Migration · 7 weeks

Gud Tonics deleted most of its site and was indexed in two days.

Alcohol-free kava and kratom tonics, positioned as the drink you have instead. Typing the brand name into Google returned nothing, because the site was buried under mass-generated content.

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GÜD Tonics' Shopify store on desktop and phone: the homepage and the Baja Bliss product page
Client
Gud Tonics
Sector
Functional beverages
Market
United States
Timeline
7 weeks
Services
SEO, Shopify Development, Migration, CRO
2 days

To indexed

$10k+

Daily sales

As reported by the client.

01 The challenge

Gud Tonics make alcohol-free kava and kratom tonics, sold as the drink you have instead of the one you were going to. The product is good and the position is clear, which is more than most drinks brands start with. People who tried it bought it again. What failed was everything before the trying.

Google would not show the site.

Not for a product term, and not for the brand name. Somebody had filled it with mass-generated articles, hundreds of pages saying the same thing in slightly different words. A shopper who had heard the name and went looking for it found competitors instead.

The instinct in that position is to publish better material on top of the old. It does not work, because the duplicated pages keep drawing the same judgement. They have to come out first. The founder had commissioned that library and was not keen to throw it away, and that was the argument the project had to win first.

02 Our approach

UX

The buying decision here is a substitution. Someone is choosing this instead of a beer or a third coffee, usually at a particular time of day. So the store leads with the occasion, then the effect, then the ingredients. Flavour and format come last, because nobody switches drinks for a flavour.

Technical

Removal came before anything else. We planned to review the article library page by page and delete rather than improve it, keeping only what a customer would actually read. Removed pages would return a clean gone status rather than a redirect to the homepage, because a redirect tells a search engine the page still means something.

Conversion

The brand name came first in the rewrite. A shopper who has heard the name and cannot find the site is a customer somebody else gets. So the pages answering for the brand were written before any chasing product terms. Product and ingredient pages followed, one subject each. Being findable for your own name matters more than any other term.

03 Design & UX

The homepage leads with the moment rather than the bottle. What you are having instead comes first, the effect second, the ingredients third. Flavour and pack size sit lower, where a decided buyer will find them. The article rail, the related-posts blocks and the tag clouds all went, because they were furniture built for pages that no longer exist.

On a phone the whole site is now short enough to read. Each page covers one subject and ends with a way to buy, so nobody has to navigate back to a menu. Navigation shrank with the page count, which made the menu something a thumb can use rather than a directory of articles.

The GÜD Tonics homepage on desktop

Occasion before flavour

People switch drinks for a moment and an effect, not for a taste, so the page argues in that order.

Gone, not redirected

Deleted pages return a gone status instead of a redirect, which tells search engines the content is withdrawn rather than moved.

One page per subject

Every topic is covered once and properly, so nothing on the site competes with anything else on the site.

Brand pages written first

The rewrite started with the pages that answer for the name, because that was the search the business was losing.

Gud Tonics brand board: logo, colour palette, typography, picnic spread with TropiColada and Baja Bliss and the product range

04 Development & technical implementation

The old library was reviewed page by page, by hand, and most of it was deleted. Removed URLs return a gone status, the sitemap was rebuilt to match, and internal links were rewritten so nothing points at a page that has been withdrawn. Search Console was used to confirm what had been dropped from the index.

What remained was rebuilt on Shopify, with Liquid templates for products and ingredients. Structured data describes the brand and the products in terms a search engine can read. The surviving pages were rewritten by people in the brand voice, fewer of them, each about one thing. GA4 and Search Console were set up to watch indexing from the first day.

Klaviyo carries the repeat purchase side, because this product is bought again rather than bought once. The team now publishes its own pages in the same templates. The rule they kept is one page per subject, written once, which is the rule the old library broke. The rebuild took 7 weeks.

Close-ups of GÜD Tonics: the product buy box, the occasion-led homepage hero and lab results on the product

05Key solutions

Key solutions.

The parts of the build a visitor would point at.

  1. 01

    Findable for the brand name

    Typing the brand into a search engine now returns the store, which is the first thing a curious customer tries.

  2. 02

    A library worth reading

    The pages that stayed cover products, method and ingredients, each written once, so visitors find an answer rather than a variation.

  3. 03

    Occasion-led shopping

    The store opens with the moment the drink replaces, which is how the decision is actually made, then works down to format.

  4. 04

    Light, fast pages

    Fewer pages and simpler templates mean the site loads quickly, which matters on the phone where most of this traffic arrives.

  5. 05

    Clean removal signals

    Withdrawn pages return a gone status and the sitemap matches, so search engines drop them instead of holding them against the site.

  6. 06

    Repeat purchase email

    Customer records feed the email programme, so people who liked the tonic hear about it again without another search.

06The result

The result.

What changed after launch.

2 days

To indexed

The site was indexed within 2 days of relaunch. For a brand that had been invisible even for its own name, that is the difference between having a website and not having one. No advertising was involved. Removing the duplicated pages is what let the real ones be seen.

$10k+

Daily sales

The store now takes $10k+ in daily sales. The product and the position had not changed. What changed is that the people who went looking could arrive. That is the commercial value of removal, and it came without a single new advert or a larger content library.

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07The finished site

The finished site.

Live, and running the business it was built for.

Visit the live site (opens in a new tab)
The finished GÜD Tonics store on phones: home, shop, product and lab results

08In their words

We could not find ourselves on Google by typing our own name. Two days after launch we could. That was the whole problem, solved.

Founder, Gud Tonics

09Tech stack

Tech stack.

What it is built on, and what it talks to.

  • Shopify
  • Liquid
  • Search Console
  • GA4
  • Klaviyo

10More case studies

More case studies.

Other projects where we named the number before we started.

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Cocoon Care left WooCommerce and more than doubled its conversion rate.

Hundreds of bamboo babywear products, tens of thousands of orders and years of rankings, moved off a slow WooCommerce build onto a store built for phones.

Conversion, from 1.5%
3.5%
Organic traffic
+30%
View case study

Migration

GRH Kratom moved six years of rankings to Shopify without losing one.

Kratom and kava from a family farm, on a WooCommerce store carrying six years of rankings. Every agency quote before ours warned of losses in the move.

Organic traffic
+40%
Conversion
+45%
View case study

Migration

King K Kratom rebuilt its store with compliance built in, not bolted on.

Lab-verified kratom extracts sold with age gating and state shipping rules bolted on by plugins. Rebuilt on Shopify so compliance is part of the store itself.

Organic traffic
+25%
Conversion
+3.5%
View case study

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