Work · Search sprint · Eight weeks
Northwind Supply: a search sprint before peak season.
An outdoor retailer heading into peak season with category pages that could not carry buying queries. The shape of the work: map intent first, rebuild the categories that can convert, and point every internal link at them before December.
The starting point
Gift guides from two seasons ago still pulling links. Category pages with swapped titles and near-identical copy. The blog earning traffic for questions nobody buying asks. A familiar picture: authority exists, but it flows everywhere except to the pages that take money.
Channel by channel
- Search. An intent map of buying queries across winter categories, one page per intent, merged duplicates. Category copy rewritten around fit, materials, and delivery — the three questions buyers ask.
- Content. One seasonal cluster: three gift guides, each with a single job — feed one category page. Old guides consolidated or retired so they stop competing with the pages that matter.
- Social. Deliberately light this sprint. Gift-guide cuts for the one channel the team already runs, pointing at the guides, not the homepage.
- Email. A gift-finder quiz added to capture undecided visitors, feeding the welcome flow so December traffic keeps converting in January.
Timeline
- Weeks 1–2. Technical pass and intent map. Crawl, speed, duplicates, and the query-to-page assignment.
- Weeks 3–5. Category rebuilds and the three guides, in shared docs, two revision rounds.
- Weeks 6–7. Internal link rebuild and quiz build in Klaviyo.
- Week 8. QA, redirects for merged pages, and the one page dashboard so the team sees traffic to revenue.
What did not work
The first gift-guide angle would be too clever — an editorial concept the buyer does not search for. We would cut it in week three and replace it with the plain query buyers actually type. Boring wins. It usually does.
We would also talk ourselves out of a second social channel mid-sprint. The team could barely sustain one. Adding a channel to a stretched team subtracts.
What to steal from this
Map buying intent before writing anything. Give every page exactly one job. Point your existing authority at the pages that convert before building new authority. That order works in most retail sprints we scope.
Northwind Supply is an illustrative example of how we scope this shape of work. Engagement shapes, timelines, and team setups are real; the brand name stands in for a typical brief.