Leroy Merlin Brasil: enterprise organic growth at catalog scale

Context and scope

Leroy Merlin Brasil sells a large ecommerce catalog. Category architecture, how pages render, what gets indexed, seasonal demand, and the tracking behind it all interact, and every fix touches more than one team.

I joined when the SEO team had two people. It grew to five SEO specialists plus adjacent analytics work while I was there. The record below states the site-level outcome and then the specific scope I owned, because the two should not be confused.

The scale is the point. This is where I learned to turn search demand, measurement, and technical structure into a page architecture a large catalog can actually run on.

The problem

• A large catalog where the same product could be reached through several page types with competing structure.
• Category and department pages were not organized around how people actually searched.
• Rendering and indexing gaps meant important pages were not reliably discoverable.
• Tracking and the data layer were incomplete, so optimization had weak measurement.
• Seasonal demand swung hard, so prioritization had to move with the calendar.
• The marketplace SEO pilot needed agreement from teams well outside SEO.

Constraints

• The traffic number is a company and site outcome, not one person's result, so the record describes my scope precisely and stops there.
• Fixes crossed engineering, content, analytics, and category teams.
• The marketplace pilot covered hundreds of thousands of products in its first year.
• There were no direct reports, so progress depended on influence and clear technical argument.

What I built

• Ownership of 13 large departments, with their category and department page structure.
• Technical optimization across rendering and indexing so important pages could be found and crawled.
• A tracking and data-layer model, so organic work had a measurement base.
• Structured data across the catalog to describe products and pages to search engines.
• Programmatic SEO work so large product and category sets could be structured at scale.
• Category and department content strategy tied to search demand rather than to internal naming.
• A marketplace SEO pilot, presented to national and global directors, that covered hundreds of thousands of products in year one.
• Growth of the team from two people to five SEO specialists, with adjacent analytics work added.

Decisions and trade-offs

Outcome

Monthly organic visits grew from about five million to about eighteen million during the tenure, a site-level result shared by the whole function. The marketplace SEO pilot went from a proposal to a program presented to national and global directors, covering hundreds of thousands of products in its first year. After the tenure, the top-3, top-10, and top-20 ranked-term volumes were not matched again. My contribution sits in the scope above: the departments, the page architecture, the tracking model, the structured data, and the pilot.