TrueNorth Supply Co. sells premium camping and backcountry gear to Canadians who take the outdoors seriously. Their products were excellent, their repeat customers were loyal, and their Instagram was gorgeous. There was just one problem: almost nobody new could find them without an ad in the way.
The background
When TrueNorth came to us, they were doing healthy revenue — but nearly all of it was paid. Every new customer arrived through a Meta or Google ad, which meant growth was a treadmill: the moment they throttled ad spend, sales dropped. Organic search sent a trickle of traffic, and their beautiful off-the-shelf Shopify theme was quietly working against them, loading slowly on the mobile devices where two-thirds of their shoppers browsed.
They didn't need a fresh coat of paint. They needed the plumbing rebuilt.
The challenge
Our opening audit surfaced three compounding problems:
- Speed. The theme scored in the low 30s on mobile Lighthouse. Largest Contentful Paint hovered around 4.5 seconds — well past the point where shoppers bail.
- Invisibility. Product and category pages had thin, duplicated metadata, no structured data, and a tangled internal-linking structure. Google could barely tell what any page was about.
- Ad dependence. With organic contributing so little, customer acquisition cost was creeping up every quarter as ad auctions got more expensive.
Our approach
We ran the engagement in four phases over nine months — build first, because search performance is only as good as the foundation it sits on.
Phase 1 Headless rebuild
We rebuilt the storefront on a headless Next.js front end backed by Shopify, so the catalog and checkout stayed familiar to their team while the customer-facing experience got dramatically faster. Mobile Lighthouse jumped into the high 90s and Largest Contentful Paint dropped under 1.2 seconds.
Phase 2 Technical SEO overhaul
We restructured the category architecture, wrote unique metadata across the catalog, added Product and Breadcrumb structured data for rich results, and untangled internal linking so authority flowed to the pages that mattered. Within weeks, indexation and impressions began climbing.
Phase 3 Content engine
Outdoor buyers research before they buy. We built a content program around real questions — "how to choose a four-season tent," "down vs. synthetic for winter camping" — that captured demand at the top of the funnel and linked cleanly to the products that answered it.
Phase 4 Search Everywhere Optimization
Finally, we optimized the catalog and content to be readable by AI shopping assistants — consistent entity data, quotable buying guides, and clean product feeds — so TrueNorth started surfacing when shoppers asked ChatGPT for gear recommendations, not just when they Googled.
The results
Nine months in, organic revenue was up 212% and, crucially, it kept compounding after we stopped actively building — the hallmark of durable SEO rather than a paid spike. The faster storefront lifted conversion rate 3.1× on the same traffic, and TrueNorth now ranks on page one for more than 40 commercial keywords in their category.
Because organic was finally pulling its weight, they cut paid ad spend by nearly half without losing topline growth — turning acquisition from a treadmill into a compounding asset. And they now show up by name in ChatGPT's gear recommendations, a channel their competitors don't even know they're losing.
"Within a quarter we were outranking competitors twice our size. Then ChatGPT started recommending us. Wild."— Sarah Mitchell, Founder, TrueNorth Supply Co.
The takeaway
TrueNorth's story is why we build and market under one roof. A rebuild without SEO would have been a faster invisible store; SEO on a slow store would have sent traffic that bounced. Doing both, in the right order, is what turned a paid-ads treadmill into an engine that grows on its own.
Services used on this project: