Case studyBooks2Door
A strategy for the in-house team. Tripled organic in eighteen months.
A sixty-page SEO audit and strategy for a UK discount books retailer. We handed it over in June 2023. Their in-house team ran it for eighteen months and tripled monthly organic traffic.
- Ecommerce
- Strategy & audit
- SEO
Eighteen months. Triple the traffic.
The site that ran the playbook. Strategy delivered June 2023, executed in-house over the eighteen months that followed.
Where Books2Door came to us.
A UK discount books retailer with a strong organic base and a falling organic revenue share. Their team had a good handle on SEO and a working hypothesis about what was wrong, but they wanted an outside read and a playbook their in-house team could execute. We were brought in for a one-off engagement: a thorough audit, a strategy, and a twelve-month roadmap of tactics. No retainer. We delivered, they ran it.
- Organic revenue share had fallen from 13% in 2022 to 8% in 2023.
- Site-wide conversion rate had dropped from 1.47% to 0.97% over the same window.
- In-house marketing team ready to execute, looking for an external strategy to guide the next twelve months.
Audit. Strategy. Twelve-month roadmap.
A sixty-page document delivered in June 2023. Ten chapters of audit covering everything from keyword footprint to crawl health to backlinks, followed by a strategy section their team could pick up and run with.
The audit
Ten chapters covering the SEO surface in detail: keyword and search-intent landscape, organic traffic patterns, crawl and technical health, the backlink profile, on-page content, AMP, usability, and a final issues summary. Honest read on what was holding the site back.
Keyword & intent map · Organic traffic diagnostic · Crawl & technical audit · Backlink profile review · Content & usability review
The strategy
Objectives, actions, and the tactics that would carry the next year. Built around the categories Books2Door actually competes in: childrens series, box sets, and gifting. Designed to be run by an in-house team, not by an agency on retainer.
Objectives & KPIs · Recommended actions · Off-page authority plan · Series & collection priorities
The twelve-month roadmap
A month-by-month tactics plan with priorities, ownership prompts, and notes on dependencies. The roadmap was the artefact their marketing team would refer back to long after the engagement closed.
Quarterly priorities · Tactic-by-tactic plan · Six-month review checkpoint
Eighteen months of compounding growth.
- Jun 2023Delivery
Sixty pages of strategy, handed over
The audit and strategy went out in June 2023. The retailer was at Domain Rating 38, roughly 42,000 monthly organic users on Ahrefs estimates, and seeing the organic revenue share decline that had prompted the brief.
- H2 2023Authority push
Domain Rating 38 to 61 in six months
Their team ran the off-page authority plan hard. By December, Ahrefs had Books2Door at Domain Rating 61, a twenty-three point jump in six months. The link footprint had been rebuilt to match the categories the strategy prioritised. This is the cleanest causal signal of the playbook landing.
- 2024Series compounding
Collection pages began doing the work
Through 2024 the in-house team kept publishing against the collection plan. Series pages for Bridgerton, Lottie Brooks, Heartstopper, Boys of Tommen, Powerless, and Isadora Moon climbed into top-three positions. Broad commercial collections like kids books, book box sets, and book subscription box uk grew from near zero into the page-one set.
- Mar 2025Peak
125,900 monthly organic users
Twenty-one months after the strategy was delivered, Ahrefs estimated monthly organic users at 125,900. Roughly three times the June 2023 baseline. Top-three ranked keywords had grown from 849 to 1,521, a 79% expansion in the high-intent footprint even as the long tail was pruned back. Brand homepage organic up 60%.
- 2026Postscript
AI Overviews reshape the SERP
Through 2026 the commercial book category compressed under AI Overviews. Ahrefs estimates settled around 60,000 monthly organic users by May, still well above the 2023 baseline but well below the peak. A pattern we now see across the wider book retail category, not specific to this site or to the playbook we wrote.
What the numbers did over eighteen months.
All figures via Ahrefs Site Explorer, books2door.com subdomains mode. Baseline Jun 2023, peak Mar 2025.
Up from roughly 42,000 in June 2023. Climbed steadily through H2 2023, broke 100,000 in January 2024, peaked in March 2025.
Ahrefs, May 2026
Twenty-three point jump in the six months after the strategy was delivered. Their team ran the off-page plan; the timing tracks the recommendation cleanly.
Ahrefs, May 2026
From 849 to 1,521. The keyword portfolio concentrated on high-intent commercial terms, exactly the shape the strategy recommended.
Ahrefs, May 2026
“We wrote the playbook. Their team ran it for eighteen months. That is the engagement, and we are happy to take credit for the bit we did, not the bit we did not.”
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