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I'm Mohamed Sahardid, the head of SEO at Groove Digital. Over three months, my team and I took on a project to greatly improve our website’s search engine rankings. This case study will walk you through our strategies, the steps we took, and the successes we achieved.
When we first looked at our website, we noticed a few big issues:
Strategic Goals
As we began our SEO campaign, we faced significant hurdles. Our backlink profile was cluttered with low-quality links, reducing our website’s credibility. The content was outdated, not engaging our target audience, and not optimized for current SEO standards.
Additionally, technical issues like slow loading times and poor mobile responsiveness hampered user experience and search engine rankings. Addressing these issues was crucial to set the stage for our strategic improvements.
We developed a focused plan to address each issue:
Backlink Improvement:
Content Strategy Revamp:
Technical SEO Fixes:
The Shopify storefront needed structural work before any content investment would pay off. We started with the backlink profile: a manual review of 300+ links, followed by a disavow file covering 217 toxic or irrelevant domains. This alone wouldn't move rankings immediately, but it stopped the bleeding — Google's algorithms were discounting the entire domain because of the link profile.
Simultaneously, we addressed Shopify-specific technical issues that most generalist agencies miss. Shopify generates duplicate content through its variant URL structure (/products/item?variant=12345 vs /products/item), tag-based collection pages that create thin content at scale, and a default canonical setup that doesn't always point where you want it to. We implemented proper canonicalisation, cleaned up the collection taxonomy, and removed 47 thin tag pages that were diluting crawl budget.
Page speed improvements included compressing product images (Shopify doesn't do this aggressively by default), removing three unused apps that were injecting JavaScript on every page load, and implementing lazy loading for below-the-fold content. Load time dropped from 4.8 seconds to 2.9 seconds — a 40% improvement.
We also fixed over 100 crawl errors that had accumulated in Google Search Console: broken internal links from deleted products, 404s from old campaign URLs, and a robots.txt configuration that was accidentally blocking the blog subdirectory.
The Webflow marketing site needed different treatment. As a webflow development agency partner, we restructured the site architecture to support a hub-and-spoke content model: a main services page acting as the hub, with blog posts linking back to it and to each other. This is standard SEO architecture, but Webflow makes it unusually easy to implement because the CMS collections and reference fields are built for exactly this kind of relational content structure.
We compressed all images (some hero images were 4MB+ PNGs), implemented Webflow's native lazy loading, cleaned up custom code embeds that were render-blocking, and added structured data (Organisation schema, BreadcrumbList, Article schema) via Webflow's custom code injection. Page speed went from a 42 Lighthouse score to 78.
We also set up proper 301 redirects for a dozen old URLs that had been orphaned during a previous site redesign, and configured the sitemap to exclude utility pages (thank-you pages, password-protected staging pages) that were wasting crawl budget.
Results after Month 1:
With the technical foundation solid, month two was about building the content layer that would actually attract and convert organic traffic.
The Webflow site got a more ambitious content build. We created a content hub around Dubai real estate marketing — the core topic Groove Digital wanted to own. The hub page (a long-form guide) linked out to six supporting blog posts, each targeting a specific sub-topic with commercial or informational intent.
Every post was built with Webflow's CMS, which gave us native control over meta titles, descriptions, OG images, URL slugs, and canonical tags — all from within the editor, without plugins or workarounds. This is one of the genuine advantages of Webflow as a development platform for marketing sites: the SEO controls are first-class, not bolted on.
We also implemented internal linking across both platforms. The Shopify blog linked to the Webflow marketing site's service pages (to push authority toward commercial pages), and the Webflow content hub linked to relevant Shopify product pages (to support transactional conversions). Cross-platform internal linking is something most agencies don't do because it requires understanding both platform's URL structures and link equity flows — but it's one of the highest-leverage moves when a business runs on two platforms.
On-page improvements:
With a clean backlink profile and fresh content in place, month three focused on earning new, high-quality backlinks. We built partnerships with three Dubai-based real estate industry publications for editorial placements (not paid links — actual contributed articles with genuine editorial oversight). We also secured mentions in two SaaS directories relevant to Groove Digital's product offering.
The new links were fewer than the old profile — 53 new domains vs the original 300+ — but dramatically higher quality. Average referring domain authority went from DA 12 to DA 41. Several main keywords moved into the top 10, with three reaching top-3 positions for terms directly relevant to Groove Digital's commercial offering in the Dubai real estate market.
The final piece was making sure the traffic we'd built actually converted. We added lead-capture forms to the top 5 blog posts on the Webflow site (inline CTAs, not just end-of-post forms), created a downloadable resource (a Dubai real estate marketing checklist) as a lead magnet, and implemented event tracking in GA4 to measure form submissions, resource downloads, and service page CTA clicks.
On the Shopify side, we optimised the checkout flow and added trust signals (client logos, case study references, security badges) to product pages. The combination of better traffic quality (from SEO) and better on-page conversion elements produced a measurable increase in both leads and direct sales.
Results after Month 3:
On Shopify: Most businesses treat Shopify as a "set it and forget it" e-commerce platform. It's not. Shopify's default technical SEO setup creates problems at scale — duplicate content from variant URLs, thin tag pages, auto-generated meta descriptions, and app-injected JavaScript that kills page speed. A shopify marketing agency that doesn't understand these platform-specific issues will waste months on content and links that can't rank because the foundation is broken.
On Webflow: Webflow is genuinely one of the best platforms for marketing-site SEO — but only if you use its native controls deliberately. The CMS gives you per-page control over every SEO element without plugins. The hosting is fast. The code output is clean. But Webflow also makes it easy to build beautiful sites with no SEO architecture whatsoever, because the visual builder doesn't force you to think about information hierarchy, internal linking, or content structure. A webflow development agency that treats SEO as an afterthought will build a site that looks great and ranks nowhere.
On dual-platform strategy: Running Shopify + Webflow is increasingly common for businesses that want e-commerce functionality (Shopify) alongside a flexible marketing site (Webflow). The SEO opportunity most teams miss is cross-platform internal linking — using each platform's content to push authority toward the other's commercial pages. This requires understanding both platforms' URL structures, canonical setups, and link equity flows, which is why it's rarely done well.
I work as an independent SEO consultant specialising in Shopify and Webflow platforms — whether that's a standalone Shopify store, a Webflow marketing site, or a dual-platform setup like Groove Digital's.
If your Shopify store has technical debt you suspect is holding back rankings, or your Webflow site looks beautiful but generates zero organic leads, the problems are usually structural and fixable within 90 days.
→ Book a free 20-minute audit call — I'll look at your GSC data, run a quick technical scan, and tell you honestly whether there's a real opportunity or not. No pitch deck, no retainer pressure.
Mohamed Sahardid — SEO & GEO Specialist mo@sahardid.com · LinkedIn · sahardid.com