Helping APEX Ski Boots 3x Sales (In 2 Months)

Background

APEX Ski Boots came to us in June 2025 determined to scale.

COO Brian Ellwood joined the business in 2015 after the original founders left the business. At the time, APEX was losing 6-7 figures every year.

Brian spent the past 10 years shifting their focus to DTC and turning the business profitable again.

P.S. Keep an eye out for the full story of how Brian helped turn the business around on Customer Growth Sessions.

Now, they hit a new wall: how to scale their DTC business from $2mm to $10mm/year in annual revenue.

APEX enlisted our help to reach that next tier. The biggest opportunity we saw was to scale through SEO.

Historically, search engines accounted for 10-20% of annual sales.

We started out with a small-scale SEO project for the upcoming ski season to show them how much SEO could help their business.

We kicked off our work together in July, knowing that the ski season was just around the corner.

Ecommerce SEO Strategy and Implementation

Working with a limited marketing budget, we needed to be strategic with what we chose to focus on. The question we asked ourselves: how can we maximize SEO-led revenue for APEX by September?

Content marketing, one of our favorite ways to help brands grow in the long term, was out of the question for now. We needed initiatives that would drive results right away.

We chose to focus on two key themes:

1. Fixing severe technical SEO issues that were diluting their search rankings
2. Create and optimize existing product listing pages (PLPs) to maximize search engine traffic for product-based search queries.

Shopify Technical SEO Fixes

APEX Ski Boots is a Shopify-based website. Most Shopify websites share a similar set of technical issues that we’re accustomed to seeing and resolving. Some items we focused on were:

1. Page templates and duplicate content pages that were indexable
2. Broken backlinks (links from other websites pointing to pages that no longer exist on the APEX website)
3. Missing SameAs schema and other schema markup that helps search engines better understand the brand.

We worked with Brian to identify and resolve these issues together.

From there, we analyzed the site’s biggest opportunities for new PLPs.

We analyzed competitor search rankings, worked with Brian to identify common customer pain points that led to their purchase of a set of APEX Ski Boots, and more.

We identified six keyword themes that:

1. Would be feasible for APEX to rank for
2. Ideal APEX customers search for online every month, and
3. Indicate that the searcher is looking for a product that solves a specific pain point.

Put another way, we identified keywords that the dream APEX Ski Boots customer types into Google each month when they are looking to buy a new pair of ski boots.

Working with the APEX team, we determined which products should appear on each PLP, built the pages, and published them.

We wrapped up our strategy work by early August and implemented all of our initiatives by mid-September.

Ecommerce SEO Results

Results from this first SEO project were stronger than we could have imagined.

Keyword Ranking Growth

At the beginning of the project, we identified a handful of keywords to track rankings for as one method to evaluate success together.

The goal wasn’t to monitor every search ranking, but rather, to give ourselves a sampling of data points to see how rankings trended throughout the project.

We started tracking those sample keywords on August 13th and wrapped up on October 29th, 4-6 weeks after our changes went live.

Rankings skyrocketed.

We’ve redacted the actual keywords, but you can see how many people search for each of these keywords every month in the U.S. on Google (volume), as well as how APEX’s rankings improved over time.

• Keyword #1: APEX grew in rankings from position 8 of Google (bottom of page one) to position 1. 590 people type that phrase into Google every month in the U.S.
• Keyword #2: APEX grew in rankings from position 11 to position 2. 1,000 people type that phrase into Google every month.
• Keyword #3: APEX grew in rankings from position 6 to position 3. 27,000 people type that phrase into Google every month.
• Keyword #4: APEX grew from not ranking in the top 100 results of Google to ranking in position 14. 2,900 people type that phrase into Google every month.

Keyword rankings are great, but the real story is how improvements in ranking like this bring more customers to the website who are ready to purchase.

How this Ecommerce SEO Project Impacted Site Traffic and Revenue

To account for seasonality, we compared search traffic and revenue for September-October 2025 vs. September-October 2024.

Search engine traffic from the website more than doubled, growing by 101.2%. More importantly, revenue from search engines grew by 231.4%.

Needless to say, this ecommerce SEO project was a huge success.

Huge shout-out to Brian and the whole APEX team for being amazing partners throughout this engagement. Their expertise in all things skiing, paired with the trust they put in us to implement these opportunities, are the reason this project went so well. It’s been a pleasure working with them on this first engagement.

Interested in seeing how we would help your team to profitably grow your customer base? Contact us to see how we help ecommerce and other B2C brands scale profitably.

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