Maptote: organic traffic doubled, orders are up 65 percent, and sixteen months later traffic is still holding

kai@doubleyourecommerce.com (Kai Davis) — Thu, 22 Oct 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Maptote has been making map-decorated totes, pouches, and printed goods in Brooklyn since 2006. Michael (cartographer) and Rachel (fashion) started it as a side project, inspired in part by a trip to Germany where plastic bags had already been banned. They brought back a stack of cotton grocery-store totes for friends, and the reusable-bag idea grew from there. When the 2008 recession hit, the side project became the business. Two decades later they’ve built it slowly through wholesale, from mom-and-pop boutiques to museum stores to J.Crew. By late 2024, wholesale was 90 to 95 percent of their sales. Their own retail site was the remaining sliver.

In early 2024 they migrated from a custom PHP store to Shopify with the help of an independent developer. The new site looked good and worked well, but nobody had checked it against SEO best practices, and Michael and Rachel weren’t sure it had been built on them. They brought in Aeolidia for the next round of work, and Aeolidia introduced them to me for the SEO side.

Michael and Rachel were not eager to invest in SEO. They had been burned before.

“We’ve worked with a lot of people in the past, and they promise you things. ‘Oh, you’re going to do 10x what you’re doing once we’re done.’ Three, four, five months down the line you realize: you’ve got me all this traffic, but my sales are still the same. At the end of the day, Rachel and I are looking at these numbers from a higher level. Even if we have all this traffic but our sales aren’t going up, then it’s not working.”
Michael Berick, Co-Founder, Maptote

He’s right, you know. It’s too easy for the person selling you the project to sell you a future full of hopes and dreams that implementation can never deliver.

They said yes to working with me because Aeolidia had already earned their trust.

“Our only hesitation was just the investment, and not totally knowing. Is it going to pay off? Once Aeolidia built that trust, we thought, all right, if they’re going to recommend this, that’s why we went ahead and did it.”
Michael Berick, Co-Founder, Maptote

First an SEO Opportunity Report, then a custom copywriting bot in Maptote’s voice

The hard part of retail SEO for Maptote is that the buyer isn’t where you’d guess. As Rachel put it on our first call:

“The reality is it could be anyone who’s from Brooklyn, who lives in Texas and wants to remind her of home. Or somebody who’s visiting from somewhere else. Stores in San Francisco only buy San Francisco. But on the retail site, we’ll get an order from somebody in Iowa ordering a Brooklyn bag.”
Rachel Berick, Co-Founder, Maptote

The wholesale half of the business is geographically clean: stores buy their own city. The retail half is the opposite. Somebody searching for a Brooklyn tote bag could be in Brooklyn, in Iowa, or visiting from Berlin. That’s the problem the SEO work had to solve. Maptote’s collection and product pages were already the right inventory for those searches. They just weren’t visible enough.

The first deliverable, in November 2024, was the SEO Opportunity Report. Collection and product pages were the biggest opportunity, in both their SEO titles and their thin on-page content. The report’s keyword opportunity map covered 35 priority pages, each with a specific title and content recommendation.

The Search Console data made the case for improving Maptote’s collection layer. Over the 90 days before we started, Maptote’s collection pages earned 105 clicks at a click-through rate of 0.22 percent. Google put Maptote on the shelf in front of browsers 47,186 times... and almost nobody was opening the box. Ouch. The SEO title and the description weren’t doing the work to earn the click.

Collection pages: share of searchers who clicked

0.22%

Before the workSep 8 to Dec 5, 2024

105 clicks
47,186 impressions

0.73%

A year laterSep 8 to Dec 5, 2025

568 clicks
77,834 impressions

Appearances in search for Maptote’s collection pages grew 65 percent. And clicks grew 441 percent.

A month after delivery of the SEO Opportunity Report we started work on Maptote’s copywriting bot. We kicked off with a conversation on the brand voice. Rachel walked me through how she thinks about the brand: friendly, playful, fun. Cheeky, earnest, caring, transparent. The words she always reaches for. The words she’d never use. The location-specific nostalgia that makes someone in Texas order a Brooklyn bag because they used to live there.

That voice work went straight into the bot. The bot’s job was to scale Rachel’s voice across the 500+ SKUs in Maptote’s catalog: feed in a product or collection URL, get back a draft description that sounded like the rest of the site.

“I’m the least tech savvy of all of us. You were always very clear and patient with the explanations. Your emails were clear, with directions and things like that. In the tech industry, if you’re not tech savvy and you work with some people, they sometimes have less patience and want to hurry things along. You explained it, blended it all, implemented it, and let us work together as a team versus making it demanding or confusing.”
Michael Berick, Co-Founder, Maptote

Amanda handled implementation on the Maptote side. She ran the bot to draft collection and product descriptions, edited them in batches, and rolled them out to the live site.

“It was a pretty seamless experience. What I liked best is that I’m doing other things at Maptote during the day, and being able to block out a time where I could just hang out with ChatGPT and get something so important done is a really good feeling.”
Amanda Maldonado, Maptote

Report to result

November 2024SEO Opportunity Report delivered. 35 priority pages, each with a title and a content fix.
December 2024Brand-voice session with Rachel, then the copywriting bot, built in Maptote’s voice.
Over the winterAmanda drafts, edits, and ships new descriptions across 500+ SKUs.
End of March 2025Daily organic clicks have doubled, and they stay there.
July 2026Traffic is still holding, more than sixteen months after our work together.

Maptote’s pages have kept growing without ongoing SEO attention.

From 25 clicks a day to 50, and more consistent traffic

The report landed in November 2024, and the rewritten descriptions went live over the winter. By the end of March, daily clicks had roughly doubled, from about 25 to about 50, and they stayed there.

Search Console, September 2024 through June 2025: about 25 clicks a day before the work, about 50 after.

The traffic is still holding. June and July 2026 were the best two months yet: 1,569 and 1,586 clicks from organic search. Maptote’s pages also rank higher than they used to: as of the June 2026 data, average position has moved from roughly 20 to 10.

The growth showed up where the strategy pointed. Comparing the 90 days before the work against the same 90 days a year later:

clicks to collection pages grew more than five-fold
their click-through rate more than tripled, from 0.22 percent to 0.73 percent
product pages nearly doubled their clicks

Those are the pages the report flagged and the copywriting bot rewrote. And orders followed: the ones attributed to organic search are up 65 percent over the year.

Some of those collections started from nothing at all. In the 90 days before we started, the Chicago collection earned zero clicks from 41 appearances in search. A year later it was earning 25 clicks and sitting at position 4.

Search Console, September 2025 through July 2026: 14.6K clicks, climbing since February. June and July are the best months yet.

Part of the overall growth is Maptote’s own brand getting more findable: searches for the Maptote name grew on their own. The growth I credit to our work is the improvement in clicks for non-branded product searches. Generic search terms like “denim tote bags,” “grocery totes,” and “dopp kits” are how new customers find the store for the first time. Those searches grew 170 percent over the same two 90-day windows.

5.6x organic revenue, and more pages bringing in customers

Traffic is the leading indicator that SEO is working: more clicks, more visibility, traffic goes up. But let’s be honest, “more revenue” is why you’re paying for any of it.

Comparing the twelve months before the engagement (July 2023 through June 2024) against the most recent twelve months (July 2025 through June 2026), measured in GA4 against Maptote’s own order data:

Organic-search revenue grew 5.6x, on 65 percent more orders and only 29 percent more sessions. More of the people arriving were buyers, and they bought more.

Where did that revenue land? Of the organic revenue GA4 can trace back to an entry landing page:

half comes from people searching for Maptote by name and landing on the homepage
34 percent comes from buyers landing on product pages
16 percent comes from buyers landing on collection pages

So half of that revenue now comes in through product and collection pages, the exact pages the SEO Opportunity Report flagged and the copywriting bot rewrote.

Where organic revenue enters the site

50%

34%

16%

half of it arrives on a page the bot rewrote

Homepage, people searching for Maptote by name
Product pages
Collection pages

Via GA4, July 2025 through June 2026. Organic revenue is tied back to the landing page a buyer visited first.

Broken out by page type, collection-page revenue grew more than sixteen-fold and product-page revenue more than six-fold.

The revenue split matches what Search Console showed: the collection and product pages that gained the most clicks also gained the most revenue.

The interesting part of this work goes beyond the increase in traffic. It’s that Maptote noticed a difference in the quality of who shows up to their store now.

“We’re getting ourselves in front of people who actually want to find us, versus a million people on our site who don’t need to find us at all. That’s really helpful. It does help to have somebody think about it beyond ‘all right, we have these five words’ but what other sorts of combinations may describe our business to allow that person to find us.”
Michael Berick, Co-Founder, Maptote

The work is in maintenance mode now. The optimized pages are live, and the rankings have stayed put without weekly attention. Michael said that the custom bot became a tool the Maptote team uses for everything, not just product descriptions.

“It’s elevated our website. The collections are nice to have, with the photo at the top and the blurb. It helps build out our site. And having access to this smart bot that can easily create content for us, versus spending the time of actually writing something when we have over 500 SKUs to rewrite copy without it all sounding the same. Ever since working with you, I had never really used ChatGPT, and it has opened up a whole new thing. What’s a way we can come up with a wording idea for this new product?”
Michael Berick, Co-Founder, Maptote

When I asked whether he’d recommend the work to other Shopify store owners, he said:

“I would say [this project] was a success, and we definitely saw results. It was a very good investment.”
Michael Berick, Co-Founder, Maptote

Originally published on Double Your Ecommerce by Kai Davis.

Case-Studies — Double Your Ecommerce

Maptote: organic traffic doubled, orders are up 65 percent, and sixteen months later traffic is still holding

First an SEO Opportunity Report, then a custom copywriting bot in Maptote’s voice

From 25 clicks a day to 50, and more consistent traffic

5.6x organic revenue, and more pages bringing in customers