How an Outdoor Performance Brand Grew Traffic by 4,461% in 3 Months
https://cascadedesigns.com/
Stats
5.2K to 236.8K Monthly Visits
Industry
Ecommerce & Retail
Niche
Sporting Goods
Reporting Date
February 2025
What happens when a company dismantles its digital silos and unites its brands under one roof?
Cascade Designs Inc., a leading manufacturer of outdoor gear and equipment, found out—and the results were explosive. They didn't just see a slight uptick in traffic; they experienced a dramatic surge practically overnight.
This SEO case study breaks down the strategies they used to execute this domain migration to perfection.
We'll also explore additional SEO growth techniques for making the most of SERP real estate and standing out from the competition.
In This Article
The Catalyst: How Cascade Designs Reached Over a Quarter-Million Monthly Visits
1. Consolidating Brand Power: Strategic Domain Migration Unifies UX
The #1 reason for Cascade Designs' recent traffic growth is their decision to consolidate brands under a single domain.
Instead of maintaining separate websites for each of the following brands:
- MSR
- Therm-a-Rest
- Platypus
- PackTowl
- SealLine*
Cascade Designs migrated them all under their primary domain, cascadedesigns.com.
This process involved a few critical factors for a seamless transition:
1. Creating Brand-Specific Pages: Cascade Designs dedicated a web page to each brand within the main website. This approach provides a distinct and branded user experience for each brand's customers. (Example: https://cascadedesigns.com/pages/thermarest)
2. Implementing 301 Redirects: 301 redirects tell search engines you've moved content permanently. Cascade Designs used redirects to send traffic from the old sites to their new corresponding URLs on the primary domain.
3. Unifying User Experience (UX): Customers can now shop across all brands with a single cart. This creates a more streamlined shopping experience and additional opportunities for cross-promotion.
Most of these migrations started in December 2024 (*apart from SealLine, which was already redirecting to Cascade Designs).
And the results speak for themselves.
Cascade Designs successfully transferred organic traffic, keyword rankings, and domain authority to cascadedesigns.com.
Why This Matters:
Cascade Designs' domain consolidation wasn't just a website redesign; it was a strategic SEO power-up. Some benefits include:
- Boosted Domain Authority: Consolidating strengthens your main domain, improving rankings across all brands.
- Eliminated Keyword Conflicts: One site, one strategy—no more competing with yourself for keywords.
- Enhanced User Experience: A unified shopping experience keeps customers engaged and increases conversions.
- Simplified SEO: Managing one site is easier than managing many, freeing up resources.
- Increased Cross-Promotion: Expose customers to more of your brands at once.
Overall, it’s a big move that can come with an equally big pay-off for your SEO.
How to Do a Website Migration:
There’s a lot that goes into website migrations. After all, you don’t want to lose any of the hard work or SEO value you put into the original domain.
Checklists can be a great way to execute a site migration without missing a beat.
WPBeginner has a thorough website migration checklist that includes the following tasks:
- Putting your site in maintenance mode
- Creating a backup of your site
- Setting up and testing redirects
- Checking for 404 errors
- And more
I highly recommend reading the above article for a full breakdown of how to do each task. It has a ton of tutorials and guides linked throughout the article to help you execute your domain migration flawlessly.
Tools for Full Site Redirects:
If you’re a WordPress user, you’re in luck.
All in One SEO (AIOSEO) has made domain migrations and full site redirects faster and easier than ever.
Just navigate to the Redirection Manager, and click on the Full Site Redirect tab. Then, enter the URLs of your old and new domains.
AIOSEO will implement permanent redirects for you, ensuring all link juice is passed on to the new domain.
For a detailed walkthrough of this process, check out the following tutorial: How to Do a Full Site Redirect in WordPress.
2. Star-Powered SERPs: Schema Markup Transforms Online Visibility
Cascade Designs didn't stop at domain consolidation. They also leveraged the power of schema markup to enhance their visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs).
Specifically, they focused on product schema, which allows them to share important product details with search engines.
Schema markup is a form of structured data that helps search engines better understand the content of a web page. It provides context and meaning, allowing search engines to more easily index your site and serve it for relevant queries.
Here’s what product schema looks like in the source code of one of Cascade Design’s web pages:
Cascade Design uses JSON-LD to communicate product details with crawlers, which is Google’s preferred method for implementing structured data.
Besides making it easier for search engines to understand your content, schema markup also often comes with an SEO-favorite bonus: rich snippets.
Rich snippets are enhanced search listings that feature additional elements directly in SERPs.
Take a product rich snippet, for example.
This enhanced listing shows details like:
- Price
- Stock availability
- Average customer rating
- Return and shipping information
It also has an image of the product, which could be the distinguishing factor between a potential customer clicking on your site or the competition’s.
All these elements appear in Cascade Design’s product schema markup.
This strategy has yielded impressive results, particularly in image snippets.
By implementing product schema, Cascade Designs saw a significant boost in image rankings, with an impressive 10.5K rankings by February.
This visual prominence has undoubtedly contributed to increased clickthrough rates and organic traffic.
They also received over 2K review snippets, which shows customers’ average rating in the form of stars.
These types of search results are an excellent way to build user trust, as they act like social proof for your products or service.
Why This Matters:
Here's how product schema works and why it's so effective:
- Rich Snippets: Schema markup provides search engines with structured data, making it easier for them to understand the content of a page. This leads to the display of rich snippets, which are more visually appealing than standard search results.
- Enhanced Visibility: Rich snippets stand out in the SERPs, attracting more attention and clicks.
- Improved Clickthrough Rates (CTR): The added information and visual elements in rich snippets can improve your CTR. More clicks equals more traffic for your site.
- Image Optimizations: Schema markup also helps search engines understand your product images. This can lead to ranking in Google Images search.
By implementing product schema, you can make your eCommerce listings more enticing to users. This strategy reflects the importance of using structured data to maximize visibility and win more traffic for your site.
How to Add Product Schema Markup:
This tutorial teaches you how to add product schema without a plugin. It uses JSON-LD and provides 3 methods for implementing it on your site.
Here are some tools that will help you with this process:
Schema Markup Tools:
If that last section made your heart rate go up, don’t worry. I’ve got another solution that’s easier and doesn’t require a single line of code (from you, anyways).
AIOSEO has a rich snippet schema generator that makes adding schema markup painless and code-free.
When you’re working on a WordPress post or page, just scroll down to the Schema tab of the AIOSEO settings. Once you click Generate Schema, you’ll get a catalog that looks like this:
If you have an eCommerce site like Cascade Designs, go ahead and select Product. AIOSEO will walk you through a few additional fields for adding your product details.
You can also upload an image, and the plugin will format the structured data appropriately.
Once you’re done, click Add Schema. AIOSEO will implement the schema markup for your web page, and you’ll be one (big) step closer to rich snippets in SERPs.
3. Content Clarity: Readability Wins for Users & Search Engines
In addition to technical SEO, Cascade Designs also focused on user experience by optimizing for readability.
Readability measures how easily users can read and understand your content. It uses various factors to calculate this metric, including:
- Sentence length
- Paragraph length
- Vocabulary
- Transition words
- And more
The higher your readability score, the easier it for readers to understand the text. The lower the score, the more difficult.
For Cascade Designs, blog posts have been the main focus of readability optimizations.
Some techniques they use include:
- Clear Subheadings: They use descriptive subheadings to break up the text and guide readers through the content.
- Short Paragraphs: They keep paragraphs concise, making the content easier to digest.
- Bulleted Lists: They utilize bulleted lists to present information in a clear and organized manner.
- Original Imagery: They incorporate high-quality, original images to enhance visual engagement.
- Embedded YouTube Videos: When relevant, they embed YouTube videos to provide additional value and engage users.
This strategy has yielded impressive results, particularly in Google's People Also Ask (PAA) feature.
This section of the SERP features questions related to the user's initial search query. Users can expand the results to view the answer and source.
Overall, Cascade Designs readability optimizations were fruitful.
Google rewarded them with almost 600 rankings in the PAA box by February.
Why This Matters:
Good readability scores can deliver the following benefits:
- Improved User Engagement: Readable content keeps users engaged and encourages them to spend more time on the website.
- Enhanced SEO: Search engines favor content that is easy to understand and navigate.
- Increased People Also Ask Rankings: By providing clear and concise answers to user queries, it's easy for search engines to feature copy in the PAA box.
How to Optimize for Readability:
This guide shows you how to improve your readability score. Here are a few of the main steps that are featured in the article and Cascade Design’s optimizations:
- Use simple language.
- Aim for short sentences and paragraphs.
- Break up text with white space and multimedia.
- Organize your content with clear subheadings.
- Include transition words for improved flow.
These steps will help you write natural content that’s easy for both users and search engines to understand.
Content Readability Tools:
Readability can sound a bit abstract, but the reality is, it’s just about creating a piece of content that’s easy and enjoyable to read.
And with the right tools, you’ll find that improving your score only takes a few minutes.
Take the AIOSEO TruSEO tool, for example.
This WordPress tool analyzes your content’s on-page SEO and readability optimizations. You’ll get a handy Readability Checklist that makes it quick and simple to improve your content’s score.
I like how you can also click the eye icon to go exactly where the plugin recommends making an adjustment. This is a huge time-saver when you’re working on long articles or pages.
Standout SEO Wins
Before we wrap up, I’d like to highlight a final SEO strategy at Cascade Designs. This strategy didn’t directly impact their recent traffic growth, but it’s a good reminder of a core SEO best practice.
Internal Links Fuel Content Discovery & User Engagement
Cascade Designs demonstrates a strong understanding of the importance of internal linking.
Internal links connect different pages of your website, helping users and crawlers navigate your site with ease.
This strategy is most evident in Cascade Designs' blog posts. (That's not to say it isn't present on their eCommerce pages, but it's more intentional and less expected in blogs.)
For instance, in this article about choosing replacement snowshoe bindings, the author linked all the product pages in the last column. This move allows users to determine the correct replacement bindings for their snowshoe and shop it with a click.
I also noticed that Cascade Designs' authors tend to include related posts at the end of blogs. This is a small but smart move. It presents an additional opportunity for internal linking while encouraging readers to continue exploring their content.
Ultimately, by linking across the site, Cascade Designs makes it easier for users and search engines to navigate the site.
This can lead to more efficient crawling and improved user engagement metrics, which tells Google users find your site valuable.
Tool: Link Assistant provides internal linking suggestions directly in WordPress. This means you don’t have to manually scour your site for linking opportunities. Once you see one you want to add, click Add Link and the tool will update your content.
Takeaways
After analyzing Cascade Designs' traffic growth, it's clear that a few key strategies were at play.
Now, let's translate their success into actionable to-dos for your website.
Top 3 Strategies to Emulate
- Master the art of permanent redirects. Whether you're moving a single page or an entire website, 301 redirects are essential for preserving traffic and SEO. A 301 redirect tells search engines you moved content permanently. They help prevent users from getting page-not-found errors and ensure a seamless UX. Permanent redirects also safeguard your hard-earned SEO rankings and link equity, so it's important to get them right.
- Make your products shine in search with schema markup. Product schema markup can transform standard search listings into eye-catching rich snippets. These enhanced search results showcase star ratings, images, and product details. Users are attracted to this type of results, leading to more clicks and organic traffic. Plus, they help search engines more easily understand your web pages, which can improve your rankings.
- Answer user queries with clear, concise content. Optimizing for People Also Ask means creating content that directly addresses user questions. Use short paragraphs, bulleted lists, and clear subheadings to make information easily digestible. This approach can improve your readability score while also helping you earn valuable PAA rankings. This area of the SERP typically has high clickthrough rates, making it valuable for your business.
Bottom 3 Strategies to Reconsider
- Exceeding SEO title character limits. Some of Cascade Designs' SEO titles exceed the recommended limit of 60 characters. This can lead to truncated titles in search results, which may be less effective than titles of the appropriate length. To avoid this issue, run your meta titles through a SERP preview tool before publishing. This will allow you to catch and fix your titles beforehand. AIOSEO has a built-in Google snippet preview to help you do this process in WordPress.
- Omitting meta descriptions on certain pages. While many of Cascade Designs' pages have well-crafted meta descriptions, some don't have any. This is a missed opportunity to provide keyword-rich summaries that drive clicks. Plus, today there are AI SEO tools that can write them for you. Take the meta description generator from AIOSEO, for example. This tool writes engaging meta descriptions with the click of a button.
- Forgetting alt text for images. Cascade Designs could be more consistent with their implementation of image alt text. Alt text is an HTML element that describes an image. Search engines and screen readers can use this text to understand an image's content and context within a page. This can improve user accessibility and image rankings. The Image SEO feature in AIOSEO can automate the writing process of image alt tags. You can customize it using smart tags, which generate the alt text for you.
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Streamline Your SEO Efforts & Rank Higher With AIOSEO
Cascade Designs' growth journey is a testament to the power of strategic SEO. From planning domain migrations to optimizing readability for users, every move you make can help you stand out to search engines.
We're also well-aware of the fact that implementing and managing these strategies can be overwhelming. Or simply take too much time.
That's why AIOSEO was designed with small business owners in mind. We've got beginner-friendly tools that can help you execute the most effective strategies in less time.
All in One SEO is the best SEO plugin for WordPress. It has over 3 million active users who trust it to improve their SEO and grow their visibility in SERPs. Here are some customer-favorite tools:
- Image SEO: Automate the writing process for image titles and alt text using smart tag variables. You’ll save time from manual entries while helping users and search engines understand your images.
- Redirection Manager: Prevent humans and bots from getting lost when you move content or domains. Our Redirection Manager helps you select and implement the best redirect type that preserves SEO.
- Rich Snippets Schema: Win more rich results with AIOSEO’s user-friendly schema generator. Just pick the schema type you want, and we’ll format the structured data properly for Google.
- TruSEO Score: Level up your content and go beyond a simple pass or fail. TruSEO analyzes your on-page SEO, giving you actionable tips to maximize your content's reach and readability.
- Link Assistant: Get link suggestions, edit anchor text, and add internal links to your WordPress content. Link Assistant helps you effortlessly build a better linking strategy while saving valuable time.
- AI Title & Description Generator: Save time writing SEO titles and meta descriptions with the help of AI. With the click of a button, you can generate unique metadata for any page on your website.
