SEO and business blog
Strategic thinking on international SEO, multi-market visibility, and what it takes to actually win in a new market. For in-house teams and brand managers doing this for real.
How Lipton Teas & Infusions built US search visibility from Scratch, and what it required
A corporate rebrand, four audiences, and a brand name dominated by a competitor. How the architecture decisions made before launch determined every result that followed.
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.
Picture perfect! 📸 Increasing relevant traffic for an independent photographer
In this case study, we delve into Clément Renaut's SEO journey as an independent photographer based in Alsace, France. We addressed critical technical errors, transitioning HTTP images to HTTPS and restructuring the website for enhanced user experience. By aligning content with Clément's services and preferred locations, organic traffic related to weddings and family photography nearly doubled and tripled, respectively, over six months. Local visibility in key areas, such as Strasbourg, significantly improved, resulting in higher average positions and click-through rates. This case study showcases the transformative impact of tailored SEO strategies on driving relevant traffic and enhancing online visibility for independent professionals.
Clément Renaut is an independent photographer based in Alsace, France. His unique personality brings the best out of people in a joyful and fun way. He mainly does wedding photography, individual and family portraits. His area of work is in Alsace-Lorraine regions. Photography is a very competitive industry and Clément made many adjustments to his website through the years.
Where we started
Lack of visibility on keywords important for the business
The top keywords for which the website ranked where focused around topics of secondary importance for the business, such as wedding venues, or general informational content about wedding organisation that was not likely to bring in conversions.
Confusion to where the business operates
The website also ranked for cities far away from where Clément operates. Despite his ability to move around in France for photo shoots, most of his revenue is made in a 150 km area around his home.
A mix of HTTP and HTTPS content
Years of updates to this custom-built website have created errors, especially regarding the location of the images. A hole bunch of them were stored on a HTTP repository, triggering mixed content errors.
Goals of the project
Our first goal was to improve the general health of the website, removing critical technical errors that were seen as a red flag by search engine crawlers. Then we would work on improving relevant organic traffic for the website. That means making sure the keywords we would target were:
In line with what his clients are searching for
Relevant to the photography services Clément offers
Local to his area
What we did
Moving HTTP images to HTTPS
Thankfully, Clément has a background in IT and was able to make all the right changes and redirections super fast.
On another note, there is something deeply satisfying to seeing error numbers go down!
There’s something deeply satisfying when you get that kind of graph @semrush 😁
— Alizée Baudez 💫 (@AlizeeBaudez) October 12, 2021
For context, this client is alone in his business, has no team nor developer. He’s a father of 3 doing his best.
I’m so proud and can’t wait to see the impact this will have for him 🥳 pic.twitter.com/8U6YgIrPl5
Reviewing the website structure
We created content clusters around his services and the locations he often visits for photo shoots. The idea was to make sure users (and bots) could easily understand what he does and where he works with an efficient internal linking strategy.
Improve content with relevant keywords
With the help of an extensive keyword research, we worked on improving the on-page content with keywords that were more relevant to Clément’s audience and aligned with their intents.
The results
Website health
With a few technical adjustments, we were able to drastically improve the website’s overall health and decrease the likelihood of Google bot crawling issues.
The number of critical technical SEO errors on the website went from 1454 to just 2 in a few days! 🥳
The overall website health improved by 15 points with a few technical adjustments.
Increased organic traffic on relevant keywords
For keywords relevant to Clément’s services, the organic traffic grew substantially over the past 6 months. In the examples below, the focus is on keywords that include “wedding” and “family” which are the biggest sources of revenue for this business.
Organic traffic related to weddings nearly doubled. This could be partly due to the current circumstances, but also to the increased CTR and average position of the website on these queries.
Organic traffic related to families tripled over the past 6 months and the CTR grew by 1 point. The website on those queries also ranked more than 13 places higher than before!
Increased Local organic visibility
When it comes to local organic visibility, the website performed much better. The example below if for keywords including “Strasbourg”, the biggest town in Clément’s area.
For keywords including the location “Strasbourg”, the average position of the website increased by 4 ranks, the CTR increased by 2 points, and the number of clics was doubled.
Client feedback on this project
“Working with Alizee is awesome. Besides being a lovely person, she handles her subjects perfectly.”
If you found this case study interesting and would like to enquire about SEO services, you can contact me here: