The Challenge
Rakuten Advertising and Rakuten Rewards collectively power one of North America’s largest affiliate marketing ecosystems, yet the brand’s organic search presence had quietly eroded over a four-year period. Amazon’s dominance of commercial-intent product queries had hollowed out key cashback category pages, while Google’s AI Overviews began surfacing competing loyalty platforms as the authoritative answer for “how to earn cashback online.” Internal analytics showed organic traffic down 34% from peak levels, with the affiliate publisher acquisition funnel particularly starved.
The technical picture was equally concerning. A legacy platform migration had left thousands of orphaned pages, inconsistent canonical tags across localized variants, and a JavaScript-heavy frontend that significantly slowed Google’s ability to crawl and index new content. Core Web Vitals were failing across all three metrics on mobile, and the brand’s schema markup was minimal, leaving enormous entity authority unclaimed in Google’s Knowledge Graph.
Rakuten needed a sophisticated SEO program that could operate at enterprise scale: cleaning up years of technical debt, rebuilding topical authority in affiliate marketing and consumer cashback, and positioning the brand for prominence in the emerging AI search landscape.
Our Approach
We deployed a three-track program running in parallel: enterprise technical remediation, entity and brand SEO, and an affiliate publisher content system targeting the B2B side of Rakuten’s business. The technical track began with a full crawl analysis identifying 2,200+ pages with canonical conflicts, 890 orphaned URLs with existing backlinks, and a JavaScript rendering bottleneck that delayed indexing by an average of 19 days. We worked with Rakuten’s engineering team to implement server-side rendering for critical landing pages and rebuilt the internal link hierarchy around commercial-intent category pages.
The entity SEO track focused on claiming and strengthening Rakuten’s Knowledge Panel presence, building structured citation consistency across 140+ web properties, and optimizing for Google’s entity disambiguation. We produced a 60-page entity authority document that guided content, schema, and digital PR efforts. For AI Overview optimization, we restructured all category pages with direct-answer lead paragraphs, implemented Merchant, Organization, and FAQPage schema, and built a systematic outreach program targeting editorial placements on sites Google uses as AI Overview sources.
Key Initiatives
- Resolved 2,200+ canonical conflicts and repatriated PageRank from 890 orphaned URLs via 301 redirect consolidation
- Implemented server-side rendering for 340 high-priority category pages, reducing average indexing lag from 19 days to 2 days
- Built comprehensive entity authority program: Knowledge Panel optimization, schema deployment across 1,400+ pages, and 140-property citation audit
- Created 24 cornerstone affiliate publisher acquisition pages across retail, travel, financial services, CPG, health, and tech verticals
- Launched AI Overview optimization track with structured data, direct-answer content rewrites, and editorial placement outreach
- Improved Core Web Vitals to passing thresholds across 95% of priority pages
The Results
Over 12 months, Rakuten’s organic traffic recovered and surpassed previous peak levels, growing 228% from the program baseline. Brand search volume grew 31% year-over-year. The technical overhaul enabled Google to index new content within 48 hours on average, compared to the previous 19-day lag. Rakuten now appears in 47% of relevant Google AI Overviews for affiliate marketing and cashback queries, up from near-zero citation rate at program start.
The affiliate publisher acquisition content program generated 156 net-new qualified publisher inquiries in the first 9 months, contributing to $3.4M in incremental affiliate network partnership value. Domain Rating improved by 22 points as digital PR drove authoritative editorial links from Forbes, Business Insider, NerdWallet, and 34 other high-authority publishers.
“We had lived with organic traffic decline so long it started to feel structural. SaaS SEO showed us it was entirely fixable, and they proved it with results that exceeded every benchmark we had set. The AI Overview work alone changed how our brand is perceived in search.”
— James Kowalski, VP of Performance Marketing at Rakuten
About Rakuten
Rakuten is one of the world’s largest e-commerce and internet services companies, operating the Rakuten Rewards cashback platform and Rakuten Advertising, a leading global affiliate marketing network. In North America, Rakuten Rewards counts over 15 million active members and partners with thousands of the world’s top retailers. For brand advertisers and publishers alike, Rakuten’s affiliate network is a primary performance marketing channel, making organic search visibility a platform growth imperative.
