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

20North deployed a phased SEO strategy that scaled from broad collection coverage into branded apparel targeting and AEO infrastructure, layering in social integration and original voice to match how Pants Store's audience already engages with the brand.

Foundational Blog and Page Optimization Strategy (August 2025)

• Launched with 5 blog posts per month targeting long-tail informational keywords, each built with custom infographics, internal linking strategy, and defined target keywords
• Paired blog work with 6 monthly page optimizations that added SEO-friendly content to main collection pages

Technical SEO Maintenance

• Monthly meta title and description optimization across the site to address visibility gaps and improve click-through rates

Branded Keyword Expansion

• Shifted focus to capturing demand around the clothing brands Pants Store carries after broader collection rankings established momentum

Brand Collection Pages

• Built out and optimized dedicated pages for the apparel brands in the Pants Store catalog

Brand-Focused Blog Content

• Layered in blog posts targeting specific apparel brands to support the collection page work and capture brand-specific search demand

Social Integration

• Embedded TikTok content within blog posts to bridge the gap between Pants Store's large organic social following and on-site search traffic

AEO Integration

• Expanded the program to address answer engine optimization as AI search gained share, building on the existing SEO foundation

Technical Infrastructure

• Implemented LLMS.txt, page-specific schema, and structured data to make content readable by large language models

Authority Through Original Voice

• Integrated unique quotes from Pants Store employees into blog content to showcase in-house expertise and brand voice, both of which perform well on AI engines

The phased approach paid off. Organic users grew 61% and sessions rose 49% as the collection and brand pages captured demand that branded search alone had been missing, and page 1 keyword coverage expanded 42%. On the AEO side, the new infrastructure began earning results in AI answer engines, lifting Pants Store's citation rank from #9 to #3.

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

20North built an SEO and answer-engine optimization program focused on capturing higher-intent demand, expanding topical coverage, and defending product pages against algorithm shifts.

Collection Strategy

• Optimized existing collection pages and built net-new collections to capture audiences with more specific search intent
• Expanded category coverage so shoppers searching by occasion, fit, or style land on a page built for that intent rather than a generic product grid

Content and Answer Engine Optimization

• Produced guide-style blog content spanning weddings, business, and formal events to compete across every suiting occasion
• Implemented AEO tactics built for the zero-click era, structuring content to be pulled directly into AI-generated answers
• Targeted top-of-funnel questions to reach shoppers earlier, before competitors captured them

Product Page Defense

• Diversified product description language across the catalog to counter the Google update that penalized thin and copy-paste pages
• Rewrote repetitive product copy into differentiated content that holds up under current ranking criteria

The approach held up against a difficult market. Organic keywords grew 41.6% year over year even as suiting-category search demand contracted, and the answer-engine work kept SuitShop at the top of AI-generated results while competitors fought for the same shrinking pool.

BRUCE BOLT, an 8-figure CPG brand from Austin, Texas with a focus on the baseball category, partnered with 20North to break through stagnant sales and build long-term category leadership. The work began with paid media in Fall 2023 and expanded into SEO and AEO, or answer engine optimization, as AI search gained share. The phased SEO and AEO program eventually pushed BRUCE BOLT to the #1 AI visibility position in its category.

Challenges across paid, organic, and AI search included:

• Wasted budget and inflated ROAS
• Lack of audience segmentation
• Redundant ad creative
• Ineffective tracking and campaign execution
• Limited organic visibility in the batting gloves category
• No infrastructure for AI search visibility

20North deployed a phased strategy that grew as performance signals validated each expansion, starting with paid media cleanup and layering in SEO, then AEO, as the program matured.

Paid Media Foundation

• Reinstated and optimized the previously suspended Google shopping feed
• Lowered overall spend by 25%
• Installed proper tracking, refreshed creative, and established campaign segmentation
• Ventured into new channels by adding TikTok advertising
• Conducted multivariate testing

Foundational SEO Program (October 2023)

• Launched with 4 blog posts per month targeting long-tail informational keywords
• Built each post with custom infographics, internal linking strategy, expert reviewer schema, and table of contents markup
• Optimized meta titles and descriptions across the site every month to address visibility gaps and lift page 1 visibility for core terms

SEO Expansion

• Doubled blog output to 8 posts per month after early performance confirmed the strategy was driving measurable traffic and revenue gains
• Layered in 10 monthly page optimizations focused on product and collection pages to capture mid- and bottom-funnel search intent alongside the top-funnel blog work
• Set up ongoing competitor monitoring to surface gap opportunities and inform monthly content planning

AEO Integration

• Expanded the program to address answer engine optimization as AI search gained share, building on the existing SEO foundation
• Implemented LLMS.txt, page-specific schema, and structured data to make content readable by large language models
• Deployed the Shopify Knowledge Base app to centralize FAQ content for AI retrieval
• Wove proof points into page copy and blog content to reinforce BRUCE BOLT's category leadership for both human readers and AI models

Roam is a shared workspace offering flexible month-to-month memberships, offices, and offsite meeting spaces. The brand started in Alpharetta in 2008 with the goal of providing a better solution for remote workers on the go and has since expanded into larger meeting rooms and dedicated offices across Atlanta, Georgia and Dallas, Texas.

Before partnering with 20North, Roam's marketing efforts focused on content development, in-person events, and partnership strategies, with a ton of untapped digital strategies. By 2022, there was a clear need to optimize Google as a marketing channel. An initial look at organic traffic surfaced a familiar problem: the majority of traffic was coming from branded terms, leaving Roam stagnant in organic users and conversions on non-branded terms.

The partnership began with SEO and local search in 2022 and expanded into paid media, location-specific service pages, and answer engine optimization as AI search gained share. Today, Roam holds the #1 AI visibility position in its category, far ahead of the next closest competitors.

Challenges across organic, local, paid, and AI search:

• Traffic concentrated on branded terms only
• Limited visibility for non-branded, location-based searches
• Untapped Google Ads opportunity for high-intent keywords
• New location openings outpacing site content
• No infrastructure for AI search visibility

20North deployed a phased SEO and local strategy that grew in response to performance, expanding from foundational content and local optimization into multi-location service pages and AEO infrastructure as Roam's footprint expanded.

Foundational SEO and Local Strategy (October 2022)

• Launched with 2 blog posts per month targeting long-tail informational keywords, each built with custom infographics and internal linking
• Paired blog work with Google Business Profile optimizations across every Roam location
• Monthly meta title and description optimization to address visibility gaps and improve click-through rates
• Recurring monthly strategy sessions with the Roam team to surface page content recommendations and align SEO direction with business priorities

Paid Media Layer

• Built a Google Ads campaign focused on high-intent, conversion-ready keywords
• Drove qualified leads that converted at higher rates than organic alone
• Captured demand on competitive non-branded terms where organic wins take longer to materialize

Location and Service Page Push

• Built 21 unique location landing pages to capture local search demand across Roam's growing footprint
• Shifted the monthly deliverable mix to 2 pillar page build-outs or on-page optimizations alongside 2 blog posts
• Focused on location-specific service pages Roam had not previously published
• Continued Google Business Profile work in parallel to reinforce local visibility across markets
• Ongoing content updates and page build-outs aligned to new location openings and naming changes as Roam's footprint expanded

The combined push grew Roam's page-one keyword footprint by 130% on Google, validating the location-and-pillar strategy as the right scale-up for a multi-market coworking brand.

AEO Integration

• Expanded the program to address answer engine optimization as AI search gained share, building on the existing SEO foundation
• Implemented LLMS.txt, page-specific schema, and structured data to make content readable by large language models
• Embedded expert reviewers on blog content and added FAQ sections to blog and page content to support AI retrieval
• Integrated direct, unique quotes from the Roam team and in-house experts into blog content to establish proprietary proof points that AI models can attribute and surface