Coutinho Jeans

E-Commerce SEO & Performance Case Study

Overview

Coutinho Jeans is a premium fashion brand selling denim and streetwear. The brand needed a website that could compete internationally — fast, search-optimized, and positioned for a global audience rather than just local customers.

I built the website and led a full technical SEO overhaul — from crawling and indexing to performance engineering, on-page SEO, analytics, and Google Business Profile setup.

Project Goals

• Build a Fast, Modern Website: Mobile-first, responsive, and premium-looking
• Fix Technical SEO: Sitemap, robots.txt, and Search Console setup
• Improve Performance: Reduce page weight and improve Core Web Vitals
• On-Page SEO: Optimize titles, meta, schema, and product names
• Analytics & Tracking: GA4 setup for measurable growth

Key Results & Improvements

Technical SEO

Crawling & Indexing

• Created and submitted sitemap.xml to Google Search Console
• Configured robots.txt with crawl rules and sitemap reference
• Verified ownership via GSC and requested indexing for key URLs

Security & Performance

• Forced HTTPS via .htaccess redirect
• Added mod_expires and mod_headers for 1-year caching
• Converted all product and model images to WebP
• Compressed images — reduced total page weight by 92%
• Preloaded and async-loaded Google Fonts to eliminate render-blocking

On-Page SEO

• Rewrote title tag and meta description for international positioning
• Added canonical tag, Open Graph, and Twitter Card markup
• Updated Schema.org LocalBusiness markup
• Rewrote product names for a premium, global tone
• Removed local keywords ("Soweto", "curated") from brand messaging

Analytics & Business Profile

Google Analytics 4

• Created a new GA4 property for coutinhojeans.co.za
• Installed the gtag.js tracking snippet in <head>
• Verified real-time tracking of active users

Google Business Profile

• Set up as a service-area business with premium brand description
• Added category, service areas, phone, website, and email
• Uploaded logo and product photos
• Verification pending

Key Challenges & Solutions

Results

• ✅ Lighthouse performance improved from 65 → 91
• ✅ Page weight reduced by 92% (18 MB → 1.4 MB)
• ✅ Fully indexed — sitemap submitted and verified in GSC
• ✅ GA4 tracking live — real-time user data confirmed
• ✅ Clean, secure, responsive website ready for international growth

Skills Demonstrated

Live Project