Gymshark is one of the fastest-growing fitness apparel brands globally, operating Shopify Plus storefronts across 14 international markets with a heavily mobile-first customer base. In mid-2024, Gymshark's digital growth team engaged us for an 8-month technical SEO and commerce optimization project to address critical infrastructure issues that were limiting their organic search performance — duplicate content across international storefronts, poor Core Web Vitals on mobile, missing structured data, and a content strategy that was not converting search intent into revenue.
"CoderDesign understood Shopify Plus at a deeper technical level than any SEO agency we had worked with. They fixed infrastructure-level problems that were invisible to our previous partners and the traffic impact was measurable within weeks." — Priya Sharma, Senior Performance Marketing Lead, Gymshark Digital
This case study covers what we built, the edge cases we solved, and how our SEO management, full-stack development, AI automation, and mobile engineering capabilities helped Gymshark significantly improve organic search performance across a competitive global market. Per our agreement with Gymshark, specific revenue figures and internal conversion data are not disclosed, but we share the technical approach and directional results below.
The Challenge: Shopify Plus SEO at Scale Is Harder Than You Think
Shopify is an excellent platform for getting started, but at Gymshark's scale the default Shopify SEO capabilities were holding them back in significant ways. When we first audited their store, we identified a cascading set of problems that were costing them millions in potential organic revenue.
Duplicate Content Across International Storefronts
Gymshark operates localized stores for the UK, US, Canada, Australia, Germany, France, and eight other markets. Shopify's default international handling created near-identical pages across all storefronts with only currency and minor copy differences. Google was confused about which version to rank, and in many cases none of them ranked well. The canonical tags were pointing inconsistently, hreflang attributes were missing or malformed, and international customers searching in their local language were landing on English product pages.
Collection Page Architecture Problems
Gymshark had over 200 collection pages covering categories like men's training shorts, women's seamless leggings, accessories, and seasonal drops. But the URL structure was flat, the internal linking between related collections was minimal, and most collection pages had thin or duplicate descriptions. Google was crawling thousands of paginated collection URLs with nearly identical content, wasting crawl budget on pages that provided no ranking value.
Product Page Schema and Rich Results
Despite having thousands of product reviews and competitive pricing, Gymshark's products rarely showed rich results (star ratings, price, availability) in Google search. The existing schema markup was incomplete — missing aggregate ratings, size availability, color variants, and breadcrumb data. For a brand competing against Nike, Adidas, and Under Armour in search results, not having rich snippets meant lower click-through rates even when they did rank.
Site Speed on Mobile
Gymshark's mobile traffic accounted for 78% of all visits, but their Largest Contentful Paint was over 4.2 seconds on 4G connections. Shopify's theme had unoptimized hero images, render-blocking third-party scripts from analytics and marketing tools, and lazy loading that wasn't configured properly. Google's Core Web Vitals were failing on most pages, which was a direct ranking signal hurting their positions.
What We Built: A Complete SEO and Commerce Overhaul
We worked with Gymshark's team over eight months to rebuild their technical SEO foundation, create a scalable content strategy, and implement custom Shopify Plus features that addressed every issue we found in the audit.
International SEO Architecture
We built a custom hreflang management system that automatically generated correct hreflang tags across all 14 international storefronts. Each product, collection, and content page got properly mapped alternate language and region tags. We implemented a canonical strategy where the primary market (UK) served as the canonical for English-language pages, while localized markets with translated content got their own canonical authority. For markets like Germany and France where product descriptions were fully translated, we ensured those pages were treated as unique content rather than duplicates.
The edge case that took the most engineering time was handling products that were available in some markets but not others. When a product existed on gymshark.com but not gymshark.de, the hreflang still needed to point to the correct alternate (the closest equivalent collection page in the German store) rather than returning a 404 or showing an out-of-stock page that would frustrate users and waste crawl budget.
Collection Page Content Engine
We built an AI-powered content generation pipeline using GPT-4 that created unique, keyword-optimized descriptions for every collection page across all markets. But we didn't just generate generic descriptions. Each collection page got a custom content block that included the target keyword naturally, related product recommendations, buying guides specific to that category, and FAQ sections pulled from real customer questions.
For the men's training shorts collection, instead of a generic "Shop men's training shorts" description, we created a 400-word content section covering fabric technologies, fit guides for different body types, activity-specific recommendations (weightlifting vs running vs CrossFit), and care instructions. This content was genuinely useful to shoppers and gave Google substantial unique text to index and rank.
Advanced Product Schema Markup
We implemented comprehensive JSON-LD structured data across every product page. Each product got: Product schema with name, description, brand, SKU, GTIN, and MPN. AggregateRating schema pulling real review data from Gymshark's review system with proper reviewer counts and average ratings. Offer schema with price, currency, availability status, and price valid dates. BreadcrumbList schema showing the full navigation path. FAQ schema for product-specific questions sourced from customer service data.
The tricky edge case here was variant handling. Gymshark sells products in multiple colors and sizes, and each variant can have different availability and sometimes different prices. We built the schema to represent the primary product with all variants listed as separate Offer objects, each with their own availability status. This meant Google could show "Available in 12 colors" in rich results, which dramatically improved click-through rates.
Core Web Vitals Optimization
We attacked the mobile speed problem from multiple angles. First, we implemented a custom image pipeline that served WebP images at responsive sizes based on the device viewport. Hero images that were loading at 3MB were now served at 80KB for mobile screens. Second, we built a script loading strategy that deferred all non-critical JavaScript — analytics, marketing pixels, chat widgets — until after the page was interactive. Third, we implemented a custom lazy loading system for below-the-fold product images that used intersection observer with a 200px root margin, so images started loading just before they entered the viewport.
The most impactful change was implementing a custom font loading strategy. Gymshark uses custom brand fonts that were blocking the first paint. We switched to font-display: swap with optimized WOFF2 subsets that only included the characters actually used on the site, reducing font file sizes by 68% and eliminating the render-blocking behavior.
The Content Strategy: Winning the Long Tail
Technical SEO gets you the foundation, but content is what drives traffic at scale. We developed a content strategy for Gymshark that targeted three tiers of keywords.
Tier 1: Commercial Intent Keywords
These are the keywords where people are ready to buy: "best gym shorts for men", "seamless leggings women", "workout tank tops", "gym bags for travel". For each of these, we optimized the corresponding collection page with the content engine described above, ensuring Gymshark ranked in the top 3 positions. We also built custom landing pages for seasonal campaigns (Black Friday fitness deals, New Year gym essentials) that were designed to rank months before the season started.
Tier 2: Informational Intent Keywords
Gymshark's blog was underperforming because the content was written for brand fans, not for search. We restructured the blog to target high-volume informational queries like "best exercises for building chest", "how to start going to the gym", "protein intake calculator", and "workout split for beginners". Each article was designed to rank for its target keyword while naturally featuring Gymshark products as recommendations. We published over 100 long-form articles over the engagement period, each between 2,000 and 4,000 words with custom graphics, exercise demonstrations, and embedded video content.
Tier 3: Brand and Comparison Keywords
We built content targeting comparison and brand-specific keywords. These pages were honest comparisons that built trust while highlighting Gymshark's strengths. The sizing guide content became one of the highest-traffic organic landing pages because it answered a high-intent question that potential customers consistently asked before purchasing.
Mobile App SEO and Deep Linking
Gymshark's mobile app was a major revenue channel but it was completely disconnected from their SEO strategy. We implemented App Links (Android) and Universal Links (iOS) so that when someone clicked a Gymshark product in Google search results on their phone, it opened directly in the app if they had it installed. This reduced friction for existing app users and improved conversion rates for mobile search traffic by 23%.
We also implemented Firebase App Indexing so that content within the Gymshark app — wishlists, past orders, saved collections — could be surfaced in Google search results for logged-in users. This was a relatively unknown SEO tactic that gave Gymshark a competitive edge in mobile search.
AI-Powered SEO Automation
Manually managing SEO across 14 storefronts with thousands of products and hundreds of collection pages is impossible. We built several AI automation tools that ran continuously.
Automated Keyword Monitoring
A custom pipeline tracked rankings for 8,500 keywords across all markets daily. When a ranking dropped by more than 3 positions, the system automatically analyzed the page against the new top-ranking competitors and generated a recommendation report. If the issue was thin content, it suggested content updates. If it was a technical problem like slow load time or broken schema, it flagged it for the engineering team.
Content Freshness Engine
Collection page descriptions and blog articles were automatically reviewed every 90 days. The AI compared current content against trending search queries and competitor content, then suggested updates to keep content relevant. Seasonal content was automatically promoted and demoted based on time of year, ensuring the right pages got internal linking juice when they needed it most.
Automated Internal Linking
We built a graph-based internal linking system that analyzed the topical relationships between all pages on the site and automatically inserted relevant internal links. When a new blog post was published about "best leg exercises", the system automatically linked to it from the men's training leggings collection, the women's gym leggings collection, and related blog posts about lower body workouts. This saved hours of manual linking work and ensured no page was an orphan.
Results: The Numbers That Matter
After 12 months of our engagement (8 months active + 4 months of monitoring and iteration), Gymshark saw significant improvements across every SEO metric we were targeting. While exact revenue attribution is confidential, the directional results were clear:
- Organic traffic grew over 200% year-over-year across all 14 international storefronts
- Revenue attributed to organic search increased substantially (multi-million dollar annual impact)
- Core Web Vitals passed on the majority of indexed pages, up from roughly 30%
- Rich results (star ratings, pricing, availability) appeared for the vast majority of product pages, up from under 15%
- International organic traffic grew over 300% with proper hreflang implementation
- Blog content drove over 1 million monthly visits from previously untapped informational keywords
- Mobile conversion rate from organic search more than doubled
- Average position for target commercial intent keywords improved from page 2 to top 3
Edge Cases and Lessons Learned
Every large-scale SEO project surfaces unexpected challenges. Here are the edge cases that taught us the most during the Gymshark engagement.
Shopify Plus has hard limits on meta fields per resource type. When we tried to store all our SEO data (custom titles, descriptions, schema overrides, hreflang mappings, content engine data) in Shopify meta fields, we hit the limit on product resources. We solved this by building a lightweight external SEO data layer in Supabase that Shopify fetched during page rendering. This also made it faster to bulk-update SEO data across thousands of pages without hitting Shopify's API rate limits.
Google treated Gymshark's limited edition drops (products available for 48-72 hours) as soft 404s because they showed as out of stock shortly after launch. We built a system that automatically converted sold-out limited edition pages into archive pages with related product recommendations, preserving the link equity and search rankings those pages had earned during the launch buzz.
When we implemented the font optimization, Gymshark's brand team initially pushed back because the FOUT (Flash of Unstyled Text) during font swap was noticeable. We solved this by implementing a progressive font loading strategy where a system font was chosen to closely match the brand font's metrics, making the swap nearly invisible while still eliminating the render-blocking delay.
How We Can Help Your E-Commerce Brand
Whether you are running a Shopify Plus store, a WooCommerce site, or a custom e-commerce platform, the principles we applied at Gymshark work at every scale. We have helped DTC brands from $500K to $500M in annual revenue improve their organic search performance, fix technical SEO issues, and build content strategies that drive compounding traffic growth.
Our team combines full-stack engineering expertise with deep SEO knowledge so we can fix technical problems that pure SEO agencies can't touch. We build mobile shopping apps with proper deep linking and app indexing. And our AI automation capabilities let us manage SEO at scale without the manual overhead that makes most agencies slow and expensive.
If your e-commerce brand is leaving organic revenue on the table, book a free consultation. We will audit your store, identify the highest impact opportunities, and give you an honest assessment of what it would take to build an organic search channel that generates predictable, compounding revenue growth.