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Introduction

For more than a decade, Hobbytech Toys has operated at the heart of Western Australia’s passionate hobby community. From a modest store, they built a solid reputable store that became known for its reputation and deep technical expertise spanning model railways, slot car tracks, and advanced RC vehicles.

Insight

This project in partnership with Hobbytech Toys is shortlisted for Best Low Budget Campaign at the Global Search Awards for 2026.

When Hobbytech Toys set its sights on scaling from a beloved brick-and-mortar destination into a true nationwide e-commerce player, they collided with a brick wall: an organic “invisibility” crisis.

Competing against monolithic national retailers backed by massive enterprise capital, Hobbytech’s flat legacy storefront completely lacked the structural architecture, indexable scale, and semantic authority required to secure Page 1 real estate for high-intent, non-branded keywords.

Megantic was engaged to stage an aggressive architectural intervention.

We needed to think creatively and deploy highly innovative, automated workflows to transform their local physical footprint into a high-octane, national organic superstore capable of dominating both legacy search engines and emerging generative AI platforms.

Our Approach

Stage 1: Research

We started by identifying where the biggest opportunities were across search demand, product inventory and customer intent.

  • Combined SEMrush, Google Keyword Planner and GSC data to uncover 8,388 high-intent, non-branded keywords and 1,684 indexable product categories
  • Restructured the website into a deeper, more intuitive category architecture, making products easier for both users and search engines to discover
  • Reworked category naming, headings and metadata around how customers actually search, turning broad terms like “Model Kits” into more specific, high-intent terms such as “Plastic Model Kits & Military Scales”

Stage 2: Implementation

With the foundations in place, we optimised key category pages to improve relevance, rankings and click-through rates.

  • Refined URLs, H1s, titles and meta descriptions across key collections
  • Used an AI-assisted metadata workflow to efficiently scale unique, search-focused metadata across thousands of pages, with human QA at every stage
  • Expanded thin category content with useful FAQs and product information to strengthen topical relevance
  • Improved the mobile experience with “Read more / Read less” content and visual subcategory tiles, keeping products front and centre while still giving search engines the context they need
  • Strengthened technical SEO by managing crawl budget, canonicals, robots.txt, soft 404s and structured product data

Stage 3: Defend Position and Grow

When rankings plateaued following a 2025 algorithm update, we used our AI SEO diagnostic platform to identify gaps in content, intent and entity relationships.

  • Deployed targeted FAQ and content improvements based on these insights
  • Strengthened authority through strategic offsite link building
  • Continued regular SEO reviews to adapt the architecture and strategy as the product range, search landscape and customer behaviour evolved

Year on Year Results

The result of our efforts were a scalable SEO foundation that could grow with the catalogue, respond to changes in search and ultimately support a significant recovery in organic visibility through 2026.

https://www.megantic.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/94ee6d09b5d8439d08095554edfe305f30d04a58.1790159657.2064.png

Summary

This campaign was praised for it’s detail on audience and strategy. Our work with Hobbytech Toys focused on transforming a well-established local retailer into a nationally discoverable online destination. With a focus on technical SEO and site architecture, Megantic expanded Hobbytech Toys’ organic visibility across both traditional search and emerging AI platforms, despite a modest monthly budget. The campaign delivered significant growth, with organic revenue increasing by 34.1%, transactions by 25%, Page 1 non-branded keywords by 178%, and SERP Features by 470%. The campaign also generated 71 AI Overview positions from zero, demonstrating the impact of a focused, scalable SEO strategy without an enterprise-level budget.

5 Stars

Hobbytech Toys

https://hobbytechtoys.com.au/

“Megantic helped us completely rethink how our website was structured and found opportunities we didn’t even know existed. The growth we’ve seen from organic search over the past year has been massive, especially considering the budget we were working within.”

– Jordan Hepburn, Managing Director at Hobbytech Toys

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