When one of the founders of mebelcenter.bg approached me to help with building out a furniture store from the ground up, and the idea seemed almost too ambitious.
Large retailers with big marketing budgets dominated the majority of search results, making it difficult for newcomers to enter the market.
3 years later, despite the difficulties, the e-commerce shop reached 5,000 monthly organic clicks and generated 140,000 leva (approximately 70,000 EUR) in SEO-attributable revenue with virtually no SEO budget.
Here’s how we did this.
Topics
Executive Summary
In this case study, I share my journey of helping a furniture e-commerce shop, Mebelcenter.bg, grow from zero to 5,000 monthly clicks and 60,000 EUR in revenue through SEO. Here’s a quick rundown of the insights and strategies you’ll gain:
1. Domain selection: Learn how to find a strong domain with existing authority, relevance, and a clean backlink profile, all within a tight budget.
2. Technical SEO foundation: Discover best practices for indexation and crawling optimization, preventing common e-commerce SEO pitfalls, and enhancing technical performance for faster results.
3. On-page SEO for e-commerce success: Understand how to structure categories and product pages for better search engine visibility, focusing on unique content, comprehensive specifications, and strategic internal linking.
4. Continuous optimization and maintenance: Gain insights into maintaining and improving your e-commerce shop’s SEO performance, including identifying seasonal patterns and prioritizing specific categories for maximum impact.
By following these strategies, you’ll learn how to compete with larger retailers and achieve impressive growth with limited resources, even in a competitive market.
Finding a strong expired domain
When the co-founder first reached out to me, they didn’t even have a domain. After a quick consultation, we established 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; basically, nothing you do for the first 6 months will yield any results. Buying an expired domain is essentially taking a shortcut over this.
Once 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 good 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 the budget and offering excellent value. This gave us a great head start.
Building 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.
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 a wide range of tactics to improve internal linking as discovery tends to be a big problem when it comes to e-commerce SEO
These technical foundations proved crucial, as we were able to rank pretty much immediately a 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 E-commerce SEO is turning categories into “hubs” for authority, so you can compete for more general keywords with higher search volume 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, right?
The image is an 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 descriptions, and images are optimized for SEO. This takes effort,t but it makes a genuine difference
This “deep categories, flat products” approach allowed us to:
- Concentrate link equity on category pages that target competitive keywords
- Allow that authority to flow down to product pages through strategic internal linking (silos)
- Optimize product pages to rank for long-tail, high-conversion keywords
Content Marketing and Link Building
I’d lie if I told you we also ran a great link-building campaign and content marketing strategy because we didn’t
We added the website to a couple of directories but that was about it when it comes to link-building. The website naturally attracted some decent links, and that has been more than enough at the moment. Also, there was simply no budget to invest in 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 hand.
We focused on improving crawling/indexing, as this is the most crucial thing you can do to improve E-commerce shop SEO performance.
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)
- SEO-Attributable Revenue: 140,000 leva (70,000 EUR)
- 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. All you have to do is stick to the basics, even with limited resources