About the Client

The client is a UAE-based online racquet sports retailer offering tennis, padel, and pickleball equipment, apparel, and accessories from leading global sports brands.

The brand operates in a niche but competitive sports retail market where visibility for high-intent product searches, tournament-led queries, and brand-specific searches plays a major role in driving e-commerce growth.

With growing search demand around tennis, padel, pickleball, seasonal tournaments, and AI-led buying recommendations, the brand needed a stronger organic growth strategy.

The Challenge

The website had strong product depth, but organic visibility was being restricted by structural, content, and technical SEO gaps.

Key Challenges We Identified

1 Implementation delays across content and technical changes

SEO recommendations were not always implemented quickly due to client approvals and development dependencies. This slowed ranking momentum, especially during tournament and seasonal search windows.

2 Website structure changes without SEO alignment

The website’s category hierarchy and navigation structure were changed without proper SEO coordination, which weakened internal link equity and affected priority commercial pages.

3 Low visibility in AI Overviews and LLM platforms

The brand had limited presence across Google AI Overviews and AI-led discovery platforms. At the start of tracking, AI Overview keyword visibility was only 64 keywords.

4 Duplicate brand page indexation

Both /brand/ and /brands/ URL versions were indexed, creating duplicate content issues and splitting ranking authority across similar pages.

5 Weak tournament and seasonal traffic capture

The brand was not systematically targeting search demand around major tennis tournaments such as Wimbledon, Australian Open, Dubai Duty Free Tennis Championships, and Abu Dhabi-based tennis events.

6 Technical SEO and page speed issues

The website had ongoing issues around page speed, heading structures, canonical configurations, meta optimization, and content depth across collection pages.

The Opositive Approach

Opositive built a growth strategy focused on improving commercial visibility, building topical authority, capturing seasonal demand, and preparing the website for AI-led search discovery.

The strategy focused on five core goals:

1 Grow organic users, clicks, impressions, and e-commerce purchases.
2 Build topical authority around tennis, padel, and pickleball.
3 Capture tournament-driven and seasonal search demand.
4 Improve visibility in Google AI Overviews and LLM-powered search.
5 Fix technical SEO issues, duplicate URLs, internal linking, and conversion-focused page elements.

What We Did

1 Built a Blog & Pillar Page Content Strategy

Opositive created a focused content strategy to grow non-branded visibility across commercial and informational search queries.

The content strategy helped the brand target:

  • Tennis equipment searches
  • Padel and pickleball queries
  • Brand comparison searches
  • Buying guide keywords
  • Product discovery intent
  • Beginner and advanced player queries

This helped improve rankings for priority category pages, brand pages, and blog-led discovery terms.

2 Captured Tournament & Seasonal Demand

A structured seasonal content calendar was created to capture traffic around major sports events and tournament-driven search spikes.

The content strategy focused on tournaments and seasonal opportunities where users actively search for players, gear, apparel, equipment, and related products.

This helped the brand move from reactive publishing to planned traffic capture during high-demand windows.

3 Improved AI Overview & LLM Visibility

The website’s content was optimized for AI-led search extraction and citation.

Opositive improved content structure, EEAT signals, topical depth, and answer-friendly formatting so the brand could gain better visibility across:

  • Google AI Overviews
  • ChatGPT-style discovery journeys
  • Perplexity-style answer engines
  • Product and buying-guide related AI responses
4 Optimized Brand Pages

Key brand pages were re-optimized to improve visibility for branded and secondary-branded searches.

This included optimization for pages related to major sportswear and equipment brands, helping the website capture traffic from users searching for specific tennis and racquet sports products.

5 Resolved Duplicate Brand URL Issues

The website had duplicate indexed versions of brand pages under /brand/ and /brands/.

Opositive consolidated the structure to the correct /brand/ URL format and removed duplicate /brands/ pages from indexation.

This helped recover authority, reduce duplication, and improve page-level ranking strength.

6 Strengthened Technical SEO & Internal Linking

Opositive worked on ongoing technical and on-page improvements across the website.

This included:

  • Internal linking improvements
  • Footer optimization
  • Canonical corrections
  • Meta title and description optimization
  • Heading structure improvements
  • Collection page optimization
  • Crawlability improvements
  • Page speed monitoring
  • Content density improvements

The Results

The campaign helped the brand grow across traffic, non-branded visibility, keyword rankings, AI Overview presence, purchases, and domain authority.

Key Performance Highlights

MetricBeforeAfterGrowth
Organic Users Monthly1,7752,737+54.2%
Non-Branded Clicks7452,663+257.4%
Non-Branded Impressions84,285225,284+167.3%
Average Keyword Position22.48.5Improved by 13.9 positions
Keywords in Top 5178284+59.6%
Keywords in Top 10256332+29.7%
AI Overview Keywords64173+170.3%
E-commerce Purchases2045+125%
Domain Rating1726+52.9%
Duplicate Brand URLsBrand + Brands indexedConsolidated to /brand/ onlyResolved

The Big Win

257.4% Growth in Non-Branded Clicks & 170.3% Growth in AI Overview Keywords

The strongest win was the brand’s growth beyond branded search.

Non-branded clicks increased from 745 to 2,663, showing that the website was capturing more category-led, product-led, and informational demand.

At the same time, AI Overview keywords increased from 64 to 173, helping the brand become more visible in the new AI-led search ecosystem.

Our Learning

For niche e-commerce brands, SEO growth depends on more than product pages. Tournament content, seasonal blogs, brand page optimization, internal linking, technical SEO, and AI-ready content all need to work together.

This case proves that when a brand builds topical authority around its category and aligns content with real search demand, it can grow both traditional Google visibility and AI-led discovery.