Fieldfolio had 200,000 products. Buyers had only 30 ways in.

Fieldfolio had around 200,000 products sitting beneath just 30 broad categories. That structure made sense for an app designed around browsing. It made much less sense for somebody arriving from Google with a specific product, category, use case or wholesale need already in mind.

The opportunity was therefore bigger than optimising the existing 30 pages. The architecture itself needed to reflect how wholesale buyers expressed demand.

The marketplace worked once somebody was inside it. Search needed more ways in.

• 30 base categories trying to cover a 200,000-product catalogue
• A taxonomy built for browsing in the app, not for how buyers search
• A custom Ruby CMS with no standard SEO tooling or plugins
• Page templates that had never been designed with search in mind

Design the marketplace from the query backwards.

1. Map demand before creating pages.We decomposed the original categories by sub-type, use case and intent modifier, then used query data and competitor visibility to validate whether each new category deserved to exist. The goal was not to manufacture hundreds of URLs. It was to create useful entry points where the evidence showed buyers were already searching.
2. Build search into the product experience.A larger taxonomy would only work if the page templates could support it. We worked directly with Fieldfolio's UX designer on the category, brand, product and homepage templates, so hierarchy, internal linking, structured information and content requirements were considered before implementation rather than added afterwards.
3. Make the architecture implementable at scale.Fieldfolio ran a custom Ruby CMS. Instead of stopping at recommendations, we documented the work as implementation specifications covering URL patterns, internal linking, metadata logic and structured data, so the development team could build the system into the platform.

Category architecture. Expanded the original 30-category taxonomy into 1,200+ validated buyer-intent pages across a three-level hierarchy: base category, sub-category and specific buyer intent.

Page experience. Co-designed the category, brand, product and homepage templates with Fieldfolio's UX team, so the new search architecture also worked as a usable marketplace experience.

Technical specification. Defined URL patterns, programmatic internal linking, metadata logic and structured-data requirements for Fieldfolio's custom Ruby CMS.

Launch and validation. Monitored the new architecture after launch and validated how the expanded footprint performed in organic search.

Fieldfolio became easier to discover because the architecture started reflecting how buyers searched.

The growth did not come from adding keywords to 30 existing category pages. It came from changing the structure of the marketplace itself.

By mapping buyer demand first, then carrying that intelligence through taxonomy, UX and technical implementation, Fieldfolio created far more relevant entry points into an existing catalogue. The products were already there. Search strategy changed how buyers could reach them.