In four months, Shopify Growth Services helped Mac Duggal lift total organic traffic 115%, grow non‑brand search nearly four times faster than brand, and improve Core Web Vitals by up to 96%. We partnered in Q3 2025 to strengthen SEO and expand international reach, then shipped quick technical fixes, refined structured data, implemented server‑rendered hreflang, and optimized performance. The result: all‑time highs in organic visibility across the US store and 28 market subdomains.
SEMRush estimated organic search traffic for macduggal.com, showing the growth trajectory from late 2025 into 2026.
The Opportunity
Mac Duggal asked us to boost organic search and shore up international coverage across 28 market subdomains. The foundations were solid a mature Shopify Plus store, baseline structured data, and a third‑party internationalisation setup but the team wanted fast, compounding wins.
Our technical review surfaced several high‑impact gaps:
- Structured data needed refinement to unlock rich results eligibility at scale.
- Hreflang delivered via client‑side JavaScript wasn’t reliably crawled.
- Performance lagged on layout stability and interactivity.
- Nearly 1,000 pages sent mixed canonical signals.
- Thousands of parameterized URLs were indexed across international subdomains without need.
With the quick wins prioritised, we organised the work into four connected tracks to address issues in the right order.
Our Approach
Technical SEO Quick Wins
- Consolidated canonical signals across ~1,000 pages where duplicate or conflicting tags diluted ranking authority.
- Identified and addressed thousands of parameterized URLs being indexed across international subdomains, reducing crawl waste and duplication.
- Cleaned up nofollow directives on internal pages that blocked Googlebot from key product and collection URLs.
- Partnered with Mac Duggal’s internationalization provider to resolve immediate hreflang and canonical inconsistencies ahead of the full server-rendered solution.
- Monitored Google Search Console throughout the engagement, flagging and helping resolve indexing issues in real time.
Structured Data Refinement
Mac Duggal already had schema markup in place. Our review found opportunities to meet Google’s rich results requirements more completely and consistently.
- Collaborated with the development agency through three QA rounds over two weeks to fix validation issues across product, collection, and content templates.
- Resolved a formatting issue where special characters in product descriptions interfered with JSON parsing on certain pages.
- Deployed the refined structured data ahead of Black Friday/Cyber Monday 2025, timed to avoid peak-trading risk
Google Rich Results Test confirming structured data eligibility for Product Snippets, Merchant Listings, Breadcrumbs, Organization and Review Snippets.
Server-Rendered Hreflang
With 28 international market subdomains, Mac Duggal's hreflang setup is one of the more complex configurations in the Shopify ecosystem. The existing implementation used a JavaScript-based approach through their internationalisation partner. While this works well for many merchants, at Mac Duggal's scale a server-rendered approach offered stronger SEO reliability by ensuring search engines could read hreflang signals directly from the HTML source.
The core challenge was architectural: the existing JavaScript-based injection meant hreflang tags only existed in the rendered DOM, not the raw HTML. The tags also carried query parameters that introduced inconsistency across market signals.
Our development team built a custom Liquid snippet that outputs all 29 hreflang tags (28 markets plus x-default) directly into the <head> at render time, using Shopify's native canonical URL handling to guarantee clean, parameter-free URLs. Because it runs server-side, there is no JavaScript dependency and the tags are present from the first byte of HTML, on every page type, automatically.
Server-rendered hreflang tags visible in the HTML source, covering all 28 international markets plus x-default.
All existing user-facing internationalisation functionality remained completely untouched: geo-detection, country routing, currency conversion, and regional content visibility. Testing confirmed 29 clean hreflang tags in page source across all page types, with zero regressions. As part of this work, we also introduced GitHub-based version control for the theme, giving the team more confidence in managing future changes.
Core Web Vitals Optimisation
Mac Duggal had already been proactive about site speed, working with third-party performance tools to improve server response times and investigate recent regressions. Our performance team identified additional opportunities at the theme level to improve loading speed, layout stability and interactivity, areas that edge-caching solutions alone could not address.
Targeted fixes were deployed across two releases in January and February 2026, building on the progress Mac Duggal had already made.
The Results
Within three months of the first changes going live, Mac Duggal's organic search performance reached all-time highs. The quick wins compounded across every workstream, delivering measurable gains in visibility, rankings and audience reach.
New Audience Discovery
The growth was driven by new audiences discovering Mac Duggal through category and product searches, not just existing brand awareness. Non-brand organic traffic grew nearly 4x faster than brand traffic, confirming that the SEO work is driving genuine discovery from shoppers who did not previously know the brand.
Google Search Console Brand vs. non-brand organic traffic growth, October 2025 vs. March 2026.
Keyword Category Performance
Across key dress categories, non-brand organic visibility surged. Importantly, all of these collection pages existed before the engagement began. The growth came from improved rankings, not from creating new pages.
Google Search Console Non-brand organic traffic growth by keyword category, October 2025 vs. March 2026. All collection pages existed prior to the engagement.
Rich Results & AI Visibility
Following the structured data deployment, the site achieved full eligibility for Google Product Snippets, Merchant Listings and AggregateRating rich results across the entire product catalogue, resolving validation issues across 1,426 pages.
The improvements also contributed to a marked increase in AI Overview visibility, with the number of keywords appearing in Google's AI Overviews rising sharply in the months following implementation.
SEMRush Keywords appearing in Google AI Overviews, showing acceleration following structured data improvements.
Core Web Vitals
At the 75th percentile (Chrome User Experience Report), all three Core Web Vitals metrics improved significantly:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): improved by over 26%
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP): improved by 70%
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): improved by 96%
Core Web Vitals from CrUX, visualised through Treo Site Speed.
The vast majority of visitors now experience a fast, stable site, contributing to lower bounce rates, higher engagement and improved rankings through Google's page experience signals.
International Hreflang Impact
The server-rendered hreflang deployment strengthened Mac Duggal's visibility across international markets. In the four markets where we measured routing directly, organic traffic to the correct localised subdomains increased across the board.
Google Search Console Growth in organic traffic to correct localised subdomains, January 2026 (pre-hreflang) vs. March 2026 (post-hreflang).
Looking Ahead
With the technical foundations now in place, Mac Duggal is well positioned for continued organic growth. The server-rendered hreflang solution provides a future-proof base for international expansion. Full structured data eligibility means the entire catalogue can compete for rich results in Google. And the GitHub-based version control workflow gives the team more confidence in managing future theme changes.
The engagement was built around close collaboration: Emily and Ana at Mac Duggal were actively involved at every stage, their development agency contributed throughout, and third-party partners were brought into the process rather than worked around. The result was a set of changes that landed cleanly, without disruption, during one of the busiest trading periods of the year.
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