Driving +39% Organic Revenue Growth: How CRO + SEO Reversed Declines For F1 Motorsports’ Dealer
In just one quarter, we turned a -22% revenue decline into a +39% uplift for this F1 Motorsports dealer.
By combining CRO enhancements with SEO fixes, Q2 organic revenue rose to $657K.
At the same time, revenue per user jumped by +22% and organic clicks rose by+12%.
This rebound not only offset the seasonal dip tied to the F1 racing calendar but also proved that protecting branded traffic and reducing checkout friction can drive lasting, scalable growth.
A niche e-commerce brand specializing in Formula 1 merchandise experienced a significant decline in traffic (-10.55%) and revenue (-22.31%) from Q4 2024 to Q1 2025.
This wasn’t entirely surprising — racing events don’t fall evenly across the calendar year, which creates natural fluctuations in demand. But year-over-year comparisons showed deeper challenges:
(1) Brand cannibalization was spiking due to the activities of a domain squatting site (cmc-motorsports.com). This site started ranking for branded keywords, hence precipitating declines in domain and branded search traffic.
(2) Sharp keyword + organic click losses for products associated with high search volume brands like Red Bull and McLaren.
(3) Product page 404s that eroded revenue from in-demand but no-longer-available products. These 404s also caused site structure dislocations, disrupted inlink equity distribution, and reduced keyword reference counts on the host collection pages.
The business needed a strategy that could both stabilize performance during low-demand periods and capture maximum upside during peak racing months.
Tasks
Our mission was twofold:
- Reverse the decline in organic traffic, protect branded search, and improve keyword relevancy.
- Increase conversion rates by reducing friction in checkout, enhancing the complementarity of upsell and cross-sell recommendations, improving recurring purchase frequency, and highlighting customer incentives.
We also needed to stabilize performance against external risks like F1’s seasonal search demand (which coincided with the racing calendar)and branded traffic cannibalization from domain squatters.
Action
To address these challenges, we rolled out a combined CRO + SEO strategy:
On the SEO front, these were the Actions Taken
(a) Filed Infringement Complaints To Overcome IDN Homograph attacks and the Domain Squatting effort of some competitors: This was achieved by initiating steps against the infringing competitor domain through ICANN’s UDRP process.
(b) On-Page Optimization: Wrapped product titles in collection grids with heading tags (H3/H4) to reinforce and amplify relevancy signals.
(c) Schema Implementation: Added WebPage and Carousel schema to expand SERP visibility, SERP coverage, and CTR.
(d) 404 Management: Shifted strategy from product-page 404s to “out of stock” labels. This helped to keep in-demand products available, thus absorbing traffic that would have been lost to their 404 status. We also implemented a sell-on-backorder feature, which allowed us to extract revenue that would have ordinarily been lost to zero stock items and their ensuing 404 status.
To improve the average revenue per site visitor, we undertook some CRO interventions, including
(e) Product Page Injection of Google Pay Button: Integrated credit card display on product pages to trigger “pre-filled convenience” and trust effects.
(f) Referral Program Integration: Moved “Give $15, Get $15” referral offer from the rewards page onto product and cart pages. This allowed us to create a traffic acquisition loop that funneled in-market and purchase-ready users to the site, independent of Organic or PPC touch points
(g) Purchase Habituation Via Reward Point-Product Price Associations
By adding “100 points = $1” on all product pages, we were able to amplify the perceived value associated with every purchase. These reward points were also an “investment” which guaranteed repeat visits to the site (as detailed in the Hooked Model). By offering reward point information side by side with products, we were able to increase the dopamine hits associated with purchases, while using investments (in the form of accumulated points) to create a reliable revisit and repurchase cycle that helped stabilize traffic and revenue
Result
The results between Q2 2025 and Q1 2025 marked a clear turnaround:
Organic Revenue: Increased 39.31%, climbing from $472,103.07 to $657,664.11.
Revenue per Organic User: Rose 22.22%, from $6.06 to $7.40.
Organic Clicks: Grew 12.48%, from 82.5K to 92.8K in Google Search Console.