Health & Wellness
Fractional SEO Director
SEO + AI Search
How a US nutrition brand went from 98.8% branded search dependency to building a non-brand organic growth engine across Google and AI search
🌎 United States
🛠 Health & Wellness
🎯 Fractional SEO Director,
+219%
non-brand organic traffic growth across new category pages
+73.6%
keyword visibility growth, positions 1-20
+152%
branded search visibility YoY, supported by organic infrastructure improvements
The situation
A Nutrition brand focussed solely on paid media acquisition
This US-based direct-to-consumer nutrition brand had achieved something genuinely hard real product-market fit, a loyal customer base, and strong brand momentum driven by a high-quality social and influencer programme. But search performance told a more complicated story.
When I first audited the account, 98.8% of all organic search traffic was coming from branded queries. Customers who already knew the brand were finding them but the brand was effectively invisible to anyone searching for what the product does, rather than who makes it. Non-brand organic contributed just 1.2% of total traffic, leaving an enormous category opportunity completely uncaptured.
The business was also heavily reliant on Meta-driven paid acquisition to reach new customers. Organic search was not functioning as a discovery channel at all it was functioning as a branded shortcut for people already converted through paid. That dynamic was commercially fragile and expensive to sustain.
The brief was to build genuine non-brand organic visibility across Google and AI search, reduce reliance on paid acquisition for new customer discovery, and turn SEO into a meaningful growth channel.
Scope of work
Embedded SEO leadership, not an outsourced project
✓ Crawl efficiency & indexation improvements
✓ Merchant Center feed setup & management
✓ Product schema expansion (attributes, reviews, dietary data)
✓ Core collection hub build (Vitamins, Greens, Hydration, Fiber, Gut Health)
✓ Product page rebuilds for purchase-stage search
✓ Structured FAQ implementation across collections & PDPs
✓ Internal linking programme
✓ AI Overview & LLM optimisation
✓ Organisation schema & entity clarity
✓ LLM prompt visibility tracking (Limmy.ai)
✓ Digital PR campaign scoping & ideation
✓ Keyword clustering & TAM document
✓ Content brief development
✓ SERP & AI Overview opportunity monitoring
Working directly with development, content, analytics, and regional business stakeholders, with full ownership of the technical ticket backlog feeding into the company's internal sprint process.
Diagnosing the real problem
The site wasn't under-optimised. It was structurally fighting itself.
1
No structured collection architecture for non-brand demand
The site had no collections built around how customers actually search for this category. There was no dedicated destination for high volume queries meaning even when Google wanted to send relevant traffic, there was nowhere meaningful to send it. The homepage was cannibalising a significant number of high-value non-brand queries that should have been served by intent-matched collection pages.
2
96 high-opportunity queries routing to the homepage
Keyword analysis surfaced 96 search queries where the brand already had some organic visibility, but the traffic was landing on the homepage rather than a relevant product or collection page. Google was trying to rank them for real commercial terms and failing to find the right destination, meaning both rankings and conversion potential were being actively suppressed by the site structure.
3
Product pages built for buyers, not for search discovery
Product pages described the product clearly and compellingly for someone already considering purchase — but they weren't structured to capture the research-stage queries that precede a buying decision.
4
No Merchant Center feed or product grid presence
Despite having strong products with genuine reviews and competitive pricing, the brand had no Google Merchant Center feed configured for free product listings. Google's organic shopping grids, increasingly prominent for supplement and nutrition searches, were entirely out of reach a significant traffic and conversion opportunity being left to competitors by default.
5
27,000+ pages crawled, 157 indexed
A crawl efficiency issue was causing Google to waste substantial crawl budget on system-generated and low-value Shopify endpoint pages that were set to no-index but not properly managed at the crawl directive level.
Engagement details
Role - Fractional SEO Director
Sector - Nutrition
Markets - US
Stakeholders - Marketing, dev, regional teams
Reporting - Quarterly + live dashboard
Services delivered
✓ Technical SEO & crawl efficiency
✓ Collection architecture & hub build
✓ Keyword & TAM mapping
✓ Product page optimisation
✓ Merchant Center & product grid setup
✓ AI search & LLM visibility strategy
✓ Content strategy & topic hubs
✓ Schema & structured data
✓ Digital PR strategy
✓ Monthly reporting & dashboard
Need senior SEO leadership, not just execution?
Fractional SEO Director engagements scoped around enterprise and multi-region complexity.
Book a discovery call
Ready to build an organic channel that works without the brand?
Supplement, health, and DTC brands — let’s talk about what non-brand growth looks like for you.
Previous case study
US DTC brand grows organic revenue 136% in 12 months
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