E-mail:
jsem@patrikpilous.cz
I started working for Erika Fashion, a women’s fashion client (erikafashion.cz and erikafashion.sk), as an outsourced SEO consultant and link builder in April 2024, and I was given a lot of freedom and trust. Because we can move and change things quickly, the results are excellent too.
One of the biggest goals was to create attributes and attribute filters for the whole e-shop, so that they not only helped SEO but also made it easier for customers to find their way around. Erika Fashion is a medium-sized e-shop on Shoptet, so the optimisation here works within the limits and strengths of this platform.
We started almost from scratch on this, so I designed the entire attribute structure and reworked the category tree. A few leftovers are still on the e-shop today, such as “black dresses”, a subcategory that performed very well, so I did not migrate it into a filter (but there are very few of these).
What have we achieved in 2 years of working together, and what are we proud of?
1. Growth on Google (GSC data) from 115,140 visits a year to 436,000 visits. That is a 278% increase. Beyond these Google Search figures, we are also managing to get the e-shop into Google Discover.
Visits grew in similar proportion on Bing and Seznam (Czech search engine) as well. To achieve these results, besides common sense, I mainly used these tools: Google Search Console, GA4, Ahrefs, Marketing Miner, Claude Code, Screaming Frog and Bing Webmaster Tools.
2. Creating more than 10,000 new landing pages, some of which are now among the best performers for paid campaigns too. And yes, I created all 10,000 pages myself, by hand. I did not just give anyone a recommendation along the lines of “Look, this would help you”. I built everything myself, step by step. Thanks to this, I also gained a very thorough understanding of the industry, and today I know exactly which dresses sell best at which time of year. I see connections faster and come up with more things to optimise. Today, of course, I also use Claude Code for this. Other areas included internal linking, removing duplicates, fixing cannibalisation and writing copy.
3. We are still growing on Google in 2026, which not everyone manages in the age of AI chats. The screenshot below shows a year-on-year comparison of a 3-month period.
4. I track, monitor and, above all, respond to the visibility of the Erika Fashion brand in the AI models ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews and Perplexity. I currently use Marketing Miner and Ahrefs for monitoring. I have long-term associations set up with the brand and categories for both SEO and GEO.
5. Link building. I have been doing link building for Erika Fashion from the very beginning. We have gained over 300 links, along with some mentions and citations. Link building has been transformed in recent years, which I also tried to reflect in the strategy I set up. Personally, I would like to know how big an impact it has on the overall result (for both GEO and SEO) and what the project would look like without link building. But I will never find out.
6. We have managed to grow in a very similar way with erikafashion.sk in Slovakia.
7. Another significant part of my work on the Erika Fashion project is spotting trends and major gaps in the product range, which we then enter in selected categories. This is not only about the most popular colours in given categories, but also about completely new categories to add. I work directly with the buyers, and we discuss options for further categories and products.
I wanted to give just a snapshot of the clear numbers from our work together, without much padding. Of course, results like these can only come when a project is well organised and everyone has the right opportunities to do their work. They are not held back by unnecessary meetings and so on. And they also have a founder who drives things forward. That is one reason why I prefer larger Czech e-shops and companies to foreign corporations. I describe how I take a similar approach with other online shops on the SEO for e-shops page.
On the Erika Fashion account, the whole marketing team meets in person roughly once every 5 weeks to discuss the most important matters, development and possible synergies. A big advantage is that the other roles on the project are filled by highly competent people whom I respect and who, in my view, do their jobs really well.
