Ocean Bottle
A reusable-bottle brand with a genuinely strong sustainability story and, awkwardly, no visibility on the non-brand searches that bring in new customers. We rebuilt the technical and editorial foundations on Shopify and turned organic into a primary acquisition channel.
The brief
Ocean Bottle is a sustainability-focused ecommerce brand selling high-quality reusable bottles and flasks. Every bottle sold funds the recovery of plastic from coastal waste hotspots. That is a real, fundable mission, not a marketing line that fell out of a workshop.
The commercial problem was a simple one. People who already knew the brand bought. People who didn't, didn't, on account of never having met it. Non-brand search visibility was effectively flat, which is a polite way of saying SEO was not pulling its weight as an acquisition channel.
What I did
Audit and prioritisation. A full technical and content audit, aimed squarely at the issues that mattered for non-brand visibility, rather than a generic 200-point checklist that makes everyone feel busy. Shopify's templating layer turned out to be the main constraint. The theme was quietly emitting performance signals that were holding back ranking potential across the board.
Shopify template performance work. Working through the template files to fix the structural performance issues, the render-blocking scripts, the image handling, the lazy-load behaviour, the schema gaps, the internal linking patterns. This is not glamorous work. It barely moves a single page on its own. It does, however, compound across thousands of impressions, which is where the interesting things live.
Information architecture rebuild. Restructured how product, collection and editorial content was organised, so that topical authority could build cleanly around the core non-brand terms ("reusable water bottle", "sustainable water bottles", "reusable flask") and the long tail sitting underneath them.
Content programme. A non-brand-led content strategy targeting the long tail of intent around sustainability, reuse and product-comparison searches. Every piece written to answer a question someone actually asked, not to fill a square on an editorial calendar.
The results
Within twelve months the site had moved from negligible non-brand visibility to ranking #1 in the UK and US for "Reusable Water Bottle", "Sustainable Water Bottles" and "Reusable Flask", three of the highest-value commercial queries in the category.
Year-on-year non-brand traffic grew by 1,286%, which translated into 225% more SEO-attributed sales and a 189% lift in organic revenue. Search stopped being a channel for recapturing people who already knew the brand and became a primary engine for finding the people who didn't.
"Kristian is a committed and passionate freelancer who is always ready to roll up his sleeves and get stuck in, no matter the ask. Has made a huge impact on our rankings and organic traffic. I would highly recommend."
Head of Growth, Ocean Bottle
The thinking
Sustainability brands tend to default to "tell the story louder", which is a fine instinct and a poor strategy. The discipline here was the opposite. Get the technical foundations strong enough that the existing story could actually be found by people who hadn't heard it yet. The story didn't change one word. The number of people who got to encounter it did.
Got a similar visibility problem?
If your non-brand search is flat, your platform is probably part of the story, though rarely the whole of it. Happy to take a look and tell you which.