MISSION BRIEF
Faceted at Scale: How a Custom Architecture Unlocked Long-Tail PLP Growth
ROLE
Associate Director, SEO
DIFFICULTY
★★★★★
READ TIME
3 min read
MISSION OUTCOME
New category pages drove +330% revenue YoY, +876% visits, and grew from 1.2% to 9.1% of total PLP traffic
◆ The Mission
A major jewelry retailer was leaving organic demand on the table. Google's faceted search experiences had created a wave of long-tail keyword opportunity — granular queries like "gold cuban link chain," "14k gold hoop earrings," and "baby gold bracelet" — that the brand had no pages to capture.
The gap wasn't a content quality problem. It was a content existence problem.
◆ The Problem
DAC mapped the keyword landscape and identified dozens of high-volume, rankable opportunities where the brand had no dedicated landing page. The queries existed. The inventory existed. The pages didn't.
The client faced a familiar bottleneck: scaling content creation recommendations into actual page production was too slow and operationally expensive to keep pace with the volume of opportunity surfaced.
A traditional content brief workflow — write, review, build, publish — wasn't going to work at this scale.
◆ The Solution
Rather than create individual content recommendations, DAC and the client's tech team designed a new architecture that made faceted page creation programmatic.
The client's Hybris platform already leveraged GroupBy's faceting system with pre-merchandised categories. The solution extended this by building:
- A SEO-friendly URL structure (BURLs) that rearranged facet parameters into clean, crawlable paths
- An API integration layer between the faceting system and Google's indexing path
- Backoffice metadata controls that allowed SEO elements — titles, descriptions, H1s — to be optimized at scale across all faceted page variants
The result: a system where creating a new SEO-optimized category page no longer required a content team. It required a configuration.
This solution set the brand up for long-tail SEO at scale — and saved the brand teams thousands of hours of manual page creation time.
◆ The Numbers YTD
New category pages (BURLs) launched and began compounding quickly. Within the fiscal year, the results were significant across every conversion metric.
| Source | FY25 Revenue | FY24 Revenue | Revenue Change | Order Change | Visit Change |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Category | $4,273,566 | $3,468,547 | +23% | +19% | +35% |
| NEW Category Pages | $281,874 | $65,502 | +330% | +447% | +876% |
New pages grew from a near-zero base to a meaningful share of total PLP performance:
| KPI | FY25 Share of Total | FY24 Share of Total | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visits | 9.1% | 1.2% | +626% |
| Revenue | 6.6% | 1.9% | +249% |
| Orders | 6.7% | 1.5% | +361% |
◆ Organic Click Growth by Category
GSC data over the trailing three months confirmed the breadth of the lift — growth wasn't isolated to a single product type. It spread across the catalog.
| Category | FY25 Clicks | FY24 Clicks | YoY Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Engagement | 165,588 | 53,622 | +209% |
| Necklace & Chains | 145,283 | 99,977 | +45% |
| Wedding | 115,572 | 85,545 | +35% |
| Rings | 88,316 | 58,089 | +52% |
| Earrings | 41,741 | 24,374 | +71% |
| Watches | 1,736 | 590 | +194% |
Women's clicks grew +92% YoY, gold material queries grew +42%, and silver surged +149% — consistent with the long-tail keyword set the new pages were targeting.
◆ The Takeaway
The opportunity wasn't missing — the infrastructure to capture it was. Once the architecture was in place, the pages scaled faster than any editorial team could have produced them manually.
This case study demonstrates that in e-commerce SEO, the content bottleneck is often an engineering problem in disguise. The strategy surfaced the opportunity. The architecture made capturing it possible at scale.
Building the right system once delivered compounding returns across every product category, gender segment, and material type in the catalog.