The Demand Was Already There: Topdog Built the Pages to Capture It

Holistic’s products already have exactly the attributes customers filter by: vegan, lactose-free, chocolate and vanilla. What the site lacked was a way to make that searchable and indexable. At the same time, a handful of technical issues were stopping Google from finding and indexing the site in full. Topdog fixed the technology first, then rebuilt Holistic’s product data into new filterable landing pages that capture the commercial searches competitors still only reach through paid Google Ads. The result: more valuable longtail traffic that converts better.

The Challenge

Holistic wanted more commercial traffic, and the site already had a strong product catalogue to build on. As with most e-commerce sites that have grown over time, though, a number of technical details were quietly limiting how much content Google could crawl, index and rank.

The technical issues we needed to fix included internal links running through unnecessary redirects, broken URLs in the sitemap, pages with no internal links, missing meta descriptions, noindexed pages left in the sitemap and page speed problems on key templates. None of this was dramatic on its own, but together, these issues capped how much commercial traffic the site could ever generate.

Goals

Topdog set four concrete goals:

1. Resolve the technical issues limiting crawl efficiency and indexing.
2. Capture high purchase-intent search demand around specific attributes (vegan, lactose-free, flavour variants) that Holistic’s products already covered.
3. Build a content and filter structure that can scale to more product attributes over time.
4. Hand over a link-building strategy that Holistic’s own team could run independently.

Strategy and Approach

The starting point was a technical clean-up: a focused effort to fix everything affecting the site’s crawl and indexing performance.

No Expansion Without a Solid Technical Foundation

This kind of content and filter expansion only works once the technology is in place. If pages can’t be crawled and indexed, or if internal linking is weak, the filter logic doesn’t matter: Google won’t find or trust the pages regardless. The technical clean-up wasn’t a parallel workstream alongside the expansion. It was the precondition for the expansion to happen at all.

With the technical foundation in place, we turned to the search queries Holistic wasn’t yet capturing. We found that consumers frequently search using dietary and flavour modifiers: terms like “för sömn” (for sleep), “glutenfritt” (gluten-free), “vegansk” (vegan), “sockerfritt” (sugar-free), “laktosfri” (lactose-free) and “detox”. Individually, these searches have low volume, but they convert unusually well, because the searcher has already filtered down to exactly what they want to buy.

We built out the underlying product content needed to support these longtail searches, then layered filter logic on top of Holistic’s product catalogue. A combination such as “vegan” plus product category generates its own crawlable, indexable URL. From there, we got those URLs into Google’s index.

Why It’s Harder Than It Sounds

Filter and attribute pages only work when there’s genuine product depth behind them. A filter page can’t lead to an empty results list. That’s precisely why so few e-commerce retailers pull this off well. Of the 100 largest e-commerce companies, only around 5% offer this kind of filtered, attribute-driven navigation, and most only in a limited way. For Holistic, that’s an opportunity to capture organic demand for flavour and dietary variants that competitors are still only buying through paid search.

“This kind of filter expansion is one of the hardest things you can do in e-commerce SEO with a client. It requires the technology to be completely right before you even start; otherwise, you’re just building more pages on a foundation that won’t hold. Pulling this off with Holistic and their agency Grebban, who did a genuinely great job on the implementation, is one of the projects I’m proudest of.”

– Christian Rudolf, CEO, Topdog

Finally, we put together a link-building strategy and game plan tailored to Holistic’s site and category. Rather than running outreach on their behalf, we handed it over to Holistic’s own team to take forward.

The Result: Purchase-Ready Longtail Traffic

The expansion gave Holistic something few e-commerce retailers capture organically: purchase-ready longtail traffic on flavour and dietary variants that had previously only been reachable through paid search.

What determined the project’s success wasn’t how much traffic grew, but the value of that traffic. The new filter structure got indexed, started ranking and captured searches with high purchase intent. Because we built the link-building strategy and handed it over to Holistic’s team, they can keep driving visibility without outside help.

“Topdog’s technical expertise is excellent, but what really made the difference was their agility and adaptability. They came up with a genuinely smart technical solution for expanding our product range, letting us capture commercial search volume in a completely new way. The project was complex and required close collaboration with our agency, Grebban, but Topdog created a clear, reassuring process that got everything in place.”

– Daniel Kostic, Head of Digital, Holistic