About
PUMA is one of the world’s leading sports brands, designing, developing, and marketing footwear, apparel, and accessories across more than 120 countries. They’re a global athletic and lifestyle powerhouse competing alongside Nike, Adidas, New Balance, On, and Asics, with a significant digital commerce presence and dedicated storefronts in key markets, including the US, Canada, UK, India, and Japan (CBC – Cross-Border Commerce region).
In mid-2024, PUMA partnered with scandiweb to strengthen the SEO foundation of its CBC storefronts and unlock organic growth through on-page consulting, technical SEO delivery for CBC, technical SEO support for all regions, and EU migration support.
Over the course of the collaboration, scandiweb’s team has worked hand in hand with PUMA’s internal stakeholders and VML’s development team to diagnose long-standing technical issues, rebuild a reliable release workflow, and implement fixes that directly translate into indexation, visibility, and organic revenue gains across all five CBC markets.
Project goals
- Build a strong technical SEO foundation – resolve the backlog of indexation, crawling, rendering, and structural issues preventing PUMA’s CBC sites from capturing organic visibility.
- Grow organic revenue in non-US CBC markets with strong brand recognition but underdeveloped technical and on-page SEO.
- Close the non-branded visibility gap against direct competitors in high-volume categories (sneakers, cleats, t-shirts, hoodies, etc.), given PUMA’s organic traffic leans ~85% branded, while competitors capture significantly more non-branded demand.
- De-risk the upcoming EU migration and extend the CBC playbook to EU markets.
- Lay the groundwork for AEO (answer engine optimization) and begin positioning the brand for visibility inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and other AI search engines.
Problem
Puma’s CBC storefronts were underperforming their potential in organic search, largely due to accumulated technical debt and an over-reliance on branded traffic.
Fragmented technical SEO foundation
PUMA’s CBC sites had accumulated technical debt that was limiting indexation, crawlability, and search performance, including rendering issues that caused pages to return 404s in Google, inconsistent search titles, menu navigation crawl issues, and missing product variant schema markup.
Traffic gap against competitors
Previously, organic traffic leaned heavily on branded demand. In the US market, roughly 85% of organic traffic came from branded searches and only 15% from non-branded terms. Direct competitors were capturing non-branded demand at a much larger scale; for example, Nike alone hits 3M monthly non-branded visits.
Upcoming EU migration risk
An EU migration was on the horizon for PUMA ahead of Black Friday. EU stores contribute roughly 10.9% of traffic and 9% of revenue from organic channels, and other recent migrations carried out without dedicated SEO adjustments caused ~10% long-lasting organic drops, translating into significant lost revenue every year.
Approach
Clearing the technical SEO backlog
Our approach for PUMA was built around a simple principle: fix the foundation first, unblock the pipeline, then scale. Before kicking off meaningful technical SEO work, we fixed the delivery process itself, defining a new end-to-end workflow that gave every party clear ownership at each stage.
We then systematically resolved the technical SEO backlog across CBC storefronts, including:
- Pagination fix on product listing pages, improving how reliably Google can crawl the catalog
- Menu navigation fix, correcting crawl and click paths through the site’s primary navigation.
- Search title consistency fixes
- Rendering fix for pages becoming 404s on Google
- Product variant schema markup implementation.
Content optimization for commercial pages
Technical fixes alone wouldn’t close the gap in non-branded traffic, and commercial pages needed substantive, locally relevant content to compete for category-level keywords. scandiweb began developing global content and localization guidelines and launched PLP content tests.
What’s next for PUMA
With two new markets set for migration ahead of Black Friday, scandiweb is positioning SEO as a day-one priority to ensure the technical fixes already delivered for CBC are implemented correctly in EU markets, protecting organic traffic and revenue through the transition.
Results
The combined impact of a stabilized delivery and a cleared technical SEO backlog resulted in +62% organic revenue YoY across PUMA’s CBC markets, with projected $3.9M in additional organic revenue.
YoY revenue increase by market
- Canada +73.98%
- UK +36.26%
- India +124.73%
- Japan +53.92%
Search performance improvements from technical fixes
- +140% clicks on product pages after fixing pages incorrectly reported as 404s, restoring indexation for a large portion of the catalog
- +52% increase in product snippet clicks following product variant schema markup implementation, with significant growth in merchant listings and translated results visibility as well
- +35% impressions on product pages after the pagination fix (US +32.5%, JP +33.8%)
- +35% clicks and +48% impressions on UK non-product pages after menu navigation fixes
- +20% clicks after resolving inconsistent search titles (CA +20.4%, JP +29.1% on branded keyword clicks).
Ready to see what the right SEO strategy can do for your revenue? scandiweb’s SEO and technical delivery teams partner with enterprise eCommerce brands to fix what’s holding organic growth back. Reach out today, and let’s connect!
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