commerce Seed Shop

Client Overview

Client: Circle Farms (circlefarms.ca)
Industry: E-commerce flower and vegetable seed shop

Circle Farms is an online seed shop operating in a highly competitive e-commerce space shaped by strong seasonality, established competitors, and rapidly evolving search features. Organic search plays a critical role in long-term customer acquisition and revenue growth within this industry.

The Challenge: Organic Growth Stalled After a Core Update

When the project began in June, Circle Farms’ organic growth had plateaued following the August 2024 Google core update. Despite having quality products and an existing content base, the website was not reaching its full organic potential.

Key challenges included stagnant organic traffic, content that was not fully aligned with modern search intent expectations, missed opportunities in commercial and long-tail keyword variations, no visibility in AI Overviews, and technical SEO inconsistencies across the site.

The objective was not short-term recovery, but sustainable growth built on stronger content quality, clearer topical authority, and solid technical foundations.

The SEO Approach: Consistent Page-by-Page Optimization

Rather than relying on one-off changes or isolated optimizations, this project focused on months of consistent, page-by-page SEO work across the entire site.

On-Page SEO and Content Strategy

Each relevant page was individually reviewed and optimized with a strong focus on improving keyword targeting and search intent alignment, optimizing headings and page structure, strengthening internal linking, expanding and refining content to outperform competitors, building topical authority across seed categories and collections, and adding question-and-answer based sections to capture People Also Ask style queries.

Content was written and optimized to perform well in both traditional organic search results and emerging AI-driven discovery environments.

Technical SEO and AI-Focused Optimization

Alongside content improvements, technical SEO played a key role throughout the engagement. This included implementing and optimizing structured data, fixing broken links and redirects, improving crawlability and internal link flow, optimizing meta data at scale, and preparing page structures and content formats for AI Overviews and LLM-based search experiences.

These improvements ensured that search engines and AI systems could better understand, trust, and surface the site’s content.

The Results: Measurable Organic Growth Across Key Metrics

217% Growth in Organic Visits

Estimated monthly organic traffic increased from 2,802 visits in June to 8,884 visits in January, making organic search the largest traffic source for the website.

Keyword Visibility Expansion

Total ranking keywords increased from 2,273 to 3,209. Over 900 new keywords entered top 3 or top 10 positions from previously not ranking. Keywords in the top 3 positions grew from 102 to 358, while keywords ranking in positions 4–10 increased from 329 to 567.

Although some low-value keywords were lost during this period, these were primarily low-converting queries with limited commercial relevance. At the same time, new rankings were gained for higher-intent keywords and more valuable keyword variations.

AI Overviews Visibility: From Zero to 89

At the start of the project, the website had no presence in AI Overviews. Through structured content, question-based optimization, and topical authority building, Circle Farms gained visibility in 89 AI Overviews, opening up an additional organic discovery channel.

43% Increase in Backlinks

Backlinks increased from 231 to 331, driven by relevance and authority rather than volume. This supported overall trust and organic visibility without relying on aggressive or unnatural link-building tactics.

Business Impact

As organic traffic quality and keyword intent improved, Circle Farms experienced a noticeable increase in sales and a strong return on investment from organic search. While this case study focuses on SEO performance metrics, the growth in organic visibility translated into meaningful business results during a key seasonal period.

Summary

This case study demonstrates how consistent, intent-driven SEO execution combined with strong technical foundations and AI-ready content can unlock growth in competitive e-commerce markets. By focusing on quality, relevance, and long-term strategy, Circle Farms was able to move past a core update plateau and achieve sustained organic growth.