Building a scalable SEO foundation for a 125-year-old e-commerce brand

Project overview

Lyon is one of America's most established steel storage manufacturers, with over 125 years in business. Their product range spans industrial lockers, modular cabinets, shelving, storage racks, and workbenches, serving warehouses, schools, healthcare facilities, military, and law enforcement customers across the US.

The engagement centred on elevating Lyon's ecommerce SEO performance across a large, complex product catalogue. With thousands of SKUs and multiple product categories, the opportunity was to build a scalable SEO foundation which involved technical optimisation, page optimisation frameworks to category page strategy and AI search readiness. A key goal was to apply recommendations in a scalable manner.

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Opportunity

An audit of the existing site revealed a number of compounding issues holding back organic performance:

• Product pages were not optimised for search intent, limiting discoverability and click-through rates across a large product catalogue.
• Meta content and on-page copy lacked consistency and strategic structure, reducing effectiveness at scale.
• Category pages were underleveraged, with limited content depth and weak internal linking.
• No consolidated SEO reporting was in place, making it difficult to track performance, identify trends, or measure the impact of optimisation work (including emerging traffic from AI-powered search channels).
• No structured data strategy was in place, leaving product information underrepresented in search results and AI responses.
• With AI Overviews and LLM-powered search growing rapidly, Lyon's content was not structured for AI retrieval, which is a key requirement for AI citation and visibility.
• No content strategy existed to address organic or AI search coverage gaps, leaving Lyon well short of its potential to become the go-to authority in the industrial storage space.
• The website had not been fully optimised to meet ecommerce SEO best practice or Google's guidelines. There were gaps across page experience, product and category page structure, internal linking, and technical fundamentals that were limiting organic performance.

Strategy

• On-page optimisation framework: A scalable naming convention and template system was developed for H1s, meta titles, and meta descriptions across all major product categories, ensuring consistency and search intent alignment at scale.
• Category page strategy: A category SEO playbook was produced covering content structure, internal linking, structure, navigation, and structured data, giving each category page a clear role in the broader organic strategy.
• Schema markup strategy: A structured data roadmap was developed to improve how products are represented in both traditional search results and AI-generated answers.
• AI search optimisation: Content strategy was updated to reflect the requirements of AI-powered search, to improve citation potential in AI Overviews and LLM responses.
• Content strategy & gap analysis: A comprehensive content plan was developed to fill gaps in organic and AI search coverage, with a clear ambition to make Lyon the most cited and mentioned source in their industry.
• Ecommerce SEO & Google Guidelines Alignment: The site was audited against current ecommerce best practice and Google's guidelines — covering page structure, internal linking, Core Web Vitals, and page experience — with findings prioritised into a clear remediation roadmap.
• SEO reporting & AI visibility dashboards: A custom Looker Studio dashboard was built to centralise SEO performance reporting, covering organic traffic, rankings, and crucially, traffic from AI-powered search channels. Alongside the dashboard, a monthly deep-dive reporting cadence was established to surface insights, track progress against targets, and inform ongoing prioritisation. This gave Lyon a clear, ongoing view of both traditional and AI search performance for the first time.

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Results

The strategy delivered a set of scalable SEO assets and operational improvements across Lyon's ecommerce presence:

• Consistent on-page optimisation framework: The internal guidance document now governs H1s, meta titles, and meta descriptions across the full product catalogue, improving search intent alignment at scale.
• Stronger category & ecommerce foundations: Product pages and category pages have a clear content and linking strategy, and the site has been brought up to ecommerce best practice standard across structure, internal linking, and page experience.
• AI search visibility: Content is structured for AI retrieval, positioning Lyon for visibility in AI Overviews and LLM-generated responses.
• SEO reporting & AI visibility tracking: A custom Looker Studio dashboard centralises organic and AI search performance data, supported by monthly deep-dive reports to drive ongoing prioritisation.
• Content strategy in place: A comprehensive content plan is underway to close organic and AI search coverage gaps, positioning Lyon as the most cited source in the industrial storage industry.
• Scalable content operations: An end-to-end content workflow enables Lyon's team to produce optimised content consistently, reducing production time while maintaining SEO quality.