The challenge
Plateaus on large stores are rarely caused by one problem. At OXO, several issues were limiting growth at the same time:
- Hundreds of category and product pages without clear keyword targeting.
- Crawl attention spent on low-value URLs instead of commercial pages.
- Authority spread thinly by weak internal linking across a large site.
- No preparation for AI Overviews or answer-style search results.
Strategy and implementation
Technical audit first
A full Screaming Frog crawl surfaced crawl waste, duplicate content, indexing gaps and broken internal links. These were resolved before any content changes, so improvements would be crawled and credited quickly.
Keyword gap analysis
Research in Ahrefs and Semrush identified more than 60 valuable terms competitors ranked for that OXO was not targeting. They became the priority list for page optimisation.
Category and product page optimisation
Major category and product pages were re-optimised: keyword targeting, heading structure, content depth, and titles and descriptions rewritten to improve click-through rate.
Content depth on under-performing pages
Thin pages were expanded with the entities and supporting detail they were missing, so they matched the full range of questions buyers ask about each packaging type.
Answer engine optimisation
Structured answer blocks and supporting schema were added to help key pages appear in featured snippets and AI Overviews.
Internal linking and architecture
The internal linking structure was redesigned around hub-and-spoke clusters, navigation links audited and anchor text standardised.
Results
Monthly organic clicks grew from around 30,000 to 45,000, an increase of 50%, with monthly impressions rising from about 880K to 1.32M. Yearly organic clicks reached 540,000, average position improved from around 25 to 18.9 and click-through rate held steady at 3.4%. The 28-day chart for June 2026 shows both clicks and impressions trending upward throughout the month.
Lessons learned
- Breaking a plateau usually needs several layers improved together, not a single tactic.
- Technical clean-up first makes every later change count faster.
- On large catalogues, internal linking is one of the most under-used levers.
