How Lipton Teas & Infusions built US search visibility from Scratch, and what it required

The Lipton name gets searched thousands of times a month in the United States. Nearly all of those searches are about iced tea. Almost none of them are about the FMCG group that owns Pukka, PG Tips, Tazo, and T2.

When Ekaterra rebranded as Lipton Teas & Infusions and launched a new corporate site from zero, this was the problem waiting at the other end of any standard SEO approach: rank for "Lipton" and you drown in irrelevant traffic from consumers who want cold drinks. Avoid it entirely and you have no anchor for the brand at all.

The brief was clear. US market. Employer brand visibility. Zero organic baseline. Getting the architecture wrong before launch would mean spending the next two years undoing it.

The situation

The new site, liptonteas.com, needed to serve four completely different audiences: job candidates searching for careers in the US, press and analysts researching the group, retail and distribution partners, and investors. Each audience had different search intent. Content built for one would actively work against the others if the URL structure and content architecture weren't designed to separate them before a single page went live.

The cannibalisation risk was real. The group's product brands — Pukka, T2, Tazo, PG Tips — each have their own websites and their own SEO strategies. A poorly designed corporate site would bleed equity into the wrong places and confuse search engines about which brand owned which audience. And the former parent company, Unilever, still carried strong search association with the Lipton name. The brand confusion wasn't a marketing problem. It was a structural one.

What determined the outcome

No keyword work started until the competitive landscape was mapped. Which FMCG groups were competing for the same US talent pool? What benefits and values were they communicating? Where were they winning, and where were the gaps?

Lipton Teas & Infusions already had genuine strengths — a serious sustainability commitment, strong diversity, equity and inclusion practices, competitive benefits. But without knowing how competitors were positioning those same attributes, any content strategy would have been generic rather than deliberate.

The keyword research came second, built from scratch for the US market. Not adapted from a European strategy. Not translated from another language. Each of the four audience segments got its own research layer: careers queries by job title and US geography, investor and analyst search patterns, wholesale and distribution queries for retail partners, press and research behaviour from journalists. And critically, a defined set of queries was explicitly excluded from the strategy — consumer product searches, iced tea queries, customer service topics — to protect every relevant visit from day one.

The architecture and content recommendations came last, grounded in that research. URL structure, content pillars, internal linking logic, and page-by-page intent mapping were all finalised before the site launched.

What happened

The site launched in July 2023. By January 2024, it had reached 7,900 monthly organic visits worldwide. Every primary employer brand query in the US ranked number one — "lipton careers," "lipton tea jobs," "lipton tea employment" — all from a standing start, with no paid traffic. The architecture held: no cannibalisation with the product brand websites was observed across the group's entire search footprint.

The traffic the site attracted was the traffic it was built for. That is not a given.

Three things this project made clear

Architecture decisions made before launch determine the results. Retrofitting SEO to a live site is harder, slower, and more expensive than designing the structure correctly from the start. The URL decisions, content pillars, and audience segmentation choices made before a single URL was published determined what was possible in the first five months.

On a high-stakes launch — a rebrand, a new market entry, a corporate site serving multiple audiences — SEO strategy is not something you add to the project plan after design is approved. It is an input to design.

US keyword research is not a translation of a European strategy. Search behaviour for employer brand queries differs significantly between markets, not just in language, but in the topics that matter, the values that influence candidate decisions, the specific vocabulary around DEI and remote work that US candidates actually use. A strategy built from the US market upward, rather than adapted from somewhere else, generates relevant traffic rather than technically correct traffic.

Knowing which queries to exclude is as important as knowing which to target. For any brand operating in a complex ecosystem — multiple subsidiaries, shared naming with another company, a history under a different parent — the discipline of deciding what you will not rank for protects the entire content investment. Every exclusion decision in this strategy was a budget protection call, not just an SEO one.

Is any of this relevant to your situation?

This project was a launch. But the same principles apply to any brand navigating a rebrand, a new market entry, or a corporate site trying to serve multiple audiences without confusing all of them.

If you are about to launch something and haven't yet decided the architecture, that decision is costing you more each week it's deferred. If you've already launched and the traffic doesn't reflect the audiences you need, the work is recoverable, but the earlier it starts, the less you undo.

The full case study presentation — including keyword rankings, traffic data, and the complete strategic approach — is available to download here.

If you're working on a project with similar constraints, a short assessment call is the fastest way to find out whether my approach fits what you're trying to solve.