Home Shielders Case Study - $100K to $500K Organic Sales in 7 Months | 100+ Top-5 Keywords Ranked

Home Shielders runs homeshielders.com, a US online store on Shopify that sells humane, chemical-free pest control. Its range covers plug-in ultrasonic repellers for mice, rats, roaches and spiders, solar stakes for moles, voles and gophers, smart repellers for deer, raccoons and skunks, bird deterrents, and dog bark control devices such as the Dog Silencer MAX and the BarkWise collar.

Optimize For SEO ran the store's SEO from January 2021 to 2023. The brief was simple: make organic search a main source of sales, not just traffic. Within seven months, monthly organic sales grew from about $100,000 to more than $500,000, and over 100 buying-intent keywords reached Google's top 5.

About the client

Home Shielders sells devices that drive pests and animals away without poison, traps or repeat visits from an exterminator. Most products are set-and-forget: plug one in, or push a solar stake into the lawn, and it keeps working.

• Market: homeowners across the USA, shipped from US warehouses.
• Range: devices for close to 20 pests and animals, from mice and ants to deer, bats and a neighbour's barking dog.
• Promise: humane and pet-safe, backed by a 60-day money-back guarantee.
• Scale today: the store says it has served more than 50,000 customers.

The challenge

People with a pest problem rarely search for a brand. They search for the problem: "how to get rid of moles", "mouse repellent", "stop the neighbour's dog barking". Home Shielders needed to show up for those searches, then turn the visit into an order.

• A broad, thin structure. In late 2020 the catalogue sat in a few broad collections (indoor, outdoor, bird control, dog bark control). Most individual pests had no page of their own, so Google had little to rank for searches like "mole repellent" or "deer repellent".
• Strong competition. Similar devices sell on Amazon and through big retailers, so product pages alone could not win the top spots.
• Doubtful buyers. Many shoppers are unsure whether ultrasonic repellers work. The pages had to answer that before asking for the sale.
• No content engine. The store's blog held only a few posts from 2015, so nothing caught people who were still researching.

What we did

• A keyword map by pest and by problemWe grouped buying-intent searches by pest and animal (mice, rats, moles, gophers, deer, skunks, snakes, bats, birds and barking dogs) and gave each group one target page, so the store's pages stopped competing with each other.
• A shop-by-pest site structureThe menu was rebuilt around "Shop by Pest" and "Shop by Animal", so every problem has its own landing page one click from the homepage and Google can see how the catalogue fits together.
• Pest landing pagesDedicated pages for rodent control, mouse and rat repellents, mole, deer and snake repellents, dog silencers and bark collars, each one matching the searcher's problem to the right device.
• How-to guidesGuides that answer the questions buyers ask first, such as forcing mice out of an attic, getting rid of gophers, squirrels, spiders or roof rats, and keeping cockroaches out without killing them. Each guide links to the matching product.
• Product and collection SEOTitles, descriptions and copy built around eco-friendly, humane pest control, with the facts buyers check before they order: which pests a device targets, where it works and how fast it acts.
• Technical SEOA faster, cleaner Shopify setup, so a fast-growing set of pages could be crawled, indexed and ranked.
• Link buildingLinks from relevant, authoritative sites, so the new pages could reach and hold top-5 positions in a competitive niche.

From the archived versions of homeshielders.com

How the site grew in 2021

Campaign results, January to July 2021

The results

The growth came from buying-intent searches, so the extra traffic turned into orders, not just visits.

Rankings

Example keyword wins

Product and where-to-buy searches like these come from people who are ready to order, which is why the rankings turned straight into sales.

Why it worked

• One page per problem. The site structure matched the way people search, so every page had one clear job.
• Content before the sale. Guides reached people who were still deciding and passed them to the right device.
• Trust on the page. Clear guarantees, safety answers and reviews turned more of the new visitors into buyers.

What other online stores can take from this

• Map keywords to problems, not just to products.
• Give every high-value problem its own page, linked from the menu.
• Answer the doubt that stops people buying, on the page where they decide.
• Link guides to products, and products back to guides.
• Judge SEO by sales, not by traffic.

Want results like these?

If you run an online store and want organic search to become your biggest sales channel, see our e-commerce SEO services and Shopify SEO agency work, or talk to Optimize For SEO.

Results: Optimize For SEO campaign records, January to July 2021. Store details: homeshielders.com today, and archived versions of the site from 2020 to 2022 (Internet Archive), which date when each page first appeared.