seo for a millennial-focused brand: Launching Piece Out

Piece Out Case Study

By Christina Sri

1. Challenge: Rounding Out a Marketing Strategy

2. Challenge: Developing the Brand Voice

3. Challenge: Finding the Right Website Platform

4. Challenge: Attracting an Enthusiastic Audience

5. Challenge: Competing with the Big Guys for Category Keywords

Piece Out’s mission is to help people spend time offline together. The online retailer launched their website with a line of jigsaw puzzles in May 2019, and building their brand via partnerships, social media, ads, and SEO. With a background in marketing, the founder, Cotille Davis, had the basics covered. What she needed was a consultant to help her navigate a topic she knew little about: SEO.

Solutions

I was recommended to Cotille by a mutual acquaintance, and hired on to own SEO strategy for Piece Out. Because of my background in both content marketing and SEO, my scope of work included launching her website, delivering a content strategy and a SEO strategy.

Once we were aligned on the strategy and approach, we prioritized efforts based on SEO impact, level of effort, and budget. I created a roadmap of all the projects I was working on for full transparency.

From there, I went through each tactic and monitored SEO performance using Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Screaming Frog, and SEMrush.

Results

Because the puzzle industry is very competitive and search results are dominated by a few well-established brands, I’ve predicted that it may take 6 months to a year for Piece Out to build the authority needed to achieve top rankings.

With that in mind, the website is performing very well after 3 months of going live. It is ranking for our target keywords on page 2, on average. Organic traffic has been growing an average of 82% MoM.

Organic traffic has been growing an average of 82% month over month since launch and is on track to hit our goal of 5K organic sessions per month in 6 months and 15K in 12 months. Conversion rate (sales) for organic is above the industry benchmark. Industry benchmark is 2% and Piece Out is currently at 3.4%.

The client is now pursuing in person activations and partnerships to help build links and boost SEO even further.

The founder had a vision to target millennials, so she needed a writer to craft funny, sarcastic, clever copy with an authentic voice. Brand is important to Cotille and is tied to her own personality. She wanted a specific brand voice that could translate across social media and all other marketing channels.

Solutions

I have over 6 years of experience writing for millennial-oriented consumer brands like HowAboutWe, Yelp, and Stitch Fix. My experience with these brands gave me perspective on how to craft language that met my client's voice and tone requirements. 

I helped define Piece Out’s brand voice, created a guide we could align on, and wrote all the copy for the website, products, blog posts, as well as some ads and social media posts.

Results

A Cohesive Voice

Overall, the client has been very happy with the voice and tone of her website and it feels consistent across all channels. She’s sung my copywriting praises to other female entrepreneurs in her workspace.

Once my client had designed her line of puzzles, she needed a website. She wanted to choose a platform that would allow her to scale. Since she was also investing in SEO, it had to offer features that enabled the process of optimizing for organic search.

Solutions

Comparing Apples to Apples

My client asked me for recommendations, so I dove into some research. I knew from experience that platforms like Squarespace weren’t great for ecommerce websites because it is slower, challenging to use, and has SEO shortcomings. I also compared sites like Wordpress, Wix, Weebly, Magento, and Shopify.

We landed on Shopify. It had the features we were looking for, was easiest to use, and didn’t require developer help to set up, and met her price threshold.

Results

The Shopify setup was a breeze and it has overall been a pretty easy platform to work on. However, there have been some SEO “quirks” (which I was expecting), like no control over the sitemap, duplicate meta data fields, and very manual solutions for schema markup.

One of Cotille’s goals is to talk to her customers and engage them via fun social media, stunning photography, and informative blog posts. She doesn’t just want customers, she wants an audience of like-minded people to join her on her mission.

Blog posts are challenging because you need to get into the head of your audience and they require a lot of research. Even more challenging is ensuring the blog is optimized for search and driving valuable traffic to your site. Because of my experience creating blog content and developing publishing strategies I took on the launch of the blog, while Cotille focused on social media.

Solutions

The Puzzy Party Blog

First, we needed to define who we were trying to target. I did some research and wrote two personas for our millennial audience. Based on customer feedback, I added a third persona targeting an older audience that might be valuable as a customer.

Once we defined our target personas, I mapped out the content strategy for the blog. I defined objectives, content categories, and distribution tactics. I then did keyword research to learn more about what people were searching for related to jigsaw puzzles and reviewed 25 competitor sites to see how they spoke to their audience. 

Creating a content calendar involved mapping out the first 20 blog post topics, which I prioritized based on keyword opportunities and level of effort. Because publishing frequency is a ranking factor, we decided not to launch everything at once, but to start with our top 4 blog posts and then release 1 new post per month. Cotille owned social, and distributed the posts on Instagram, Pinterest, and Reddit.

In addition to publishing frequency, we focused on some ranking factors important for long-form blog content (see: Stitch Fix case study). Once we were ready to go, I wrote the blog posts, went into Shopify to set up the blog, and published our first 4 pieces.

Results

The story So Far

In the end, I set up a blog with 4 pieces of long-form content, with a content calendar mapping out posts for the next year. 

In the first 3 months, we acquired rankings for 557 relevant keywords and began ranking on the 2nd page of search results for our target keywords (improving search visibility an average of 59% each month). Examples or our target keywords include: “How to Solve a Jigsaw Puzzle” and “What to do With a Finished Puzzle.”

The blog is on track to drive 7K organic visitors per month in 12 months. 

Piece Out needed more sales—and that started by us trying to drive more high-quality traffic to the website. While building an audience is important Cotille also needed to drive sales. So we decided to rank for more product category keywords. The challenge is that these tend to be very competitive and it takes a long time to rank for them. By implementing this now, we could get in front of more down funnel traffic.

While a larger company can afford a long term SEO audience building strategy, this client could not. She needed some more transactional activity on her site and SEO was one way of achieving this. 

Solutions

Experiment with Collection Pages

In ecommerce SEO, a common ranking and traffic acquisition tactic involves making landing pages that are "collections" of products within a given theme. This helps users find curated content they are searching for that they might not normally find via the site navigation. Although it typically works best when there are hundreds of products on the page, we decided to create 2 landing pages for Piece Out to help them start to gain rankings for some keywords that are relevant to their target audience.

My keyword research helped us identify some category keywords that are relevant to the products on Piece Out's site: "Cute puzzles for adults" and "sexy puzzles for adults." Because we want to build authority over time and rank for these keywords, we created two collection pages to target them. The plan is to monitor the performance of these pages, then create more once Piece Out launches more products.

Results

These are Still Baking

Cool Puzzles: The first few months after we launched them, there was not much search activity. In August, however, the pages began to rank for all our target keywords on the 4th and 5th pages on Google Search.

Sexy Puzzles: This page has seen a bit more success. It began to rank in late July, and now ranks on the first page of search results for “sexy puzzle” target keywords.