Quarterly Organic Search Report · Prepared by SearchFlex
Organic revenue grew in the two biggest markets this quarter, though it came from converting demand Varley already has, not from winning new. The rankings we own climbed; the non-branded demand beneath them shrank. Here's the full Q2 picture, market by market, and honest about what drove it.
Organic revenue grew strongly in the two biggest markets (US $2.23M, up 62% year on year; UK up 17%). But it came from converting the demand Varley already has, not from winning new. Non-branded search, the discovery layer SEO builds, shrank in every market. So the quarter is commercially strong and strategically fragile: the engine is running on conversion and brand while the organic pipeline underneath needs rebuilding.
What moved: rankings and the backlog. High-intent outerwear terms climbed onto page one (UK puffer coat to #2, US puffer jacket to #4), and the technical roadmap largely shipped (titles, metas and broken links cleared). The risk: Varley is a small organic player beside Lululemon, Gymshark and Vuori, and its discovery demand is falling. For Q3: turn those rankings into revenue, close the mobile conversion gap (a store-team job), and fix Europe's conversion drop.
Q2 was a commercial quarter, and each market got there its own way. US revenue grew 61.6% on flat traffic, from conversion (2.12% to 2.94%) and bigger baskets (order value up 20% to $344), not more visits. One caveat worth stating plainly: this is total organic revenue, and most of it is branded and returning customers arriving via the homepage. The non-branded discovery SEO directly builds is a small slice, and this quarter it shrank. The UK pulled in new demand, sessions up 41% and new users 53%, with a cluster of outerwear terms climbing onto page one (puffer coat to #2, puffer jacket to #5), though conversion slipped year on year, so more visitors converting a little worse. Europe went backwards, and the Opportunities section explains why.
Revenue, transactions and customer figures are GA4, organic-search channel only. Traffic is Google Search Console; rankings are Ahrefs organic positions, non-branded (brand queries excluded). The full commercial breakdown is in Section 04; the strategic opportunities, with the research behind them, in Section 07.
Monthly non-branded organic clicks by market, Sep 2025 to Jun 2026. This is discovery demand with brand searches stripped out. It steps down through spring and summer as winter product terms fall out of range, which is the shape you'd expect for an outerwear-led catalogue.
Non-branded clicks softened year on year in every market (US −16%, UK −11%, EU −24%), the usual spring–summer easing. The impression counts beneath were squeezed further by Google's late-2025 switch from top-100 to top-10 rank tracking. Revenue grew anyway, on lighter discovery traffic.
Each market's non-branded traffic against last quarter and last year, page-one keyword coverage, and the terms that gained the most ground in the rankings. Switch markets and the section follows.
| Non-branded keyword | Volume | Position move (QoQ) | Gain |
|---|
Non-branded clicks and impressions are Google Search Console. Position moves are Ahrefs organic positions (the main blue-link rank, excluding SERP features), Q2 2026 vs Q1 2026, with Ahrefs monthly search volume. Positions are Ahrefs snapshots and can read higher than a live check by day and location.
What the channel actually earned this quarter, and how it split by market. In the US it came down to conversion and basket size, not traffic. The UK was the opposite, a wave of new visitors (sessions up 41%), though conversion slipped year on year, so it's an acquisition story to watch rather than bank. Europe fell on every commercial measure. Switch markets to see each in full.
| Product | Revenue | Units |
|---|
| Landing page | Revenue | Orders |
|---|
GA4, organic-search channel, Q2 2026, native currency. Revenue here is total organic and includes branded search: with 69% from returning customers and 37% arriving via the homepage, most of it is brand and retention, not new discovery. Worth confirming before it goes upward: how much of the +20% AOV is price and mix versus discount (i.e. what happened to margin), and how much of the growth is organic's doing versus brand and merchandising.
The rankings behind the revenue. Against Q2 2025 a cluster of outerwear terms climbed onto page one: in the UK, puffer coat to #2 and puffer jacket to #5; in the US, puffer jacket climbed twenty-eight places to #4. Real progress on seasonal terms, off a low base.
Positions are Ahrefs organic positions (the main blue-link rank, excluding SERP features), Q2 2026 vs Q2 2025, with Ahrefs monthly search volume. Treat them as Ahrefs snapshots: they can read higher than a live check on a given day and vary by location, so spot-check the headline terms before this goes client-side. The clearest gains are the seasonal outerwear terms.
Non-branded terms already ranking 11–20 in Ahrefs, sitting on the edge of page one, where a title, internal-linking and content pass can push them over. Sized by monthly search volume, so the biggest demand closest to breaking through rises to the top. The Q3 quick-win shortlist, by market.
Ahrefs organic positions 11–20, Q2 2026, non-branded, sized by Ahrefs monthly search volume. US “athleisure” (36k/mo at #13) and UK “shorts” (60k/mo at #16) are the biggest single opportunities. Europe has no non-branded terms within striking distance, which is consistent with its story being conversion, not rankings. Positions are Ahrefs snapshots and can differ from a live check by day and location.
The honest frame for everything above: in organic search, Varley is a minnow. It ranks for roughly 1,425 keywords in the US and 490 in the UK, against rivals ranking for tens of thousands. Ahrefs puts Varley's US organic traffic near 62k visits a month; Lululemon's is over a hundred times that. This quarter's gains are real, but they come off a small base, and most of the category's search demand sits with competitors.
Estimated monthly organic visits (bars, log scale) and ranking-keyword counts, Ahrefs, Jun 2026. Premium activewear peers shown; large generalists also compete for product terms (US: Gap, Nordstrom, H&M; UK: M&S, ASOS, Zara). The gap is the opportunity: the non-branded category demand Varley isn't capturing yet is exactly what these competitors hold.
Four opportunities the Q2 numbers point to, and what the data actually says about each. This is where most of the next few quarters' growth is likely to come from.
Mobile is 64% of US organic sessions but converts at just 2.31%, against desktop's 4.08%. So it carries two-thirds of the traffic and brings in only about half the transactions. The same gap runs through the UK and EU. Matching desktop outright isn't realistic (mobile rarely does), but closing half of it is, and that alone is about $425k a quarter in the US, with more in the UK. This is a store and UX job more than a search one, so it needs the ecommerce team.
37% of US organic revenue and 40% of the UK's comes in through the homepage, which is brand-driven, high-intent traffic. It converts, but it means the collection pages aren't pulling their weight in organic. The rankings show where: the activewear collection, a flagship category, still isn't holding page one for its head term, and shorts sits just below it, while the sale and new-arrivals pages rank right at the top. That's where the demand is, and where it's being missed.
The Hawley Half Zip and Ritchie Short Sleeve Sweat alone bring in $267k of US organic revenue, and the same few SKUs (Hawley leads every market) account for most of it. Great products, but it's a lot riding on a short list. A soft quarter for one hero style would move the whole number.
This one needs care. EU organic search is fine. Positions hold around 5 and daily clicks were steady right through the quarter (below), so the “June drop” in the monthly view is a reporting artefact, not a real loss. The decline is commercial: conversion fell from 1.82% to 1.18% year on year and transactions dropped 44%, on only a 13% dip in sessions.
Mobile-gap upside is an illustrative ceiling (US mobile sessions × the desktop–mobile conversion gap × average order value). Homepage share, product concentration and the EU conversion figures are GA4, organic channel, Q2 2026. EU daily traffic was checked in Google Search Console to rule out a genuine June loss.
A fresh Screaming Frog crawl on 20 July checked which roadmap fixes actually shipped, and whether they moved rankings. Most of the template-level work landed: a collection-page title and meta bug is fixed, broken Shopify image links are cleared, and the sitemap and x-default hreflang issues are gone. Internal error pages fell from 390 to 106. Two things regressed, though, and need Ecrubox now.
| Issue | Owner | Prior | Now | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Broken Shopify CDN image links | Ecrubox | 25,198 | 20 | Fixed |
| Missing page titles | SearchFlex → Ecrubox | 1,255 | 7 | Fixed |
| Missing meta descriptions | SearchFlex → Ecrubox | 878 | 23 | Fixed |
| Thin-content pages | SearchFlex → Ecrubox | 858 | 8 | Fixed |
| XML sitemap links to 4xx | Ecrubox | 312 | 3 | Fixed |
| Missing x-default hreflang | Ecrubox | 73 | 0 | Fixed |
| Internal 5xx link references | Ecrubox | 257 | 45 | Improved |
| Duplicate titles (indexable pages) | SearchFlex → Ecrubox | n/a | 88 | Open |
| Parameterised URLs | Ecrubox | 21,853 | 21,745 | Open |
| Canonicalised pagination pages | Ecrubox | 440 | 480 | Not done |
| Internal links via 3xx redirects | Ecrubox | 28,336 | 34,070 | Regressed |
| Hreflang links to internal 4xx | Ecrubox | 1 | 139 | Regressed |
Screaming Frog, 20 Jul 2026 vs the prior crawl. Two honesty notes: the crawl covered 35,963 internal URLs (down from 52,140), so raw counts aren't perfectly size-normalised; and the audit's headline “internal 4xx” figure is ~97% external resource and tracking references, so the genuinely actionable internal broken links are about 90 (up from ~44, worth a quick dev pass). Encouragingly, the title and metadata fixes on collection pages line up with this quarter's ranking gains on those same categories.
Four priorities to carry the momentum into Q3, each tied to something on this page.
Revenue is riding on conversion and returning customers while non-branded demand shrank and competitors hold the category. Turn the ranking gains into category pages that actually earn, and widen the base beyond the homepage and two hero products.
Title, content and internal-linking work on the quick-win shortlist, where small on-page gains turn straight into clicks. The biggest demand sits just off page one: UK “shorts” (60k/mo, #16) and “wide leg joggers” (8.4k, #12); US “athleisure” (36k, #13) and “athletic shorts” (35k, #17).
EU search visibility is stable. The problem is commercial: conversion down to 1.18% and transactions off 44% year on year. Look at the EU store (checkout, pricing, localisation), and treat the “June dip” as the reporting glitch it is.
Close out the Ecrubox roadmap items, then read the impact against the ranking trend, so the technical work gets judged on outcomes.