How I Took a UK Modest Fashion Store from 6 to 122+ Organic Keywords in 4 Months (With Zero Ad Spend)

Hey Indie Hackers 👋

I am an SEO strategist from Pakistan managing the organic growth for Alabayae.com a luxury abaya and modest fashion ecommerce brand targeting UK and European customers.

Four months ago the site had 6 organic keywords, zero backlinks, and no presence in AI search. Here is what we built and what actually moved the needle.

The starting point:

• 6 organic keywords

• Authority Score: 2

• Site Health: 81%

• Zero AI citations

• Zero organic orders

What we fixed first (technical foundation):

Before writing a single article we fixed the house. The biggest issue was WoodMart theme generating 9,970 duplicate filter URLs every colour and stock filter combination created a unique URL that Google was crawling instead of our real product pages. We blocked all filter parameters in robots.txt and freed up the entire crawl budget.

We also cleared 66 structured data errors in one RankMath setting change, fixed 49 broken internal links with 3 redirects, and rewrote 6 duplicate title tags.

Site Health went from 81% to 91% in four weeks.

The content strategy:

We published 25+ SEO optimised blog articles targeting keyword gaps against the two main competitors. Every article was written with EEAT signals, AEO question sections for AI search eligibility, GEO targeting for UK cities with high Muslim population, and full entity-rich NLP structure.

The AI visibility play:

We implemented llms.txt a plain text file that tells AI crawlers what the site is about. Most competitors have not done this yet.

Result: ChatGPT is now citing 71 Alabayae pages. Google AI Mode cites 22 pages. Gemini cites 4. AI Assistant shows as a separate traffic channel in GA4 with 125% growth week on week.

The numbers after 4 months:

• Organic keywords: 6 → 122 (+1,933%)

• GSC impressions: 354/week → 20,500 over 3 months

• Total clicks: 192 in 3 months (from 0)

• Average position: 18+ → 9.9

• Site Health: 81% → 91%

• Referring domains: 0 → 39 (all natural, no outreach yet)

• Backlinks: 0 → 51

• AI cited pages: 0 → 82

• PageSpeed mobile: 64 → 82 (removed 2 duplicate plugins)

• First organic order: received in month 3

What I learned:

The biggest unlock was not content it was crawl budget. 23,771 pages were being crawled but not indexed because of filter URL bloat. Fixing that one robots.txt issue changed everything.

The second biggest unlock was llms.txt. AI traffic is real and growing. Getting into ChatGPT citations before your competitors do is a genuine first-mover advantage right now.

The third thing: schema accuracy matters more than schema completeness. We replaced incorrect Local Business schema (business is in Qatar, targeting UK) with Organisation schema. Fixing wrong data is more valuable than adding more data.

Still working on: backlinks (Authority Score is 6, need to reach 15+), conversion rate (traffic growing but reviews needed to convert), and expanding the content cluster.

Happy to answer questions about any of this. The modest fashion niche in the UK is genuinely interesting from an SEO perspective low competition, high topical specificity, and AI search is arriving faster than in mainstream fashion.