Bernie's (Bernie's Best, Inc.)

Bernie's had a strong flagship product in Perfect Poop and a deep library of dog-health content. The problem was technical: years of organic potential were sitting behind technical debt, unoptimized pages, and a search landscape starting to shift toward AI-generated answers. A full audit turned up issues at every layer of the site, from how it was crawled down to how individual pages were built.
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Technical foundation issues:

• Crawl inefficiency and index bloat, with low-value and parameter URLs eating crawl budget
• Misconfigured, oversized XML sitemaps and robots directives
• Redirect chains, broken links, and orphaned pages
• Inconsistent canonical tags creating duplicate-content signals
• Core Web Vitals and mobile performance gaps, which matter given that most traffic arrives on mobile
• Missing or incomplete structured data (Product, FAQ, and Article schema)

On-page and content quality constraints:

• Thin, duplicate, and near-empty pages diluting topical relevance
• Missing, duplicate, and multiple H1s and title tags weakening relevance signals
• Keyword cannibalization, with overlapping blog posts competing for the same terms
• Weak, inconsistent internal linking between content and revenue-driving product pages
• Content gaps against real, high-intent search demand
• Aging posts losing relevance and slipping in rankings

Authority and off-page gaps:

• A shallow backlink profile relative to established category competitors
• No structured digital-PR or link-acquisition motion

The emerging challenge, AI search:

• No visibility strategy for AI Overviews and answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Copilot, just as those surfaces started intercepting the informational queries Bernie's content relied on

Over four years, we built and kept evolving a full-funnel SEO program. Early work fixed the foundation. From there we scaled topical authority around canine digestive health, and as the landscape changed, we rebuilt Bernie's content to compete in AI-generated search.
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Technical SEO foundation. We rebuilt the site's crawl and indexation architecture, cleaning up sitemaps, robots rules, canonicals, and redirects so search engines could find and prioritize the pages that matter. We fixed Core Web Vitals and mobile performance issues, then rolled out structured data across product and content templates.
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Content and topical authority. We mapped the full canine-digestion topic space and built content clusters around the questions owners actually ask, covering diarrhea, vomiting, stool health, dental care, and breed-specific problems. Each cluster points toward the Perfect Poop product line. We also refreshed and consolidated older posts to stop them competing with each other and win back lost rankings, and every new piece targeted long-tail, high-intent queries tied to real symptoms.
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On-page optimization. We standardized titles, meta descriptions, and heading structure across the site so each page targets a single intent, and optimized product and category pages for their most valuable commercial terms.
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Internal linking. We audited the site's internal links and set up a hub-and-spoke structure that pushes authority toward revenue pages and ties supporting content back to the commercial URLs it should feed.
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Authority building. Ongoing link building and digital PR strengthened the domain's authority in a competitive category.
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AI-era optimization. As AI Overviews and answer engines started changing how search works, we restructured Bernie's best content so those systems could pull from it and cite it: clear question-and-answer formatting, clean entity signals, and schema. Most brands saw AI answers as a threat. We used them as another way to reach customers.

Over the past year, AI-generated answers changed search for everyone. Once Google's AI Overviews and the conversational answer engines started resolving questions right on the results page, click-through fell across the whole sector, and the real measure of SEO shifted from raw clicks to where you rank and how often you get cited. On both of those, Bernie's moved up.
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Rankings rose across the board. Bernie's average position went from the middle of page two to the top of page one, moving from around position 22 into the low double digits, with the strongest months landing in single digits. In total, 169 tracked keywords gained positions over the period.
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The same pattern holds across every ranking band:

• 203 keywords now rank within the first 10 pages (+81)
• 105 keywords in the top 30 (+41)
• 67 keywords in the top 20 (+31, an 86% increase)
• 30 keywords on page one (+14, an 88% increase)
• 4 keywords in the top 3 (+4)

Bernie's product and buying pages are where search demand turns into sales. The Perfect Poop range carries the commercial performance: the main product page plus a family of condition-specific landing pages, each ranking for a problem owners are trying to solve and offering Perfect Poop as the fix.

• Perfect Poop (main product page). Around 1,600 clicks and 132,000 impressions, averaging near position 6.
• Homepage. Around 2,600 clicks and 130,000 impressions at position 8, the brand's main entry and conversion point.
• Perfect Poop for Stool Odor. Around 520 clicks and 87,000 impressions at position 6, the strongest of the condition pages.
• Perfect Poop for Coprophagia (Poop Eating). Around 390 clicks and 69,000 impressions.
• Perfect Poop for Acid Reflux. Around 300 clicks and 54,000 impressions at position 9.
• Perfect Poop for Diverticulitis. Ranking at position 4 for a high-intent condition search.

Bottom-of-funnel pages back these up, catching owners who are close to buying:

• Where to Buy. Around 470 clicks at position 8, with a 3.4% click-through rate that sits well above the site average. Pure purchase intent.
• Perfect Poop Ingredients. Around 250 clicks, the page buyers check before committing.
• Perfect Poop Reviews. Around 240 clicks of social proof at the decision stage.

Across the full Perfect Poop range (180+ product and condition pages), the cluster drew more than 5,100 clicks and 678,000 impressions over the period. Bernie's other lines, including Charming Chompers (dental care) and Marvelous Mobility (joint support), rank and convert too, extending the commercial footprint beyond the flagship.