A 14-month SEO, AEO and GEO program for a Shopify store selling wall panels and steel doors, tracked in Semrush, Google Search Console and Shopify.
In March 2025, usabuildersdepot.com was easy to miss: an Authority Score of 7, 218 ranking keywords and an estimated 64 organic visits a month, about half of what paid search delivered.
Fourteen months later, Semrush shows 8,300 organic keywords and about 14,000 estimated monthly visits. Google Search Console records 20,400 clicks in the three months to mid-June 2026, the store became a regular source in Google AI Mode and AI Overviews, and Shopify shows bulk orders of $2,900–$4,900 that began with an organic Google result.
The catalog was the kind buyers research before they spend: fluted WPC panels, exterior cladding and steel doors, often bought in bulk. Those buyers compare specs in Google and increasingly ask AI assistants before opening a product page. The brief was to make the store easy to find in both places.
We treated the store as a set of topics rather than a list of pages, and wrote each page so a person or an AI assistant could lift a clear answer from it.
Keyword coverage grew first and traffic followed. Ranking keywords more than doubled between November and January, then estimated visits more than tripled between January 10 and February 15 and reached 14K by May 21.
| Checkpoint | Est. organic visits | Organic keywords | Authority Score | AI mentions |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mar 6, 2025 | 64 | 218 | 7 | — |
| Nov 5, 2025 | 1.2K | 1.8K | 10 | 11 |
| Nov 20, 2025 | 1.3K | 2.2K | 10 | 16 |
| Dec 5, 2025 | — | — | 22 | 25 |
| Jan 10, 2026 | 1.6K | 4.1K | 21 | 50 |
| Feb 15, 2026 | 5.3K | 6.7K | 22 | 305 |
| May 21, 2026 | 14K | 8.3K | 26 | 398 |
Semrush models traffic; Search Console counts real clicks from Google, so it is the stricter test. Clicks in the latest window were about five times the earliest, and average position improved by more than two places.
In September 2026, the USA Builders Depot Business Profile recorded 130 customer interactions, 25% more than in September 2025. Calls doubled, website clicks rose by 42.9% and direction requests by 9.4%.
Between December 2025 and May 2026, mentions of the store in AI answers grew from 25 to 398, and pages cited as sources grew from 458 to 1,800.
Google AI Mode became the main surface, rising from 5 mentions to 268, about two-thirds of the total. AI Overviews went from none to 69.
ChatGPT cites far more than it names. Cited pages grew from 103 to 353, while brand mentions stayed low. Closing that gap is the clearest next opportunity.
Shopify’s session details show how each customer first reached the store. In six order records captured between March and June 2026, every first session was an organic Google result with no campaign parameters. The five orders with visible totals add up to $15,710.65, an average of about $3,140.
| Visit date | First page visited | Order total |
|---|---|---|
| Mar 23, 2026 | Homepage | $2,922.49 |
| Mar 27, 2026 | Exterior wall panels collection (35 items) | $3,006.99 |
| Apr 24, 2026 | Interior fluted slat panels, classic wood | — |
| Jun 3, 2026 | Fluted slat panels, Nordicwood (100 items) | $4,649.99 |
| Jun 7, 2026 | Homepage (6 sessions over 6 days) | $4,850.00 |
| Jun 15, 2026 | Exterior WPC panel spacer clips (first order) | $281.18 |
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