Pants Store is a family-owned apparel retailer founded in 1950 by Taylor Gee in Leeds, Alabama. What started as a single pants shop has grown into a destination for clothing, shoes, and accessories for the whole family, with seven locations across Alabama and one in Oxford, Mississippi. Now run by the third generation of the Gee family, the brand carries names like New Balance, Hoka, Birkenstock, and Free People has become a go-to source for SEC gameday style across the South.

Pants Store also built a large and engaged social following. Its Tuscaloosa store and #bamarush content turned the brand into a TikTok sensation and drove major spikes in online sales, and pantsstore.com now ranks among the company's top-performing locations, with more than half of online orders shipping out of state. That reach created an opportunity. Much of the brand's organic visibility leaned on branded searches, while demand for the apparel brands it carries and the categories it sells went uncaptured in non-branded search.

Pants Store partnered with 20North in 2025 to close that gap. The work started with foundational blog and collection page optimization, expanded into branded apparel targeting and social integration, and grew into answer engine optimization as AI search gained share.

Challenges across organic and AI search:

• Organic visibility concentrated on branded search terms
• Demand for the apparel brands Pants Store carries going uncaptured in non-branded search
• Main collection pages lacking SEO-friendly content
• A large social following that was not translating into on-site search traffic
• No infrastructure for AI search visibility

With 20North, Pants Store turned brand awareness that lived largely on social into lasting organic search performance, capturing non-branded demand across the categories and apparel brands it sells. As the program expanded into AEO, the brand began building citation share in AI answer engines, giving it an early foothold as AI search takes on more of the discovery journey.

Search Growth (Since Launch, August 2025)

• Organic users up 61% and sessions up 49%
• Keywords up 47% and page 1 keywords up 42%

Recent Momentum (Last 90 Days, Year over Year)

• Users up 56% and sessions up 39%
• Page 1 keywords up 53%

AI Citations

• Citation rank climbed from #9 to #3 in AI answer engines, with citation share roughly doubling
• Top-cited pages span collection, brand, and educational blog content, giving Pants Store citation depth across the funnel

Business Growth

• Captured non-branded demand across collection and apparel brand pages
• Built lasting organic visibility to complement the brand's strong social presence
• Established AEO infrastructure to grow citation share as answer engines take more of the discovery journey

SuitShop came to 20North already performing well, with a clear goal: be more competitive at the top of the funnel, where larger suiting brands were capturing early-stage shoppers first.

Two forces made that harder. The suiting category was facing an industry-wide decline in search demand, so visibility had to be won against a shrinking keyword pool. At the same time, Google's algorithm updates increasingly penalized thin or duplicative product pages, a structural problem across suit retail, where the same jacket is often described the same way across ten colors. The work needed to grow qualified visibility while modernizing the catalog for AI-driven, zero-click search.

Challenges across organic and AI search:

• An industry-wide decline in suiting-category search demand
• Larger competitors capturing top-of-funnel shoppers first
• Google updates penalizing thin and duplicative product pages
• Repetitive catalog copy, the same jacket described the same way across colors
• The shift toward zero-click, AI-driven search

While the suiting category contracted, SuitShop grew where it counts. The collection and content expansion pulled in higher-intent shoppers, the product page overhaul defended the catalog against algorithm shifts, and the answer-engine work held SuitShop at #1 in AI visibility, exactly where top-of-funnel discovery is moving.

Keyword Visibility (last 90 days, year over year)

• Organic keywords up 41.6%, from 59,276 to 83,927
• Held page 1 keyword count steady while the broader category contracted
• Grew keyword visibility even as suiting-category search demand declined industry-wide

Traffic (last 90 days, year over year)

• Organic sessions up 5.8% and organic users up 5.3%

AI Search and Authority

• Held the #1 AI visibility rank, with visibility score rising to 27.2%
• Held the #1 share of voice rank, with score rising to 5.5%
• Maintained a top-tier citation position at #2 in a competitive field