Ecommerce SEO · Case study
Live Breathe Futbol case study: 43% more clicks on 38% fewer impressions
This Live Breathe Futbol case study covers a Philadelphia soccer apparel store on Shopify. Over six months organic clicks rose 43%, from 5.44K to 7.8K, while impressions fell 38%, from 333K to 206K. Click-through rate went from 1.6% to 3.8% and average position from 13.2 to 9.1. Search Console verified.
Client
Live Breathe Futbol (livebreathefutbol.com)
Industry
Soccer lifestyle apparel, Philadelphia, on Shopify
Scope
Catalogue cull of more than 300 product pages, against a storefront of 220 products, 128 collections and 71 pages
Timeline
Search Console pulled 21 September 2026. Storefront and URL history inspected 22 September 2026.
Led by
Abdul Subkhan, SEO lead on the engagement
Live Breathe Futbol case study: what was the challenge?
Live Breathe Futbol is a Philadelphia soccer lifestyle apparel brand on Shopify. Over the last six months organic clicks rose 43%, from 5.44K to 7.8K, while impressions fell 38%, from 333K to 206K. Fewer people saw the store in search results and far more of them came through. That trade is the entire story of this page.
An impression count that falls by more than a third normally reads as a disaster, and on most dashboards it is the first thing anyone points at. Here it is the mechanism, and it was deliberate. The store was appearing for a very large volume of searches it had no realistic chance of converting, and every one of those appearances dragged the click-through rate down with it.
The question a store in that position has to answer is which searches it actually deserves to be in. Ranking for 333K impressions at 1.6% click-through rate and position 13.2 is worth less than ranking for 206K at 3.8% and position 9.1, and the second of those is what the last six months produced.
Why did we delete 312 product pages?
Deleting more than half a catalogue is not a normal recommendation, and it is the single decision this result rests on. The store was carrying hundreds of pages that could never win the searches they were entered into, and every one of them was making the store look worse to Google than it was. Here is what went and why.
- 01
We went after the player-name pages first
Thirty-four of the 36 of them are now gone: messi-ten-10s, cristiano, mbappe-starboy, haaland-starboy-tee, maradona-ten-10s, ronaldinho, mo-salah-starboy. A page carrying a footballer name is entered against a query owned by news outlets and the clubs themselves, so it lands around position 30 and earns nothing while counting every appearance against the store.
- 02
Then the rest of the dead weight
Face-mask products, all 6 of them, left over from 2020. Country and World Cup products, 14 of 18, tied to tournaments that had finished. Across the whole catalogue the removal rate came to 59%, and the cull took the store from more than 500 live product URLs down to 220.
- 03
We let them return 404 rather than redirecting
A product that no longer exists and has no equivalent should say so. Mass-redirecting deleted products into a collection page gets read as a soft 404 and teaches Google nothing, so the removed URLs were left to return 404 honestly. A sample of 45 of them was rechecked on 22 September 2026 and 43 still do.
- 04
We rebuilt the catalogue around what sells now
Only 7 of the 219 products published today predate 2024, on a brand trading for well over a decade. The catalogue is not a smaller version of the old one, it is a current one, and that figure reads straight out of the store product feed without touching an archive.
- 05
We stopped at the product layer, and it shows
BreadcrumbList schema is on every page and every variant carries a SKU, so the product layer is sound. The collection layer was not part of this and has not been touched: 128 collections serve 219 products, four of them render the entire catalogue, and two hold nothing at all. That is the next job, and it is named here rather than left out.
What results did Live Breathe Futbol get?
Two windows from the same property, both pulled on 21 September 2026. The six-month comparison is the main view and shows the full trade of impressions for clicks. The 28-day comparison against the same 28 days a year earlier confirms the same direction over a longer horizon, with average position moving 31.8 to 10.
| Metric | 6 months, previous | 6 months, now | 28 days, a year ago | 28 days, now |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Clicks | 5.44K | 7.8K | 530 | 756 |
| Impressions | 333K | 206K | 73K | 29K |
| Click-through rate | 1.6% | 3.8% | 0.7% | 2.6% |
| Average position | 13.2 | 9.1 | 31.8 | 10 |
What Live Breathe Futbol looks like in Search Console
Both windows, straight out of the property. The six-month card is first: 7.8K clicks against 5.44K, but 206K impressions against 333K, with click-through rate 3.8% against 1.6%. The year-over-year card underneath shows the same trade over 28 days, and average position moving from 31.8 to 10.
Why did it work for Live Breathe Futbol?
Impressions are not traffic. A store ranking at position 13.2 for a very wide query set collects a large impression count and almost no clicks from it, because position 13 is the second page and nobody goes there. Trading that reach for position 9.1 on a narrower set more than doubled the click-through rate.
The year-over-year window makes the same point more sharply. Over 28 days impressions fell from 73K to 29K, a much steeper drop than the six-month view, while clicks still rose from 530 to 756 and average position went 31.8 to 10. A site averaging position 31.8 is on page four, where an impression is worth close to nothing.
This is the hardest kind of result to report, because the headline metric on most dashboards went the wrong way. Anyone reading impressions as the health indicator would call this a decline. Clicks, click-through rate and average position all say otherwise, and clicks are the only one of the four that puts somebody on the site.
Deleting more than half a catalogue takes a nerve that most store owners do not have, and it is worth being clear about what makes it safe. It is safe when the pages going out are ranking at position 30 for queries they were never going to win. It is reckless when they are ranking at position 8 for queries that convert. The work is in telling those two apart before anything is deleted, which is what the query data is for.
There is also work still sitting there, and it was re-checked on 22 September 2026 rather than assumed. The tees collection page has no H1 at all and its description field is empty. The about page title is the lowercase words about us. Four collections, all, shop, all-products and new-collection, each return the same 219 products, while nigeria returns none and dc-united and mugs return one each. Three separate review apps are installed and not one of them emits review markup, so the store earns no rating snippets from any of them.
Tools and stack
Numbers verified in Google Search Console. See our verified reviews on Clutch.
AI visibility for ecommerce brandsQuestions about the Live Breathe Futbol case study
Short answers to what people ask about the Live Breathe Futbol case study: how clicks rose while impressions fell, what that trade actually means for a store, and how the figures were verified. Every number below was read off Google Search Console on 21 September 2026.
How can clicks rise while impressions fall?
Because impressions at a poor average position produce almost no clicks. Live Breathe Futbol went from 333K impressions at position 13.2 and 1.6% click-through rate to 206K at position 9.1 and 3.8%. Fewer, better-matched appearances beat a larger volume of appearances on page two.
What actually caused the impression drop?
A deliberate catalogue cull. More than 312 product URLs were removed, taking the store from over 500 down to 220. The removals were concentrated on player-name products, 34 of 36 gone, which are the pages that earn very large impression counts at very poor positions and almost no clicks.
Why delete product pages instead of optimising them?
Because a page carrying a footballer name competes with news outlets and the clubs themselves for that query, and no amount of on-page work wins it. It lands around position 30, earns almost no clicks, and every appearance still counts against the store. Removing it costs nothing real and lifts everything measured.
Were the removed pages redirected?
No, they return 404, and that is the right answer for a product that no longer exists with no equivalent to send someone to. Mass-redirecting deleted products into a collection page is read as a soft 404 and teaches Google nothing. A sample of 45 removed URLs was rechecked on 22 September 2026 and 43 still return 404.
How much did Live Breathe Futbol grow?
Organic clicks rose from 5.44K to 7.8K over six months, a 43% increase, while impressions fell from 333K to 206K. Click-through rate went 1.6% to 3.8% and average position went 13.2 to 9.1. All figures come from Google Search Console.
What does the year-over-year comparison show?
Over the last 28 days the store took 756 clicks against 530 in the same 28 days a year earlier, from 29K impressions against 73K. Click-through rate went 0.7% to 2.6% and average position went 31.8 to 10, which is a move off page four entirely.
Should a falling impression count worry a store owner?
Only if clicks fall with it. An impression at average position 13 or 31 is a listing almost nobody scrolls to. What matters is whether the searches you still appear for are ones you can win, which is what the click-through rate figure measures.
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