How We Rebuilt GrytFit on Shopify and Grew Organic Search 4.8X

Hear from GrytFit

Who is GrytFit?

GrytFit manufactures and sells gym flooring — 6ft by 4ft three-quarter-inch rubber mats, interlocking tiles, rolled rubber, turf and accessories — at grytfit.com. The company is based in Columbus, Ohio, was founded in November 2024, and runs on Shopify. Robert Nesteroff is the CEO.

The business serves two very different buyers off one storefront. A homeowner outfitting a garage gym wants square footage, a price and fast shipping. A commercial gym operator wants specifications, freight terms and a quote. Both were landing on the same undifferentiated site.

What was the challenge?

GrytFit had a revenue problem hiding inside a website problem. The company was less than a year old and growing — but almost none of that growth came from the site.

Robert put it plainly on our first strategy call in September 2025. Of the company's revenue at the time, what the website drove “might have been 5%, maybe.” His target was specific: he wanted leads and sales generated by the website “to be at around 50%.”

The store ran on PageFly stacked over a stock theme. It was slow to change, awkward on mobile, and it treated a $200 home order and a $20,000 commercial install as the same transaction. Robert was watching the funnel leak in both directions at once:

“We have noticed that website form submissions are down and phone calls from customers are down.”

Paid search had already been tried and abandoned. Google Ads at $1,000 to $1,500 a month produced, in his words, “no ROI. It was just, we're just burning money.”

Leads were also going missing after they arrived. GrytFit collected customer information at trade shows and took inbound calls constantly, with nothing to catch them: “It's really easy without having a CRM to just forget about someone who reached out to us.”

Then came the fork in the road. Another agency was lobbying GrytFit to leave their platform entirely. Robert's original message to us said so directly:

“There is another web designer who is trying to switch us to a different platform. I am not sure we want to do this.”

He was right to hesitate.

How did Lantern Sol approach it?

Two decisions shaped everything that followed.

First: stay on Shopify. Replatforming would have cost months, reset their organic footprint to zero and solved nothing. GrytFit's problem was not the platform. It was a storefront that had been assembled rather than designed, sitting on an organic presence that barely existed. We recommended a full rebuild on a modern Shopify theme with an SEO program running in parallel from day one — so the technical and content work was already compounding while the new site was still in Figma.

Second: fix the store before spending on ads. This was Robert's instinct too, and we agreed with it rather than selling against it: “I'd like to get the website fixed and the funnel cleaned up so that when we are doing ads, they're actually going to have a convert.” So we sequenced deliberately — design and SEO from September, development from October, launch in January, paid media only once there was a store worth sending traffic to.

The third decision came later, once we had behavioural data instead of opinions. Microsoft Clarity showed that 64% of GrytFit's traffic was mobile, that average scroll depth on mobile product pages was 32% — meaning most shoppers never reached the Add to Cart button — and that 66% of taps on the top product page were landing on bolded text that was not a link. That audit became a ranked backlog of 17 fixes, shipped in three sprints.

What did we build?

The storefront. A full rebuild on a fresh Shopify Horizon theme, retiring the PageFly build entirely. Four core templates — homepage, collection, product and cart — designed in desktop and mobile, then a second sprint covering account, contact, FAQ, articles index and article template, a how-to install guide and a redesigned quote request page. Plus a mega menu, a side cart, roughly seven collection banners, and a product image library rebuilt for consistency. URLs were deliberately preserved so existing links, QR codes and rankings carried across intact. Live January 15, 2026.

SEO. A full technical audit covering crawl, indexing, canonicals, robots.txt, sitemaps and Core Web Vitals. FAQ, LocalBusiness and Product schema implemented, and the rich-snippet errors blocking them fixed. Titles and meta descriptions rewritten across 10 to 15 pages, heading hierarchy restructured sitewide, and the homepage plus both money product pages optimized on a recurring monthly cycle. Eight original articles shipped between December 15, 2025 and January 26, 2026, targeting what gym flooring buyers actually search — flooring thickness, rubber versus EVA foam, eco-friendly and recycled rubber, noise reduction, and off-gassing and VOCs.

Local search. Google Business Profile optimization with monthly posts, NAP consistency cleanup across directories, and 7 of 7 data aggregator and network citations completed.

Conversion rate optimization. Seventeen fixes across three sprints, executed in priority order off the Clarity audit: a sticky mobile Add to Cart, trust and USP strips above the fold, accelerated checkout with Shop Pay, Apple Pay and Google Pay, higher-contrast variant swatches, an FAQ accordion on product pages, a cart drawer carrying trust badges, a mobile-first product page reorder, JavaScript error remediation, and Clarity installed on the checkout domain to close a measurement blind spot.

The systems behind the store. A GoHighLevel to Shopify CRM integration so quote requests stopped disappearing. A Google Merchant Center feed rebuild. WhatConverts call tracking, so phone leads finally showed up in reporting. Google Tag Manager with a proper dataLayer, and Microsoft Clarity.

Email. Two Klaviyo flows — an abandoned checkout recovery sequence, and a post-purchase flow delivering a floor care guide alongside a self-reported attribution survey.

Paid media. Separate home gym and commercial funnels across Meta and Google, each with its own landing pages, audiences and creative, plus a library of video and static concepts and customer testimonial footage shot on location in Columbus.

What were the results?

Organic clicks grew from 108 in September 2025 to 410 in February 2026 — 3.8X in five months — while organic impressions grew from 6,466 to 30,843 per month, a 4.8X increase. Keywords ranking in Google’s top 10 climbed from 81 to 666 and top-3 keywords from 29 to 396, and the average ranking position improved from 25.6 to 10.3, moving GrytFit off page three and onto page one. Pages earning organic traffic grew from 39 to 84 — evidence the content program was building an asset, not lifting a handful of URLs.

Organic revenue attributed in Shopify reached $6,603.98 in January 2026 against $655.76 in December 2025 — the first full month after the new site went live. GrytFit also earned 144 citations across AI assistants that month (95 in ChatGPT, 30 in Gemini, 14 in Copilot and 5 in Perplexity); for a brand 14 months old, being quoted by AI search was a real competitive position.

Local visibility went from nothing to the top of the map: within a five-mile radius “gym flooring” reached position 1, with “gym flooring near me,” “rubber gym flooring near me” and “commercial gym flooring near me” at positions 1 to 2 — most began as Not Ranking — while nationally “rubber flooring” reached position 1. The two Klaviyo flows generated $70,344 between April 1 and July 14, 2026 ($59,817 from abandoned checkout recovery, $10,527 from the post-purchase flow). And the growth kept compounding after the engagement ended: by July 2026, five months on, grytfit.com was recording 843 monthly organic clicks and 56,929 monthly impressions across 2,552 ranking keywords — 7.8X the clicks the site earned the month we started.