Case study · Ecommerce · SEO

How DR-HO’S nearly tripled daily organic traffic in three months

Organic clicks to the DR-HO’S pain relief store had halved since spring. We rebuilt how the store’s collections, products and content answer real search intent. Over six months it earned 1.46 million clicks from Google, and daily traffic grew almost 3× from June to September.

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DR-HO’SGoogle Search Console

Last 6 months

1.46Morganic clicks from Google search in six months

Weekly average of daily organic clicks from March to September 2024, falling to a low in June and rising steeply through September

35Mimpressions

4.2%average CTR

2.9×daily clicks

At a glance

ClientDR-HO’S

IndustryEcommerce, drug-free pain relief devices

PlatformShopify

MarketsUS, Canada, UK and 25+ countries

ServiceEcommerce SEO

Results periodMar to Sep 2024, Google Search Console

Visit drhos.com ↗

The challenge

A trusted brand with organic traffic sliding

DR-HO’S sells doctor-developed, drug-free pain relief devices: TENS and EMS units, the Circulation Promoter, MotionCiser, Neck Pain Pro and back belts, shipped to more than 25 countries from a Shopify store.

Through spring 2024, organic clicks fell steadily. Health is a category where Google holds pages to a higher standard of expertise and trust, and the store was competing with large marketplaces and health retailers for the same product searches.

10.5K

organic clicks a day in late March

5.2K

organic clicks a day by early June

Weekly averages read from the Search Console chart.

What we did

An eight-step ecommerce SEO process

Ecommerce SEO works when the technical base, the store structure and the content all point the same way. We fixed the base first, then made every collection and product page earn its place in search.

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01Audit

Technical SEO audit of the Shopify store

Found what was stopping Google from crawling and ranking the right pages.

Duplicate product URLs from collection paths consolidated with canonicals

Thin and filtered collection URLs kept out of the index

XML sitemap, robots.txt and broken links cleaned up

Index coverage errors in Search Console fixed

02Research

Keyword research mapped to buying intent

Matched every page to the searches real customers use, from condition to product.

Condition searches such as “TENS unit for back pain” and “neck pain relief device”

Product and brand searches for each device line

One primary topic per page to stop pages competing with each other

03Structure

Collections built around pain types

Turned shop-by-pain-type collections into landing pages that can rank on their own.

Neck, back, knee, foot, arthritis and fibromyalgia collections

Unique intros, buying guidance and FAQs on each collection

Internal links between related conditions and devices

04Products

Product pages that answer buyer questions

Rewrote product pages to cover what shoppers compare before buying.

Search-focused titles and meta descriptions

Clear benefits, how-to-use and what’s-in-the-box sections

Product schema with price, availability and reviews for rich results

Descriptive image file names and alt text

05Trust

Expertise signals for a health brand

Made the medical credibility behind the products visible to people and to Google.

Dr. Michael Ho and the medical advisory board linked from key pages

Studies and science pages connected to the products they support

Organization schema and consistent brand details

06Content

A pain relief content hub

Published helpful guides that rank for questions and lead readers to the right device.

Articles on conditions, symptoms and drug-free relief options

Each guide linked to the matching collection and products

Older posts refreshed and merged where they overlapped

07Speed

Faster pages on mobile

Improved Core Web Vitals so pages load quickly for shoppers on phones.

Images compressed and served at the right size

Unused apps and scripts removed from the theme

Layout shifts fixed on product and collection templates

08Tracking

Measure clicks, rankings and revenue

Reported on the numbers that matter for an online store.

Search Console tracking by page group and country

GA4 ecommerce tracking tied to organic landing pages

Monthly reporting on clicks, impressions, CTR and position

Results

From a spring slide to record daily traffic

Clicks bottomed out in early June, recovered through July and climbed sharply from August. By mid-September the store was getting more than four times its June low on its best days.

1.46M

organic clicks from Google in six months

35M

impressions in Google search results

2.9×

average daily clicks, June vs September

4.2%

average click-through rate

Organic clicks per day (weekly average)Mar to Sep 2024

Line chart of daily organic clicks, weekly average, March to September 2024: about 10.5K in March, a low of about 5.2K in early June and a peak week of about 18.7K in September

Impressions per day, monthly average2024

Bar chart of average daily impressions by month in 2024: March 180K, April 163K, May 148K, June 140K, July 161K, August 245K, September 369K

Source: Google Search Console, web search, 18 Mar to 17 Sep 2024. Total clicks, impressions and CTR are exact. Daily and monthly values are read from the Search Console chart and rounded; their sum matches the reported totals. *March and September are part months.

Key takeaway

“In health ecommerce, pages that show real expertise and answer real buyer questions win. Collections built around the customer’s pain, not the product catalog, did the heavy lifting.”

Impressions grew 2.6× a day between June and September, which means Google started showing the store for far more searches, not just sending more clicks to the same few pages.

Fix the foundation first

Shopify creates duplicate and thin URLs by default. Cleaning them up lets Google focus on the pages that sell.

Match pages to intent

Shoppers search by problem before they search by product. Pain-type collections meet them there.

Show your expertise

For health products, visible medical credentials and evidence are part of ranking, not decoration.

Proof

Straight from Google Search Console

An unedited screenshot of the store’s Performance report for web search over the last six months.

Google Search Console performance report for DR-HO’S showing 1.46M total clicks, 35M impressions, and 4.2% average CTR over six months, with clicks and impressions rising sharply from August to September 2024

Search Console, web search, last 6 months: 1.46M clicks, 35M impressions, 4.2% CTR.