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Introduction
De Plantrekkers started as a physical plant store in Leuven. While the shop had deep plant knowledge and loyal customers, its online visibility was almost nonexistent.
Over the course of 3 years, we transformed that offline expertise into a scalable organic growth engine. Today, the website attracts 220 visitors per year from organic search and reaches plant lovers across multiple countries.
The strategy focused on structured SEO fundamentals rather than aggressive backlink building, turning product knowledge, customer questions, and smart site architecture into sustainable growth.
The Challenge
At the start of the project, the situation looked like this:
- 800 organic visitors per month
- Only branded impressions in Google Search
- 40 indexed pages
- 2 sales per month
Main challenges:
- highly competitive ecommerce niche
- limited backlink opportunities
- plant expertise existed offline but not online
- content was only available in one language
Strategy Overview
Instead of chasing quick SEO wins, the strategy focused on six structural growth levers:
- Optimizing Google Merchant Center to improve product visibility
- Expanding content into multiple languages
- Turning real customer questions into search content
- Scaling internal linking and navigation
- Creating structured collections and filters
- Publishing seasonal pages months before demand peaks
Each lever reinforced the others, creating a compounding SEO effect.
1. Helping Google Understand the Product Catalog
Google Merchant Center played an important role in helping search engines understand the product catalog.
By improving product feeds, attributes, and taxonomy, Google could better match De Plantrekkers’ inventory with relevant searches.
2. International SEO: Multiplying the Value of Existing Content
The website was translated into English and French, significantly expanding the potential audience.
Instead of creating entirely new content, the existing knowledge base suddenly became accessible to much larger markets.
However, international SEO requires patience. It took almost a year before translated pages began gaining significant traction.
3. Turning Customer Questions into Content
Much of the website content came directly from questions customers asked in the physical store.
Instead of writing technical plant articles, the content focused on clear explanations using the same language used in the shop.
This approach made the content:
• easy to understand
• highly relevant
• aligned with real search behavior
Informational pages created: 862
Organic traffic to informational content: 150k over 16 months (keep in mind Google update with AI overviews)
4. Scaling Internal Linking Instead of Backlinks
Unpaid Backlinks are difficult to obtain in the plant ecommerce space.
Instead of relying heavily on link building, the focus shifted to internal linking and site structure.
Key improvements:
- better navigation
- contextual links between plant guides and products
- automated linking where possible
- improved crawlability
5. Collections and Filters for Long-Tail Discovery
Plants naturally lend themselves to category discovery:
- plants for low light
- plants for bathrooms
- pet-friendly plants
By creating structured collections and filters, the site became easier to navigate for both users and search engines.
6. Seasonal SEO Planning
Search engines need time to crawl and rank new pages.
Seasonal pages were therefore published months before demand peaks.
Example:
Christmas plant pages were created in summer, ensuring they were indexed and ranked when the season started.
Preparing for the Christmas period. Producing in advance got out position better, resulting in higher volumes when the time is there.
The Results
The website evolved from a local store website into an international plant knowledge hub.
