Scaling Organic Traffic from 0 to 40%
Experience prior to UXR: Mauricio Antúnez's in-house work creating the SEO area at Cornershop by Uber, not a consulting engagement.
In short
- Organic accounted for less than 1% of total traffic, and there was no dedicated SEO team or process.
- The function was built from scratch: technical audit, programmatic content architecture and multi-country international SEO.
- Over 3 million landing pages indexed and optimised, with hreflang, structured data and canonicals at catalogue scale.
- Organic traffic went from near 0% to over 40% of the total and became the main source of new users.
Context and Challenge
Cornershop, a leading grocery delivery platform acquired by Uber, faced a critical challenge: virtually zero organic search presence.
Initial situation:
- Organic channel: <1% of total traffic
- No dedicated SEO team or processes
- Technical architecture not optimized for indexing
- Multi-country operations without international SEO strategy
Goal: Build SEO from scratch and scale organic traffic into a primary acquisition channel.
Technical SEO Strategy
Phase 1: Audit and Diagnosis
Comprehensive technical audit identifying:
- Indexation and crawl budget issues
- Programmatic content opportunities
- Information architecture gaps
- Technical implementation requirements
Phase 2: Programmatic Content Architecture
Programmatic landing page strategy capturing high-intent searches:
- Location-based store pages
- Product category pages
- Specific product pages
- Local search optimization
Result: 3+ million optimized landing pages.
International SEO
Multi-Country Implementation
Operations across Chile, Mexico, Peru, Colombia, and additional markets required:
- Country and city-based URL structure
- Hreflang implementation for multilingual content
- Market-specific link building strategies
- Regionally-localized content
Complex technical challenges solved:
- Dynamic content management (inventory, pricing, availability)
- Core Web Vitals optimization for catalog pages
- Structured data for products and stores
- Canonical URL management across massive catalogs
Results and Impact
Growth Metrics:
- Organic traffic: 0% → 40%+ of total traffic
- Landing pages: 3M+ pages indexed and optimized
- Coverage: Successful implementation across all markets
Business Impact:
- Organic became primary new user source
- Significant customer acquisition cost reduction
- Scalable foundation continuing growth post-Uber acquisition
Legacy:
Strategy and processes persisted post-Uber integration, validating technical implementation and documentation quality.
What's next
The strategy and processes kept working after the Uber integration. What sustained that was not only the technical implementation but the documentation of the function: the work was left transferable, which is the only way a channel keeps growing once the team that built it changes.