Rebuilding search visibility for Australia's art and homewares brand

The challenge

Urban Road sells art, wallpaper and homewares at real scale, with a catalog deep enough to compete on almost any style, colour or room term you can name. The problem was not product. It was that a whole layer of demand had no page to land on.

A domain migration had cost the brand hard-won search authority, two Google core updates had compressed its category pages, and the site was running three markets from one storefront with US visibility that was mostly low-intent blog traffic. Competitors with thinner catalogs were outranking it on terms Urban Road was better equipped to serve.

What we did

We started with a competitor gap analysis rather than a wish list, and let it decide the order of work.

We built the pages the demand was asking for. Wallpaper went from a single page to a full shop-by-type and shop-by-colour range: removable and peel-and-stick, murals, and colour-led pages across pink, blue, green, floral and kids. That category alone represents more than 100,000 monthly searches, and the brand carried over 200 wallpaper products with almost no visibility for any of them. We added a dedicated Coastal collection against a cluster worth roughly 25,000 monthly searches, and built format pages for canvas prints, framed wall art and art prints, where competitors held the top spots and Urban Road had nothing to compete with.

We strengthened what already ranked. The main Wall Art page and a run of key collections got richer descriptions, FAQ sections and real internal linking. The large and oversized collection was retargeted to the phrasing the market actually searches. Titles and metas were rewritten on high-impression pages to earn clicks at the ranks they already held.

We made the editorial traffic shoppable. The two highest-traffic guides on the site pull hundreds of thousands of search impressions between them. They were doing that work with no clear path to a product. Now they carry curated product links.

We fixed what was quietly competing with itself. Secondary landing pages were outranking the collections they were meant to feed, and a canonical misconfiguration had a strongly-ranking category page at risk. Both were resolved. We also opened product and collection pages to AI search crawlers, so the brand is present as more discovery moves through AI assistants.

On the paid side

We run Urban Road’s paid media on a margin-true basis. Before setting a target we measured contribution margin from real unit costs across the active catalog, landed freight and made-to-order production. Gross margin said one thing; contribution said something materially harder. The account is now bid against the number that reflects what a sale actually leaves behind, not the one that flatters the report.

The outcome

Urban Road now has a category architecture that matches how its customers search, in the markets it sells to, with editorial traffic that leads somewhere and paid targets derived from real economics. Search work of this scope takes four to six weeks to re-crawl and re-rank, and we report on the movement rather than declaring victory on the day it ships.