Spell SEO Case Study

We helped one of Australia's most iconic fashion labels consolidate a complex international setup, grow non-branded organic visibility by 95%, and reduce paid search dependency - all while executing a major platform migration.

Spell is an iconic Australian bohemian fashion label founded in Byron Bay. Known for romantic, free-spirited designs, the brand has built a loyal global community across Australia, the US, Europe, and beyond. Both Spell and Optimising are B Corp certified - which made this partnership feel like the right fit from day one.

With a distinctive product and a deeply engaged customer base, Spell's challenge wasn't awareness. It was reach. The brand had strong branded search demand but was largely invisible to new customers searching for the category - "boho clothing", "festival outfits", "byron bay clothing". That's where the opportunity was.

When Spell came to Optimising, the brand was running a complex multi-subdomain Shopify setup with roughly 200 subdomains across international markets (aus.spell.co, us.spell.co, be.spell.co, and so on). The architecture was fragmenting domain authority, creating hreflang complexity, and making it difficult to build momentum in any single market.

On top of the technical debt, the business was heavily reliant on branded search and paid media to drive traffic. Non-branded organic was underperforming relative to the brand's actual size and category authority.

The goal was clear: grow non-branded organic visibility, consolidate domain authority, and build an SEO architecture that could support international growth without the fragmentation.

• Architecture: ~200 subdomains diluting domain authority across fragmented properties
• Visibility: Heavy reliance on branded search, limited non-branded organic reach
• Paid dependency: Brand paid search cannibalising organic demand at significant cost
• Scale: A full Shopify theme rebuild underway, requiring careful migration support

Fixing the Foundation: International Architecture Consolidation

Spell was running ~200 international subdomains, fragmenting domain authority across every market. We consolidated these into a clean subdirectory structure on a single root domain, executed alongside a full Shopify theme rebuild in October 2025. Full redirect mapping, hreflang implementation, and post-migration monitoring protected rankings through the transition, with a domain transfer completing in early 2026.

Collection Page Content Strategy

Collection pages are where fashion SEO is won or lost. We built a PLP content strategy across all major categories - keyword-led copy, optimised metadata, heading tag improvements, and sub-collection architecture - giving Google a clear signal for what each page should rank for and creating the conditions for sustained non-branded growth.

Turning Off Brand Paid Search

We recommended switching off brand paid search, which represented around 80% of Spell's total paid budget. The logic: if organic is doing its job, you're largely paying for clicks you'd get anyway. After three months, brand traffic held strong. Paid sessions dropped from 4,000+ to under 100 by March 2026 with no meaningful impact on brand demand, and the freed budget was redirected to non-branded acquisition.

Technical SEO and Site Hygiene

Underpinning everything was an ongoing programme of technical work - site hygiene sweep, broken link cleanup, homepage consolidation, Shopify Markets research, developer QA across the rebuild, and a blog categorisation and content audit. The technical work created clean crawl paths and a site structure that let the content strategy actually perform.

The headline result is a +95% increase in non-branded clicks year on year. This is the number that matters most for Spell's long-term growth - it represents real new customers finding the brand through category searches, not just existing fans typing the brand name.

Non-branded now represents a meaningfully larger share of Spell's organic traffic mix than it did at the start of the engagement. The brand is ranking in positions it wasn't visible in before.

Spell came to Optimising with a strong brand, a loyal community, and a technical setup that was holding them back. Over 20 months, we rebuilt the foundations, grew non-branded organic reach significantly, and helped the team make bold strategic calls - including turning off brand paid search - that paid off.

Both brands are B Corp certified. Both are built for the long game. That alignment shapes how we work together - not just optimising for short-term metrics, but building an SEO architecture and content strategy that compounds over time.

With the domain transfer completing in early 2026, the focus shifts to post-migration optimisation, improving non-branded conversion across the collection-to-product page journey, and building out AI search visibility as a new front in discovery.