The brief
The client was a mid-market Malaysian e-commerce operator on Shopify, running in a competitive category with established competitors and aggressive Google Ads spend. They came to us in April 2025 with the following problem statement:
- 5,000 monthly organic visitors (flat for 18 months)
- RM 80,000 monthly revenue, around 30% attributed to organic
- Climbing Google Ads CPA — from RM 45 to RM 78 over the previous 12 months
- Two previous SEO agencies had reported on traffic but produced no revenue growth
They had a 600-SKU catalogue, decent domain authority, and genuinely good product quality. What they didn’t have was an SEO programme tied to revenue.
Stage 1 (Month 1–2): Analysis and technical audit
The first six weeks were diagnostic. We ran a full Screaming Frog and Sitebulb crawl against the entire catalogue, cross-referenced with Search Console data and server logs. We also pulled GA4 data to map the current revenue-attribution model.
The audit surfaced 47 technical issues. The most impactful:
- Faceted navigation producing 12,000+ thin URLs, eating crawl budget and diluting ranking signals on parent categories
- Missing Product schema across 85% of the catalogue, costing rich-result eligibility
- LCP failures on mobile across all category pages — 4.2s field data vs the 2.5s threshold
- Canonical chaos on variant products where Shopify’s defaults created self-referencing canonical loops
We prioritised by estimated revenue impact and dev hours. The top 12 items were scheduled for Stage 2 remediation.
Stage 2 (Month 2–4): CRO built into the SEO work
This is where Adam SEO’s 4-Stage / 9-Step Framework diverges from most agencies. We don’t wait until traffic is growing to address conversion — CRO is integrated from Stage 2.
Our CRO specialist audited the top 20 landing pages by existing traffic. Findings included:
- Form friction: the main lead form had 11 fields. We cut to 5 with progressive disclosure for the rest.
- Trust-signal gaps: no review integration, no case study links, weak author credibility on product pages.
- Hero copy: generic “quality products at great prices” instead of concrete value propositions.
By the end of Month 4, the reworked landing pages were live and early data showed conversion rate up from 1.4% to 2.3% on the top category pages.
Stage 3 (Month 3–10): On-page and off-page SEO
With the technical baseline fixed and CRO improvements shipped, we began the compounding work:
- 30-keyword priority list built around commercial intent and existing near-miss rankings (pages 2–3 for high-value queries)
- Category copy rewrite for 24 top categories — 400–800 word briefs with FAQ sections targeting commercial long-tail
- Product schema deployment across the catalogue with rich-result validation
- 4 backlinks per month via guest posting, HARO responses, and broken-link outreach on relevant Malaysian and SEA publications
- Internal linking restructure pushing authority to priority money pages
By Month 6 the 30-keyword target set had moved from an average position of 14.2 to 6.8. The commercial categories started pulling first-page rankings on the queries that mattered most.
Stage 4 (Month 6–10): Remarketing layer
Once organic traffic was compounding, we added a remarketing layer — Google Ads and Meta retargeting campaigns pointed at high-intent visitors who hadn’t converted on first visit. This added approximately 7% incremental sales on top of the organic growth.
The 10-month result
At the end of Month 10 (February 2026), the numbers:
| Metric | Month 0 | Month 10 | Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly organic visitors | 5,000 | 15,000 | +200% |
| Monthly revenue (total) | RM 80,000 | RM 307,000 | +283% |
| Organic revenue share | 30% | 62% | +32pp |
| Customer acquisition cost | RM 78 | RM 46 | -41% |
| Google Ads spend | RM 35K / month | RM 22K / month | -37% |
The standout number for the client wasn’t the traffic — it was the 41% drop in CAC and the 37% reduction in paid ad spend. Organic had become a meaningful revenue channel that wasn’t linearly dependent on ad budget.
What we got wrong
Honest retrospectives matter. Two things lagged our forecast:
- Link acquisition velocity: we targeted 6 backlinks / month and hit an average of 4. Our outreach response rate on Malaysian publications was lower than we’d seen in other markets.
- Mobile LCP fix timing: we scoped this for Month 2 but it slipped to Month 4 because of a developer resource constraint on the client side. This delayed category-page ranking improvements by ~6 weeks.
What this means for you
This pattern is reproducible for most mid-market Malaysian e-commerce operators who:
- Have an existing catalogue of 200+ SKUs
- Are on Shopify, WooCommerce, or Magento
- Are already spending RM 15K+ / month on Google Ads
- Have decent product quality and brand positioning
If that sounds like you, our E-commerce SEO service page walks through what a typical engagement covers. Or book a free discovery call and we’ll look at your specific catalogue and competitive landscape.
