Case Studies: Rothy's | Inseev Interactive

Case Study

Client Overview

Rothy’s is a fashion company based in San Francisco, CA. This remarkable environmentally conscious brand started with washable flats made from recycled water bottles, and has since expanded into various shoe styles and other accessories. They have generated an incredible amount of loyalty and almost “cult” passion for their products, and many women believe their shoes are not only the most comfortable in the world, but also some of the most fashionable.

Client: Rothy’s

Website: rothys.com

Business Type: E-Commerce

Services:

Content Marketing Link Building Full Service Orchestrated SEO

The Situation

Rothy’s came to us looking for a long-term SEO growth partner. Although Rothy’s had never focused on SEO (partly due to their massively successful brand marketing campaigns) they understood that as they continued to grow and expand their website it was imperative to have a partner focusing solely on organic search and acting as a strategic partner to help drive revenue through the channel. We all agreed that their specific needs did not require a fulltime in-house SEO team, but they did need a strong outsourced SEO knowledge leader and a significant investment in the underlying SEO execution services of content creation, link acquisition, UX for SEO, technical optimization and more.

Rothy’s was a perfect candidate for Inseev’s coordinated full service SEO approach. Our offering allowed them to capitalize on the knowledge, planning and project management of our SEO strategy team while still putting the majority of their SEO investment towards the executional needs on and around the site that drive search engine results.

What Happened

After taking over the account we hit the ground running. In the first month we allocated about the half budget to completing our SEO Research and Strategy Formulation project. We knew it was necessary to understand all of the potential opportunity for the business, and to get the various teams aligned on a 12 month plan rather than operating within a myopic view of best practices to undertake month to month. However, we also knew that we needed to keep momentum going on the execution side during the transition, and were able to do so with success because our pricing was so much better.

Our research project highlighted some key strategies that we have pursued. These are a few examples of the initiatives we took on in the early months of the partnership:

As Rothy’s progressed, so has the relationship. Rothy’s has expanded their product line, and throughout our partnership we’ve supported the internal team with on-page recommendations and with off-page support.

Establishing workflows is at the core of any good partnership, especially when working with larger companies and established startups. This is no different at Rothy’s, where product, engineering, and marketing teams need to collaborate to launch new site sections and product lines. Understanding these dynamics within a company from the start can helped us to set up the relationship for long-term success.

Below are some key strategies we’ve implemented over the years to drive massive growth in the SEO channel and provide an incredible amount of enterprise value for the brand:

Strategy 01

SEO Category Pages

Like all e-commerce companies, the category page is a vital part of the shopping experience on the site. In SEO, we find there’s a consistent calibration between SEO and UX. For Rothy’s, maintaining and upholding their brand image is vital, so we worked with the internal team to come up a unique approach to their category pages.

To integrate more contextual content we suggested building pages that contain text interweaved with products. An SEO-optimized, content rich SEO category page was born.

https://rothys.com/collections/animal-flats

Strategy 02

Blog Strategy (Editorial Content)

The Rothy’s blog was driving limited organic traffic when we first started working together. As a way to build huge amounts of high funnel traffic for fashion conscious women, we decided to pursue a robust editorial content strategy. Today, this approach is one of the biggest feeders of quality retargeting audiences for the brand.

We started by identifying informational, support queries that were related to Rothy’s core focus- flats. Our initial content efforts centered on comprehensive pieces answering general queries, such as “how to dress with flats.”

Over time as Rothy’s has evolved we’ve broadened the scope of our content to be more focused on general queries, while also supporting any lower funnel topics that align with new product launches.

Strategy 03

Technical Improvements / Monitoring

As with any of our clients, we want to make sure that every aspect of the site is functioning properly and we’re presenting the best version of the site to the search engines. For an enterprise company, monitoring everything happening across 100+ subdomains, multiple platforms, and millions of URLs can be a full-time job.

The reality is that most companies don’t need this much attention to the technical piece, and an SEO’s role should be passively monitoring the health of a website. Platforms like Shopify are built to control for major issues that custom platforms might have.

We completed our standard technical analysis during the audit and uncovered a few issues, none of which were detrimental to performance. Over time, we’ve moved to a more passive cadence of report checking to ensure things are functioning properly; they still are.

Results

A little less than two years into the relationship, Rothy’s has $60,000 of paid traffic equivalency in non-brand traffic. When we started they had less than $1,000. The blog has grown steadily, and the partnership continues to develop.