How Asian Footwears Went from Barely Visible on Google to Page 1 for Some of India’s Most Competitive Footwear Keywords

Seo

CONTENT MARKETING

About the Client

Asian Footwears is one of India’s established footwear brands, which sells sports shoes, sneakers, running shoes, casual footwear, and kids’ shoes online across the country. With a catalogue spanning hundreds of SKUs and a growing direct-to-consumer presence, the brand competes in one of the most crowded e-commerce categories in India.

But the online footwear market in India is brutal. You are not just competing with other Indian brands. You are competing with Adidas, Nike, Puma, Myntra, Amazon, and Flipkart, all of whom have domain authority, ad budgets, and SEO footprints that most brands can only look at from a distance.

When Asian Footwears came to Justwords, they had the product. They had the brand recognition offline. What they didn’t have was strong organic search visibility. And the website had problems that were actively working against them.

The Problem Underneath the Problem

Before any content or keyword strategy could work, we had to deal with what was happening at the foundation. The website had serious technical issues that were not just limiting growth; they were actively causing damage.

Staging website getting indexed: The development/staging version of the site was being crawled and indexed by Google, which created duplicate content and cannibalisation issues that confused rankings and caused traffic fluctuations.
Recurring indexation issues: At various points, key sections of the website lost visibility in Google’s index. This was making it difficult for category and product pages to rank consistently and limited organic growth.
No robots.txt properly configured: Crawl budget was being wasted on pages that should never have been indexed.
Broken URL structure: Poor URL architecture was making it harder for Google to understand the site’s hierarchy.
Navigation issues on product pages: Products that existed on the site had less clear navigational paths, meaning Google (and users) couldn’t reliably find them.
No product descriptions: Hundreds of product pages with no content. Just images and prices. Nothing for search engines to index, nothing for customers to read.
Blog content without internal links or topic clusters: Blogs existed in isolation, not connected to collection pages or other relevant content, meaning they built no topical authority and passed no link equity.
Orphaned links: URLs pointing to products that no longer existed.

The uncomfortable truth about a website in this state: you can write all the content you want, build all the backlinks you want, and it won’t move rankings. At least not sustainably. Because the foundation has to be solid first.

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The Strategic Decisions

Decision 1:

Fix the technical debt before doing anything else

This sounds obvious. In practice, it means months of work that produces no visible ranking movement and requires convincing a client to be patient while you repair infrastructure rather than publish content. We worked directly with Asian Footwears’ development team to implement fixes systematically:

Configured robots.txt to block the staging environment from being crawled.
Restructured URLs for consistency and crawlability.
Fixed header/footer structure and internal navigation.
Cleaned up broken and orphaned links.
Set up proper URL canonicalisation to eliminate duplicate content signals.
Monitored crawl health daily until de-indexation events stopped.

Only after this was stable did we move to content and keywords.

Decision 2 :

Don’t chase the biggest keywords first

“Men’s sneakers” has 368,000 monthly searches. It’s also dominated by Myntra, Amazon, Flipkart, Adidas, and Nike, all with DA comfortably above 70. Asian Footwears had a DA of 20 when we started.

The instinct is to go after the biggest keywords. The correct call is to build ranking momentum on achievable targets first, earn authority, and let that authority compound toward the harder keywords over time. We targeted a mix: some mid-competition keywords where movement was possible in months, some longer-tail keywords that could drive purchase-intent traffic immediately, and broad keywords as longer-term goals.

The logic: a page 1 ranking for “branded shoes at lowest price” (9,900 searches/month) is worth more than a position 50 ranking for “sports shoes” (201,000 searches/month). Traffic comes from page 1. Everything else is just impressions.

Decision 3:

Build content as infrastructure

Collection pages, product pages, and blog content were treated as interconnected assets rather than standalone pieces. Every blog post was written with internal links to relevant collection pages. Every collection page was structured around keyword intent. Content clusters were built around category themes (men’s sports shoes, women’s footwear, kids’ sneakers) rather than individual posts.

The goal: when someone searches for anything in the footwear category, there’s a page on Asian Footwears’ site that’s relevant to that query, linked to related pages, and signals to Google that this site knows this topic.

Decision 4 :

Monitor seasonality actively and publish around it

Footwear has clear seasonal demand peaks like festive season, summer (sandals, sports), winter (boots, warm footwear), and New Year fitness purchases. We tracked these trends and published content and promotional pieces timed to seasonal intent, rather than publishing on a flat editorial calendar that ignores how people actually search.

Decision 5 :

Earn authority from the outside

Off-page strategy ran in parallel with on-page work. A mix of paid guest posts on relevant publications, free guest post placements, Google Business Profile (GBP) optimisation for the Delhi location, and business directory listings. The goal was to build a backlink profile that grows Domain Rating and signals to Google that this is a legitimate, established brand.

Results

From December 2024 to December 2025, Asian Footwears moved from being largely absent for its most important footwear keywords to competing for some of the biggest search terms in the category.

81.2% of Broad Keywords Now Ranking, 37.5% on Page 1: Starting from zero (none of the target keywords ranked on page 1, and most weren’t even in the top 100), Asian Footwears now ranks on page 1 for 37.5% of them. Keywords like “men's sneakers” (368,000 monthly searches) and “women’s sneakers” (165,000) moved from outside the top 100 to positions 16 and 12, respectively.
“Sports Shoes” Jumped from Position 50 to Position 5: A keyword with 201,000 monthly searches, dominated by Myntra, Amazon, and the major sportswear brands. Moving to position 5 for a domain with a DA of just 22 is the single clearest proof point of the engagement.
109% More Impressions, 67% More Clicks (YoY): Google search impressions grew from 1.13 million in December 2024 to 2.36 million by December 2025. Clicks rose from 129k to 215k over the same period.
Average Position Improved from 13.4 to 9.5: Moving the average ranking position from mid-page-2 to a page 1 average is what drives every other metric upward.
378.8% Increase in Organic Purchases: December 2025 saw 5,454 completed purchases from organic search – nearly 5x the same month a year earlier. This is the number that ties SEO directly to revenue: ₹50.28 lakh in organic revenue for the month, up 33.6% from November alone.
Organic Outperformed Paid Search on Every Commercial Metric: In December 2025, organic search drove 67,351 add-to-carts and 4,287 purchases. Google Ads, running in parallel, drove 86 add-to-carts and 0 purchases. The channel doing the actual selling was organic.
Domain Rating Grew 56%, Backlink Profile Expanded 15x: Domain Rating grew from 18 to 28, backlinks from 695 to 10,912, and referral domains from 387 to 1,297. This is the authority foundation that makes every future keyword easier to rank for.

What This Case Demonstrates

Asian Footwears demonstrates a common challenge in e-commerce SEO: technical and structural issues often limit growth long before content becomes the primary bottleneck.

Asian Footwears had brand recognition. But what they also had on the website was a series of technical issues that were actively suppressing their visibility. Fixing that before pushing content or building links is the call that most agencies don’t make because it doesn’t produce fast visible results. But it’s the correct call.

The keyword trajectory tells the rest of the story. Starting with zero rankings for several broad footwear terms in one of the most competitive search categories in India and reaching page 1 for 37% of them in 12 months, including a top-5 ranking for “sports shoes” with 201,000 monthly searches, is a result that reflects both strategy and patience.

And the 378% YoY growth in organic purchases is the proof that rankings are a means to an end. Traffic converts when the right people find the right pages. Both conditions have to be true.