At a Glance
- 7.6x more non-branded Google clicks, Q3 2026 vs Q3 2025 (236 to 1,800)
- +78% total Google clicks (5.7k to 10.1k a quarter), with branded clicks flat
- Top 10 rankings for 1,342 non-branded keywords, up from about 300; top 3 for 308 keywords, up from 22
The Client
An established kratom brand, selling online for over 10 years, with a loyal following. That loyalty hid the problem: almost all of their Google traffic came from people who already knew them and searched the brand name.
Fewer than 5% of their clicks came from non-branded searches, so Google was bringing them very few new customers.
What the Audit Found (December 2025 to January 2026)
Google Couldn’t Rank Their Category Pages at All
A plugin setting had added a noindex tag to every category page.
Indexing Problems Across the Site
Search Console showed 251 pages crawled but not indexed, 64 discovered but not indexed, and 79 broken URLs. The sitemap listed junk pages like old cart and test pages, and a blank robots.txt let Google waste its crawl on cart and ajax URLs.
A Blog That Wasn’t Pulling Its Weight
About 250 blog posts drove roughly a total of 100 visits a month, and several older posts competed with each other for the same searches.
Messy Page Structure
Category pages had no H1s and no self-referencing canonicals. Menu items, product names and footer links were marked up as headings, and every blog post repeated the headings of its related posts.
An Unnatural, Thin Link Profile
Over 90% of the links to their category pages used exact-match keyword anchors, and they had 44 quality linking sites against 64 to 300+ for their top competitors.
Core Web Vitals were failing on mobile and desktop.
Is most of your Google traffic people searching your brand name? Book a free call and I’ll show you where you’re missing new customers.
What We Did
Audit and Plan
A full technical, on-page and off-page audit with a prioritized action plan.
On-Site Fixes
I mapped out the fixes, and their team implemented them. They started on the headings within days of my first walkthrough video, before the full audit was even finished.
By late March they had fixed robots.txt, cleaned up the sitemap, added canonicals, fixed the blog and footer headings, and rebuilt their categories as new indexable hub pages, which also cleared the noindex problem.
They pointed 950+ blog posts at the new hubs, and by April the site passed Core Web Vitals.
Link Building (April 2026 Onward)
40 links in five months from relevant lifestyle, health, fitness and legal sites (Domain Rating 20 to 63, median 41), with the average Domain Rating rising from about 37 in May to 46 by August.
We rebalanced the anchor text from over 90% exact-match keywords to about half, with branded and topical anchors making up the rest. Since August, the client picks the target pages each month from their own search data, and we place the links.
Their team also launched a learning content hub and a free samples page, which we supported with links.
The Results
In Q3 2026, the brand got 1,800 Google clicks from searches that didn’t include their name, 7.6x the 236 they got in Q3 2025. Their branded clicks stayed flat, so the growth came from new shoppers searching for products and information.
Total Google clicks grew 78% year over year, and non-branded searches went from under 5% of their clicks to 18%.
Category keywords climbed too, between March and September 2026:
- “crushed leaf kratom”: #19 to #4
- “kratom legal states”: #43 to #10
- “kratom wholesale”: #38 to #14
- “bulk kratom”: #41 to #16
- “kratom capsules”: #71 to #25
Want results like these for your store? Book a call and I’ll show you what I’d do first.
A Bonus: Showing Up in AI Search
We didn’t do any separate AI optimization. SEO was our only focus. But as their category pages started ranking in Google, they started showing up in AI answers too.
Since April, when link building started, Ahrefs shows the brand in 56 Google AI Overview answers, up from zero, and in 105 AI answers across all platforms, up from 27.
What the Client Said
One placement was “one we had been trying to reach ourselves without any luck.”
The Takeaway
A loyal customer base can hide an SEO problem. If nearly all your Google traffic is people searching your brand name, you’re missing the shoppers who don’t know you yet.
Book a call and I’ll show you where those searches are going instead.
