Ocean Bottle

The brief

Ocean Bottle is a sustainability-focused ecommerce brand selling high-quality reusable bottles and flasks. Every bottle sold funds the recovery of plastic from coastal waste hotspots — a real, fundable mission rather than a marketing line.

The commercial problem was simple: people who already knew the brand bought. People who didn't, didn't. Non-brand search visibility was effectively flat, which meant SEO wasn't pulling its weight as an acquisition channel.

What I did

Audit and prioritisation. A full technical and content audit — surfacing the issues that mattered for non-brand visibility specifically, not a generic 200-point checklist. Shopify's templating layer turned out to be the biggest constraint: the theme was throwing off performance signals that were holding back ranking potential across the board.

Shopify template performance work. Working through the template files to fix the structural performance issues — render-blocking scripts, image handling, lazy-load behaviour, schema gaps, internal linking patterns. The kind of work that doesn't move dramatically on a single page but compounds across thousands of impressions.

Information architecture rebuild. Restructured how product, collection and editorial content was organised so that topical authority could build cleanly around the core non-brand terms — "reusable water bottle", "sustainable water bottles", "reusable flask" — and the long-tail underneath them.

Content programme. A non-brand-led content strategy targeting the long tail of intent around sustainability, reuse and product-comparison searches. Every piece written to satisfy a real query, not pad an editorial calendar.

The results

Within twelve months the site had moved from negligible non-brand visibility to ranking #1 in the UK and US for "Reusable Water Bottle", "Sustainable Water Bottles" and "Reusable Flask" — three of the highest-value commercial queries in the category.

Year-on-year non-brand traffic grew by 1,286%, which translated into 225% more SEO-attributed sales and a 189% lift in organic revenue. Search shifted from a brand-recovery channel into a primary engine of new customer acquisition.

The thinking

Sustainability brands often default to "tell the story louder". The discipline here was the opposite — getting the technical foundations strong enough that the existing story could actually be discovered by people who hadn't heard it yet. The story didn't change. The number of people exposed to it did.