Case study — Technical SEO audit
ShipTheDeal
Two months of technical fixes took top-three rankings from 17 to 99 and lifted click-through rate by 43%. A year on, it is 242 and still climbing.
ShipTheDeal publishes coupons, promo codes and discount codes for thousands of stores. When the work started the site was struggling with indexing problems and showed no positive trend in rankings or organic traffic. I ran a detailed technical audit and implemented the fixes: the duplicate content keeping pages out of the index, an internal linking structure full of links with no value, metadata and headings, pages returning 404 and 500 errors, the sitemap, rating schema to improve click-through rate, and the structure of category pages.
- Industry
- Coupons and deals publishing
- Project type
- Technical SEO audit
- Site
- Store, category and article pages for thousands of merchants, more than 40,000 ranking keywords
- Focus
- Technical SEO, Indexation, Click-through rate
- Keywords in Google's top three, United StatesJuly → September 2025 · 242 by Sept 2026
- 17 → 99
- Organic click-through rate0.62% → 0.89%, 30 days vs previous 30
- +43.6%
- Organic clicks from Google90 days vs previous 90
- +28.5%
- Google AI Overviews citing the siteMeasured September 2026
- 2,400
Results
What changed.
The rankings had been drifting down all year. Within two months of the fixes going live, keywords in Google's top three went from 17 to 99, clicks from Google rose by 28.5% against the previous quarter, and click-through rate jumped 43.6% after rating schema and rewritten titles went live. The gains did not fade: a year later the site holds 242 top-three rankings, and 2,400 Google AI Overviews cite it as a source.
Keywords in Google's top three, United States
17242Jul 2025 to Sep 2026
| Month | Keywords in the top three |
|---|---|
| Jan 2025 | 42 |
| Feb | 24 |
| Mar | 28 |
| Apr | 23 |
| May | 28 |
| Jun | 19 |
| Jul 2025 | 17 |
| Aug | 53 |
| Sep 2025 | 99 |
| Oct | 140 |
| Nov | 161 |
| Dec | 131 |
| Jan 2026 | 195 |
| Feb | 203 |
| Mar | 190 |
| Apr | 167 |
| May | 193 |
| Jun | 246 |
| Jul | 211 |
| Aug | 168 |
| Sep 2026 | 242 |
Google Search, last 90 days against the 90 before
BeforeAfter
- Organic clicks+28%
- Before:14,039After:18,038
- Impressions+19%
- Before:2,279,617After:2,709,158
- Click-through rate+8.1%
- Before:0.62%After:0.67%
- Average position−15% · lower is better
- Before:50.92After:43.26
Google Search, last 30 days against the 30 before
BeforeAfter
- Organic clicks+26%
- Before:5,963After:7,506
- Click-through rate+44%
- Before:0.62%After:0.89%
- Average position−9.6% · lower is better
- Before:43.09After:38.97
Store coupon searches now in the top three
BeforeAfter
- arete coupon code13 → 1
- arete hemp discount code8 → 1
- cherry hill programs coupon code4 → 1
- prequel coupon code9 → 2
- arete hemp coupon code8 → 2
- jase medical promo code15 → 3
- prequel discount code9 → 3
- snkrdunk coupon7 → 3
| Measure | Result |
|---|---|
| ChatGPT citations, September 2025 | 243, all gained in the previous three months |
| Pages cited by ChatGPT, September 2025 | 209 |
| Google AI Overviews citing the site, September 2026 | 2,400 |
| Recorded ChatGPT answers drawing on the site, September 2026 | 432 |
In short
- Keywords in Google's top three in the United States went from 17 in July 2025 to 99 in September, and to 242 by September 2026. Keywords ranking #1 went from 2 to 15 in the same two months, measured independently of the client's tools.
- Organic clicks from Google rose 28.5% over 90 days against the previous 90, from 14,039 to 18,038, while impressions rose 18.8% and average position improved from 50.9 to 43.3.
- Click-through rate rose 43.6% in 30 days, from 0.62% to 0.89%, once rating schema and the new titles reached the results. Clicks in the same window rose 25.9%.
- Ahrefs' estimate of organic traffic roughly tripled between late June and mid-September 2025, and the site took 65,500 clicks and 8.66 million impressions from Google Search in six months.
- Store coupon searches moved into the top three, including #1 for Arete, Arete Hemp and Cherry Hill Programs codes.
- ChatGPT began citing the site: 243 citations across 209 pages within three months. A year later 2,400 Google AI Overviews use it as a source.
Click, impression and click-through figures come from Google Search Console, and positions and AI citations from Ahrefs, on the dates shown. Monthly top-three and #1 counts, and the September 2026 AI figures, were measured independently with DataForSEO, so they can be re-checked. Traffic estimates from Ahrefs are modelled, not counted.
The challenge
What was wrong.
- Indexing problems: duplicated content was causing a large number of pages not to be indexed at all.
- No positive trend in rankings or organic traffic. Keywords in Google's top three had fallen from 42 in January 2025 to 17 by July.
- A poor internal linking structure, with too many internal links carrying no value and no clear connection between related stores, articles and category pages.
- Pages returning 404 and 500 response codes, and a sitemap that did not reflect the pages worth indexing.
- Results that were ranking but not being clicked: weak titles and headings, and no rating information in the search snippet.
Approach
How I worked it out.
- Started with a detailed technical audit and ranked the findings by how many pages each one affected, because on a site of this size a template-level issue outweighs any single page.
- Treated indexation as the first constraint. Content that Google will not index cannot rank, however good it is.
- Separated pages with a ranking problem from pages with a click-through problem, since they need different fixes and the second is the cheapest win on a site that already ranks.
- Worked template by template, stores, categories and articles, so each fix applied across thousands of pages at once.
The work
What was done.
- 01Duplicate content and indexation
- Fixed the duplicated content that was keeping a large number of pages out of Google's index, so the store pages meant to rank were the versions Google kept.
- 02Internal linking
- Removed internal links that carried no value and built clear connections between related stores, articles and category pages, so authority reaches the pages that earn clicks.
- 03Errors and the sitemap
- Fixed pages returning 404 and 500 response codes, and rebuilt the sitemap so it lists the pages worth crawling and nothing else.
- 04Metadata and headings
- Optimised titles, meta descriptions and headings across the store templates to match how people search for a store's codes and to give a reason to click.
- 05Rating schema
- Implemented rating structured data to earn star ratings in search results. Click-through rate rose 43.6% in the following 30 days.
- 06Category page structure
- Restructured category pages so they organise stores clearly for visitors and pass authority to the store pages beneath them.
Key takeaways
What this project demonstrates.
- 01Indexation comes first. Until duplicate content stopped keeping pages out of the index, no amount of content or link work could have shown up in rankings.
- 02On a site that already ranks, click-through rate is the fastest lever. Rating schema and better titles moved clicks within a month without a single new page.
- 03Template-level fixes scale. Fixing the store and category templates improved thousands of pages at once, which is why the result arrived in two months.
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