SITUATION
In 2008, many large retailers were still distrustful of SEO and relegated it to copy teams as an afterthought in their “free time.” The CEO and Head of Marketing brought back an appetite for SEO from a fly-fishing trade conference.
THE CHALLENGE
Help Orvis to dominate in search for the fishing and pet categories.
STRATEGY
As a catalog company with seven distinct category businesses from apparel to gift, hunting and home decor, Orvis needed to solidify its authority in the Fishing and Pet categories in order to win in search. We started by getting the house in order, telling Google what we wanted to rank for through on-site SEO, which in a business this size with thousands of SKUs and a dynamic UX, is no easy feat. But we worked with internal teams to bake SEO into a standard production schedule.
From there, we approached it as a content-marketing exercise and worked with our team and internal partners to build up a library of blog and evergreen content. First in fishing and pet and then apparel and all categories as we proved success, SEO content was shared in social media, email and through PR/outreach efforts to build domain authority for the business.
RESULTS
In addition to top rankings for thousands of key business-driving keywords, our Guide to Dogs, Guide to Travel, Dog Breed Selector and other bodies of content now drive many tens of thousands of relevant informational queries to the website per week.
