1,500% more traffic and 33x the AI citations.

The challenge

Maple Terroir had everything in place offline, a forty-seven-year heritage, quality products, loyal customers, beautiful packaging. The problem was online presence: fewer than ten referring domains, fifty monthly organic visitors, and total absence from the conversations where customers actually search for premium maple syrup.

Functionally invisible online.

~50 monthly organic visitors. Almost no presence on Google for category-defining searches.

No referring authority.

Fewer than 10 referring domains. Competitors had hundreds.

Weak technical foundation.

No schema markup, sparse metadata, no internal linking system, no A/B testing infrastructure.

No topical authority.

Isolated product pages with no content hubs covering production, terroir, or Canadian maple heritage.

Demand captured by competitors.

Word-of-mouth and repeat customers were driving the business while competitors captured the new-customer demand online.

The approach

Four pillars working together: authority, topical depth, evergreen content, and a rebuilt technical foundation.

Strategic link building.

Cornerstone content paired with white-hat outreach. Unlinked brand mentions converted into live links. Niche directory placements at DR 60 to DR 91.

Entity SEO hubs.

Structured content hubs around production, tree tapping, Canadian heritage, cocktails and seasonal gifting, with deliberate internal linking funneling readers toward product.

Evergreen content.

Long-form guides and trend-driven posts engineered to attract traffic, backlinks and conversions. The "$30 Million Maple Syrup Heist" piece was a category-defining win.

Technical overhaul.

Rewrote metadata for search intent, implemented product and local business schema, fixed performance issues, launched a conversion-focused site with A/B testing.

What we actually did

The detail underneath each pillar.

Strategic link building.

The campaign opened with cornerstone content, "The Complete Guide to Canadian Maple Syrup", designed to be linkable on its own merits. Outreach targeted publications with domain authorities between 60 and 90, framing Maple Terroir as the credible Canadian source on the subject. Unlinked mentions across food and travel publications were tracked down and converted into proper backlinks. Niche directories with high authority were sourced and acquired. The result: new backlinks from DR 77, DR 89 and DR 91 sources.

Entity SEO & internal linking.

Topical hubs were structured around the entities Google associates with maple syrup, production methods, tree tapping, Canadian heritage, regional terroir. Supporting posts covered angles like "Can You Tap Any Maple Tree?" and the Canadian Maple Syrup Production Report 2025. Expansion into adjacent categories, cocktails, seasonal gifting, added semantic depth without diluting focus. Internal linking was deliberate: every informational page funneled readers toward product pages via contextually relevant anchors.

Technical foundation.

Meta titles and descriptions were rewritten across the entire catalogue with search intent alignment. Product schema and local business schema were implemented site-wide. Performance issues, slow images, render-blocking scripts, were resolved. A new conversion-focused website was launched with stronger social proof, clearer CTAs and built-in A/B testing capabilities so the team could iterate on messaging post-launch.