Organic SEO Expertise Allows Startup Clothing Brand To Continue Growing Despite Reducing Paid Ads & PPC Budgets

At a glance

We assisted novel, edgy underwear brand Culprit Underwear in regaining the website traffic volume that it had seen slow drastically upon its decision to undertake cost-cutting measures to reduce its digital marketing spend. Thanks to Blue Summit’s experience, efficiency and proven organic SEO tactics, our client was able to return to its prior growth trajectory quickly while simultaneously slashing its search advertising budget to almost zero.

Case Details

Client Type: Clothing Brand
Business Name: Culprit Underwear
Location: California, USA
Period of Performance: Feb 2024 – June 2024

Results

In just 90 days, our SEO strategies produced:

7.5x increase in monthly revenue from organic search
100% increase in organic traffic equivalent value (OETV)
41% increase in ratio of organic revenue to paid ad revenue
22% increase in Google Search results impressions

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Client Background: Novel Upstart Seeking Traction in Competitive Industry

Our client Culprit Underwear is a relatively new high-end direct-to-consumer men’s and women’s underwear brand. It is distinguished by its exclusive use of Siro-Micromodal, a new-age fabric admired for its superior qualities and sustainability. Made from beechwood trees in a carbon-neutral process, this luxurious material is not only eco-friendly but also has unmatched breathability, durability and softness. Additionally, Culprit stands out with its original, tastefully risqué art prints created by in-house and celebrity guest artists, embodying an edgy, smart and humorous brand voice that resonates with life’s oddly specific and relatable situations. Culprit accompanies these eye-catching designs with a bold brand message espousing irreverent humor, but it always takes its fabrics, comfort and customer satisfaction extremely seriously.

As an emerging brand competing in the luxury underwear space against both establishment brands like Calvin Klein and Tommy John and equally edgy incumbents like Me Undies and Ethika, Culprit was seeking Blue Summit’s assistance in expanding its visibility in online search engines to its target audience: rebellious, alt-culture Millennials, Gen Zs, and Gen Alphas of all shapes, sizes and sexes.

Over the past year our client’s Marketing team had experimented with a variety of paid advertising avenues on Google Search, which brought in some new customer traffic with modest conversion to sales but also quite became pricey to maintain on a monthly basis. Our client sought a solution for reducing its pay-per-click (PPC) ad spend while maintaining a similar performance level of the search visibility and traffic they had built up to that point. Over a span of four months, Blue Summit’s tried-and-true SEO techniques helped Culprit Underwear wean itself off of paid ads and achieve equivalent online customer engagement results through the more robust and longer-lasting method of organic search.

Breaking Through SEO Limitations for Culprit Underwear

A modern clothing brand with a bold voice and a younger-skewing demographic, Culprit has garnered the bulk of its sales from digital channels. Culprit’s focus for growing its business was not on any one geographic market but on penetrating the fabric of urban culture across major U.S. metro markets including its home market of Los Angeles, CA, a mecca for fashion-forward trendsetting.
Blue Summit SEO conducted a comprehensive preliminary technical analysis of Culprit’s existing website and prior to client onboarding revealed significant keyword gaps and a need for more robust strategic content planning and seeding; these deficiencies were hindering their organic search visibility. Additionally, their low domain authority relative to industry competitors made ranking high in search engine results pages (SERPs) difficult.
To overcome these performance issues, we honed in on developing a comprehensive SEO strategy to increase the company’s online presence, attract high-intent leads and drive sustainable business growth. Our SEO expertise helped them boost their ranking for high-conversion search terms related to their products, attracting more organic website visitor traffic and conversions while reducing their utilization of paid ads.

Results: Measurable Performance Improvements in Less Than 90 Days

Within the first few days, we were able troubleshoot common domain and webpage problem spots, then rapidly deploy technical fixes to correct these identified areas that were hindering maximum SEO performance. Then, we had our content editing team clean up the client’s legacy website content and also create new content that aligned with their product lines and brand messaging but was optimized to match high-yield keywords:

We added keyword-rich above-the-fold content to Culprit’s product pages to generate stronger SEO signals, but employed collapsible sections to keep the user browsing and shopping experience smooth and efficient on both desktop and mobile devices.

After 60 Days

Our client saw a sharp rise in organic (i.e. non-paid) traffic for keywords that over the past year it had been paying monthly fees to Google to access. Organic Traffic Value above indicates the equivalent savings on monthly paid search ads that we earned for our client, based on keyword bidding values and performance of keywords. By earning the traffic organically now that Blue Summit’s techniques and solutions had been implemented into their website pages, Culprit no longer had to divert a considerable portion of its marketing budget on PPC and instead could redirect those funds to other more critical operations needs.

After 90 Days

Prior to hiring Blue Summit SEO, our client was experiencing a steady decline in their organic keyword performance over the past year, which was correlated to their heavy utilization of paid keywords. With the systematic changes implemented we were able stopped the bleeding, and by the end of May the client’s Google keyword ranking count had made a sharp U-turn and was back on the rise with over 2.5K distinct search terms now referencing Culprit’s various website domain pages.

Achieving this rapid turnaround was the result of our SEO team smartly identifying high-leverage opportunities for our client’s products to be discovered by search terms that signaled strong buyer intent but had relatively little competitors. We were able to increase meaningful search traffic to Culprit’s women’s underwear collection by shifting our focus away from many extremely competitive terms that would have had our client’s pages drowned out or fighting hard with incumbents in the quest to earn visitor eyeballs. We tallied 11 new search terms that placed our client in one of the top 5 search result slots, resulting in 523 unique monthly visits by users with high intent to purchase.

Conclusion

In just 5 months, our strategic initiatives delivered our client these amazing results:

7.5x increase in monthly revenue from organic search
100% increase in organic traffic equivalent value (OETV)
41% increase in ratio of organic revenue to paid ad revenue
22% increase in Google Search results impressions

Through this client case, Blue Summit validated its capability to characterize and execute timely, relevant and highly impactful website SEO improvements to ramp up revenues and boost the bottom lines of emerging retail brands and consumer packaged goods (CPG) businesses.

Looking for similar success? Reach out to Blue Summit SEO now!