Every time they asked their agency what to do next, the answer was the same: spend more on ads.
Watch how The Luxury Pergola increased organic traffic 50–80% and drove 230% year-over-year Black Friday growth by changing how they’re discovered across Google and AI-driven results like ChatGPT, without increasing ad spend.
The Luxury Pergola is a family-owned manufacturer of custom louvered pergolas based in Indiana. Co-founded by Brendan Elmore, the company designs, engineers, and manufactures American-made aluminum pergola systems sold direct to consumer across all 50 states and U.S. territories. Every sale starts online. In a category where competitors are fighting for the same buyer attention, organic search traffic is the business. When that traffic started declining 20% year over year, the impact showed up immediately in revenue. And the three agencies brought in to fix it could not answer the most basic question: how many leads did you generate, and what did they cost?
3 Core Challenges
The Luxury Pergola Faced
1st Core Challenge:
Three previous agencies promised lead volume but could not answer a basic question: how many leads did you actually generate, and at what cost?
1st Strategic Shift:
Revenue and keyword performance became fully transparent, with top-three Google rankings doubling in under 12 months.
2nd Core Challenge:
Organic traffic was declining 20% year over year, threatening the primary revenue channel for a business built entirely on direct-to-consumer ecommerce.
2nd Strategic Shift:
Organic traffic reversed from a 20% decline to 50-80% month-over-month growth, creating enough new volume that the company had to accelerate its hiring plan.
3rd Core Challenge:
The AI search landscape was shifting the rules of buyer discovery faster than the internal team or previous partners could keep pace with.
3rd Strategic Shift:
A forward-looking AI visibility strategy positioned the brand to be found and recommended as buyers increasingly start their search with AI instead of Google.
The Problem
The Luxury Pergola had built a real product and a real brand in a competitive DTC category. But the business runs on one thing: being found online. When that visibility started slipping, the P&L felt it immediately. Organic traffic was down 20% year over year and nobody had a plan to turn it around.
Three different agencies took a shot at it. Each one promised results, then fell back on the same answer: pay for more clicks. When Brendan asked the straightforward accountability question, how many leads and at what cost, none of them had an answer. Big promises on the front end, zero ownership on the back end. For a manufacturer selling a premium product direct to consumer in all 50 states, that gap between promises and results was not a marketing headache. It was a revenue problem that got worse every quarter.
The Solution
Keywords in the top three rankings on Google doubled in less than a year. Black Friday sales surged 230%, driven by the organic traffic base that no paid campaign could have created on its own. Organic traffic went from declining 20% to growing 50-80% month over month.
As AI started reshaping how buyers discover products, the strategy evolved with it, positioning The Luxury Pergola to show up where modern buyers are starting their search. The results actually created a new problem: organic volume grew fast enough that the company had to hire more aggressively than planned just to keep up with demand. That is the kind of problem a business owner wants to have.
Before KeenView, we were down about 20% year over year on organic traffic. After working with them, we are now up 50 to 80% on average, month over month. Our Black Friday sales were up about 230%, which was unbelievable. Nobody here expected that kind of explosive Black Friday. It wouldn’t have happened without the base of the organic traffic. KeenView is bringing in so much extra organic volume, we’re having to hire much more aggressively than we had planned. It is a really nice problem to have.
Brendan Elmore – CEO, Luxury Pergola
Brendan Elmore – CEO, Luxury Pergola