Northern Shoe Store: an SEO case study
Katrina, Terry and Remidy showing off the new Shopify website which was optimised for desktop, tablet and mobile.
Digital marketing plays an important role in increasing brand awareness and sales in business. Search engine optimisation (SEO), together with websites, social media and email marketing, are key digital marketing enablers of business growth. SEO is an extraordinarily broad and deep science - not well understood in business and even by most marketers - and we hope our series of rural SEO case studies can help businesses better understand this important marketing discipline.
Terry Jennings and his Northern Shoe Store business will always occupy a special a place in our heart. The business was a client for around 7 years but succumbed to the fate of an increasing number of bricks and mortar retailers and closed its doors in 2025.
Terry approached us in 2018 to build a new website to replace a static website that had no online sales capability. It also had to sync with his point of sale (POS) software to ensure online stock quantities matched physical stock levels in store.
Using Google’s Gemini AI we were able to analyse raw sales data extracted from Shopify, split it by state and exclude local postcodes to reveal that 80% of online orders came from outside the local area. We can safely conclude that our SEO strategy was a strong driver of this result given the family-owned business had little brand awareness outside of its immediate location.
The SEO challenge: David versus Goliath
While we developed a modern-looking online store on the Shopify platform we knew we also needed to perform comprehensive search engine optimisation (SEO) on the website to ensure his product pages appeared on Google when people were searching for products he stocked. While the third generation family-owned business had tremendous local brand awareness and foot traffic, the real opportunity was to get his website and products in front of potential customers online from outside the Swan Hill region.
This was easier said than done as he was in competition with large businesses with bigger marketing budgets and who had already been online years before him such as shouz and styletread. To make matters worse he was also competing for visibility with the brands he was selling - including Frankie4 and Django & Juliette - who dominated page one of search results for their brand name.
What we learned is that rankings on Google can fluctuate - wildly - from week to week. This could be caused by updates to Google’s algorithm but it’s likely that Terry’s competition also had its resources spending time and money to improve their rankings on Google too!
Online sales success can happen even when not on page one of Google results
A positive conclusion we came to, however, was that even if a Northern Shoe Store product page was ranked on page 2, 3 or 4 of Google, shoppers keen for a bargain were still finding Terry’s business and buying from him.
There could be several reasons for this:
were Terry’s prices lower?
Was he more competitive on shipping?
Or did he simply have the correct shoe size customers were after and they were prepared to visit numerous sites until they found the correct fit?
Personally, I think in this case it was likely #3. It goes to show that you don’t always have to be ranked on the first page of Google to achieve online sales but you want to be close to it and threatening to break into the first page.
The wildly popular Frankie4 was one of Northern Shoe Store’s most popular brands.
Success between the challenges
As we touched on earlier, it was extremely challenging to outrank the big players online who have big marketing and SEO budgets. They could and did focus their efforts on the most popular brands and products that are highly sought after. For example, the mega popular Frankie4 brand of women’s shows averages 11,000 to 30,000 monthly searches on Google Australia and we found it very difficult to break into the top 15 results on Google and stay there. The brand name is a very broad search term so it was always going to be highly competitive.
When we drill down to the product-level, however, we were able to rank in the top 10 for some specific Frankie4 footwear styles with much lower monthly volumes.
Our SEO approach for product pages explained
SEO success doesn’t come overnight and it doesn’t come easily. There are many factors that go into improving a website’s rankings on Google and optimisation strategies need to be applied continuous not just from time-to-time. Northern Shoe Store had THOUSANDS of products and we followed the process below for EVERY product page.
A strong focus on search engine optimisation is usually rewarded with a strong increase in visitors to a website.
We’re happy to share our know-how. To keep SEO costs down we created a guide for the team at Northern Shoe Store to follow when new products were added to their point of sale (POS) which triggered the creation of new non-SEO friendly product pages in Shopify. Our continuous methods included:
Writing strong page titles featuring a strategically important product or brand keyword at the beginning of the 60 character title.
Writing punchy and engaging meta descriptions for every product page with strong calls to action (CTA) - such as free shipping on orders over $100 - to display on Google search results pages.
Write engaging product descriptions for the top of each product page and include the brand and product name at least once at the beginning. Many online retailers copy descriptions used by the shoe manufacturers and we tried to create unique descriptions as Google does not reward duplicate content.
Use brand and product names in the file name of product photos.
Include multiple product photos per product page (it’s convenient to just include one image but why not include more angles for the customer to clickthrough?). More clicks is more engagement, longer “dwell time” spent on the page and more opportunities to include a keyword.
We would always include a keyword in the “alt text” tag of every image.
Optimise product image size and try to keep files below 500kb (less than half a mega byte). We would go a step further by always saving images in the preferred JPEG format and running them through an image compression website like tinyjpg to reduce the file sizes even further.
Rewrite the URL slug (ie. the path that follows the www.) to include the brand and product name. A path featuring /collections/frankie4/nat-tan will rank higher on Google for “Frankie4 Nat” than a URL automatically generated by Shopify or your POS system.
Online sales will increase, sometimes spectacularly, when you have a digital marketing plan and you execute it well.
Plan your work and then work your plan
If you have a plan, and follow it daily over a long period of time, your product pages will begin to rank better on search engines.
This progress, in turn, leads to more search engine users clicking through to your website, and sales should flow relative to the increase in traffic to your website.
That’s an oversimplification, of course, because if your prices or shipping are more expensive than your competitors, your images missing or poor quality and you have poorly written or non existent product descriptions, then people will abandon your website as quickly as they found it.
You only have one chance to make a first impression and we believe it’s important to get it right.
It’s about the journey not the destination
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is a grind and a serious investment for any business. We understand the gravity of the investment required and warn prospective clients about the chances of success, the likelihood of sales and the days, weeks, months and years it may take to meet their expectations.
Many aspects of SEO are not $exy or exciting. There is a lot of keyword research, competitor benchmarking, spreadsheets and reporting. We feel free when rankings climb but feel like a fraud when the drop again.
SEO success takes time but there is a method to all the madness (and we are mad to try to read Google’s mind and understand its opaque algorithm). There are SO many layers to SEO - and we’ve barely touched on five per cent of the tactics above - but in a kind of perverse way we love it. And we love educating our clients and inviting them to share the heavy lifting so they can keep costs down.
Starting from square one and understanding a new client’s aspirations and challenges - and going on a journey together against larger competitors and the might of Google - and witnessing a well curated strategy bear fruit is tremendously fulfilling.
Fancy a chat about how SEO can add to your bottom line?
If you’d like to discuss your aspirations and challenges we’d love to hear from you. Please get in touch.
We can help in different ways. We love to teach businesses and entrepreneurs how to do SEO for themselves through our coaching service which is a great way to keep overall costs down or, if you’re time poor or have no interest in learning SEO we can do it all for you.
