Case Study: How we grew a furniture E-commerce shop from zero to 5,000 monthly clicks and 60,000 EUR in Revenue Through SEO

When one of the founders of mebelcenter.bg approached me to help the idea of building out a furniture store from the ground up seemed almost too ambitious. Large retailers with big marketing budgets already dominated the majority of search results, making it very difficult for newcomers to enter the market.

Despite that, they successfully built an online furniture store, reaching 5,000 monthly organic clicks and generating 115,000 leva (approximately 60,000 EUR) in total revenue within just 36 months with little-to-no SEO budget.

Finding strong domain

When the co-founder first reached out to me, they didn’t even have a domain. After a quick consultation, we established a clear criteria:

• Leverage existing authority: Buy an expired domain with some backlinks and domain age.
• Budget constraints: Spend a maximum of 50 EUR for domain acquisition.
• Industry relevance: If possible, find a domain previously used in the furniture industry but sometimes that’s too much to ask.

Using an expired domain allows for faster results when you’re starting out, as brand new domain names take time to build authority. Not only this but Google keeps new domains in a “Sandbox” which is an algorithm that holds back new domains. All that means = nothing you do for the first 6 months will yield any results. Buying an expired domain is essentially taking a shortcut over this.

Onec the criteria was established, we went on expireddomains.net and almost immediately found “mebelcenter.bg,” which had previously belonged to an old furniture shop in Bulgaria

Our analysis showed:

• Domain age of around 5-10 years
• A dozen backlinks from Bulgarian websites, some of them with great anchor text.
• Clean backlink profile with no toxic links or traces of spam tactics.
• Previous indexation in Google

The domain cost was just 12 EUR, well within our budget and offering excellent value. This gave us more than a great head start.

Building rock-solid Technical SEO Foundation

Starting from zero when you’re in SEO is a rare opportunity to do things right from the beginning. We made sure to take advantage of it and implemented technical SEO best practices from day one.

Here’s what we did:

Indexation and crawling optimization:

• Implemented XML sitemaps with proper categorization
• Added a custom robots.txt file to guide crawler behavior, excluding a ton of filter pages, admin and checkout pages.
• Established a good site architecture, making sure all important pages were no further than 3 clicks from the homepage.

Preventing common e-commerce SEO pitfalls:

• Configured canonical tags to prevent duplication issues with filtered product views in the categories
• Blocked crawling of some of the non-essential parameters (color, size, sorting options) while preserving user functionality.
• Implemented pagination with rel=”next” and rel=”prev” attributes

Technical performance enhancements:

• Implemented image formats with lazy loading for product galleries
• Created a mobile-first responsive design
• Made sure the server loaded for less than 500ms and optimized the majority of product pages for optimal performance (Crucial in 2025)
• Added Product, Breadcrumbs and Organization schema markups to trigger the correct signals in the algorithm and hopefully have rich results on the SERPs
• Implement wide range of tactics to improve internal linking as discovery tend to be a big problem when it comes to Ecommerce SEO

These technical foundations proved crucial, as we were able to rank pretty much immediately wide variety of product pages for long-tail keywords.

This would’ve been impossible without a proper technical optimization

On-Page SEO

With technical fundamentals in place, we switched our focus to an On-page SEO approach specifically designed for e-commerce success.

One of the challenges in Ecommerce SEO is turn categories into “hubs” for authority, so you can compete for more general keywords with higher search while also creating a silo structure that allows internal linking to flow down to product pages which then you rank for long-tail keywords. Sounds simple isn’t it?

The image below is a great example of optimal structure for e-commerce shops.

What did we do exactly?

Deep Categories

• Implemented a silo structure with logical categorization (living room → sofas → corner sofas)
• Aligned category names with searches
• Included internal links from informational content to relevant categories
• Build a user-facing sitemap with internal links to every single category page on the website. (It feels like a cheat code)

Flat Product pages

• Created unique, detailed product descriptions, doing our best to avoid manufacturer boilerplate pages. Google rewards uniqueness.
• Listed comprehensive specifications including all dimensions, materials, and warranty information. This is important!
• Incorporated detailed delivery information specific to major Bulgarian cities
• Implemented a structured FAQ section addressing common buyer concerns
• Build a proper hierarchical heading structure and ensure titles, meta description, and images are optimized for SEO. This takes effort but it makes a genuine difference

This “deep categories, flat products” approach allowed us to:

1. Concentrate link equity on category pages that targeted competitive keywords
2. Allow that authority to flow down to product pages through strategic internal linking (silos)
3. Optimize product pages to rank for long-tail, high-conversion keywords

Strategic Content Marketing and Link Building

I’d lie if I tell you we also ran a great link-building campaign and content marketing strategy because we didn’t

We added the website to couple of directories but that was about it when it comes to link-building. The website naturally attracted couple of decent links and that has been more than enough at the moment. Also, there was simply no budget to invest into that.

When it comes to content, the picture is similar. We wrote a few blog posts that got no traction, and we eventually chose to spend the budget in areas that made more sense for the business.

Continuous Optimization and Maintenance

Once the core work was done, we focused mostly on maintenance and improving whatever we could with the budget we had at hands.

We focused on improving crawling/indexing, as this is the most crucial thing you can do to improve E-commerce shop SEO performance.

We also established a proper measurement system and identified seasonal patterns in Bulgarian furniture shopping, allowing us to prioritize specific categories and pages during peak interest periods in order to maximize impact.

Results

Our approach delivered consistent growth over a period of close to 3 years:

• Traffic growth: From 0 to 5,000 monthly organic clicks (63% YOY growth)
• Revenue: 115,000 leva (60,000 EUR) in total revenue from organic traffic
• Keywords expansion: From ranking for 0 keywords to over 2,000 keywords

This experience made me realize that there are still plenty of opportunities in the SEPRs to grab, and you can still win by sticking to the basics, even with limited resources.