National Furniture Store Chain
The migration that paid for itself
The situation
A multi-showroom retailer with an online catalogue and a strongly seasonal year, September peaks and January troughs. The site had grown by accretion; the category and collection pages people actually search for either did not exist or did not rank.
What we did
- Summer 2025: collection pages built in sequence (living room, bedroom, dining, appliances), category pages rewritten, local citations for every showroom, 404 clean-up and quarterly links. Ranking keywords rose 86% between April and October 2025.
- February to June 2026: category pages redesigned, structured data rolled out, the rebuilt website launched with a post-launch review, Business Profile categories and links optimized, eight brand collection pages published, two blogs a month, backlinks and a press release.
What moved
Top-3 rankings went from 725 in April 2026 to 1,402 in October 2026, up 93%. Keywords cited inside AI Overviews went from 73 in May to 218 in October. Estimated organic traffic rose from 68,500 to 88,300 a month over the same six months. September to September, the fairest comparison for a seasonal site, top-3 rankings were up 32% and AI Overview citations up 8.6x. The total top-10 count fell 9% while the top-3 count nearly doubled: fewer, better positions.
What we would do differently
Tell the migration story in the open. The dip in the first quarter was the redesign and launch, and a prospect who sees the dip without the explanation reads it as a problem.
Build the pages people search for, then make them citable.
Source: Semrush, Canadian database, monthly, as of October 15, 2026, Google only. Estimated visits are estimates. Leads come from client call tracking and Search Console. [Screenshots of the real AI answers naming this client go here.]
Written by Michael Landry, Founder and Head of AEO.