Cardtopia Case Study

We grew a legacy playing-card brand's new ecommerce store's non-brand Google clicks 118% year over year.

A legacy playing-card brand launched its own direct-to-consumer store, selling its decks alongside other well-known card brands, accessories, and gifts to players, collectors, and magicians. It sits inside a larger enterprise with a parent company, a European technical team, and several vendors, and competes with big marketplaces and card retailers.

The Challenge

New store on a brand-new domain, almost no search history of its own, inside a complex enterprise (platform transition, technical work in Europe, small in-house team owning a cross-functional channel). Most search traffic came from people who already knew the brand.
The challenge went beyond rankings: know if SEO is working, what to do next, who makes sure it happens. Data in several tools, insights not turning into shipped changes, larger-order buyers landing on pages built for single decks. They needed an operator, not another vendor to manage.
Engaged Good SEO in two phases: a three-month setup project ahead of the holidays, then an ongoing fractional SEO director role.

What We Did

Intro: Measure, Architect, Perform in two work streams: build the foundation and a shared roadmap, then take ownership of running it month after month.

Phase 1: Measure and Architect, the SEO foundation

Timeline: Aug–Oct 2025 (SOW 1), roadmap execution through Dec 2025

Outcome: a crawlable, consistent site and one prioritized roadmap the whole team could see.
Audit and roadmap with owners across the SEO lead, European dev team, and content.
Foundation fixes: crawling, indexing, duplicate URLs, sitemaps, canonicals, redirects from legacy subdomains.
Titles, descriptions, and category pages rewritten.
Customer-journey map by intent and product line, plus competitor content gaps.
Reporting the team can use: monthly reporting, dashboard, SOPs.

Phase 2: Perform, fractional SEO leadership

Timeline: Jan 2026 to present

Outcome: growth concentrated in brand and category pages, and a team that can explain what's working and why.
One owner for the roadmap, working alongside the in-house SEO lead and the European technical team.
Brand and category pages built up.
High-volume buyer opportunity: page and offer reworked.
Content system: repeatable workflow; first guides live, more in review.
New product launches built to rank as they launch.

The Results

By the end of 2025 the foundation was showing up: non-brand clicks climbing, one roadmap instead of scattered tools.

A handful of brand and category pages delivered 62% of the increase; a core product-line search moved from position 29 to 3.

Not a straight line. Clicks slipped in early 2026 (Feb–Apr) before recovering; by August they were 118% above a year earlier. Reporting now separates what's working from what isn't.

Good SEO is a system someone owns. For this store, it turned a mostly brand-driven channel into one the team can measure, explain, and grow.

+118%

non-brand Google clicks, Aug 2026 vs Aug 2025 (403 → 880)