Overview

Discount Filter Store is a long-established US e-commerce retailer selling refrigerator, air, furnace, whole house, pool, and commercial filters, including its private label Tier1 brand. A replatform from Magento to Shopify triggered a severe organic collapse, cutting organic users by 56% and organic revenue by 46% in a single year. The brand needed more than tactical fixes. It needed a systematic, revenue-quantified recovery program that could rebuild classic search rankings while establishing visibility in the fast-growing AI search channel. We came onboard as Technical Marketing Manager to diagnose the damage, sequence the fixes by dollar exposure, and rebuild organic growth from the ground up.

Challenges

A Post-Migration Traffic Collapse: The Magento to Shopify migration cost the store 100,000+ organic users year over year. January 2025 hit a low of 2,153 organic users against 16,735 the year before, a fall of 87%, with organic revenue down to just $2,250 for the month.

$204K+ in Revenue Tied to Broken Legacy URLs: Thousands of legacy Magento .html URLs still carried rankings and revenue but pointed nowhere on the new Shopify build. On top of that, 453 discontinued SKUs representing $354K in prior-year revenue had vanished without any redirect or content strategy.

Content Decay and Indexation Debt: The flagship fridge filter buying guide had lost 91% of its sessions year over year, 115 backordered products sat indexed in Google creating dead-end experiences, and a landing page analysis quantified $915K in revenue at risk across decaying pages.

Invisible in AI Search, With No Way to Measure It: As shoppers shifted to ChatGPT, Gemini, and Google AI Overviews, the store had no AI visibility tracking, no structured data strategy, and no idea how AI engines described the brand. Competitors were being cited. DFS was not.

Results

• +58% Organic Revenue Growth Year over Year Six months of systematic recovery took H1 organic revenue from $78,451 to $123,793. January alone grew 858% year over year, from $2,250 to $21,563, as redirect repairs, content rebuilds, and technical fixes compounded.
• #1 Rankings on the Most Commercial Head Terms “Water filters” moved from #3 to #1, “water filter replacement” from #2 to #1, and “furnace air filters” from #3 to #1. “Best furnace filters” climbed from #47 to #8 and “salt free water softener system” from #100+ to #20. DFS now holds 2,485 top-3 keyword positions, more than larger competitors filtersfast.com (579) and discountfilters.com (1,520).
• AI Search Citations More Than Doubled A structured AEO program, anchored by a custom pipeline (Laravel + Claude API + Python JSON-LD) that generated 3,945 product FAQs across 789 products, grew AI search citations from 912 to 2,100 in four months. Keywords appearing in Google AI Overviews more than tripled, from 209 to 705. Within eight weeks of the schema rollout, FAQ pages indexed jumped from 36 to 171.
• +1,117% Blog Engagement in Two Months A content program built from 685 real search queries, mapped into 92 prioritized topics, took monthly blog users from 41 to 499 as answer-first guides and buying content went live.
• Conversion Rate Beating Target While UX Signals Improved Store conversion rate now runs at 4.2 to 5.3% against a 3.5% target. Cumulative Layout Shift improved from 0.12 to a passing 0.05, and dead clicks fell from 9.1% to 3.2% of sessions.
• One Version of the Truth for Leadership Monthly SEO reporting now consolidates GA4, Search Console, Bing, and AI visibility data into a single narrative, with a Looker Studio dashboard in build, so every decision traces back to revenue.