Schöffel Country Case Study | Organic Revenue +127%

Schöffel is a household name inside its own world. In the country set, the Oakham fleece gilet is close to a uniform. If you shoot, farm, or spend your weekends outdoors, you know the name without being told.

Step outside that world and the brand was hard to find, because the site only ranked for the language Schöffel already used about itself. “Women’s country shirts” sat on page three. “Ladies blouse” sat on page 83. There were pages for jackets and coats, and none for the waxed jackets, tweed coats and quarter-zips people were actually typing in.

Brand searches accounted for the majority of organic income, which put a ceiling on growth based on the number of people who already knew the name. Being famous was doing the work that being findable should have been doing.

Then the site was rebuilt, on a platform we already knew had a habit of hiding pages from Google. A migration into peak trading season is where hard-won rankings disappear.

Services: SEO, Content
Industry: Fashion, Ecommerce

Launch month delivered Schöffel’s strongest organic traffic and revenue in four years, which is not what a migration into peak season usually looks like.

Across the first half of the year, organic revenue was 127% higher than the same period a year earlier. Take the full twelve months either side of the launch date and revenue was up 86%, so this was not a spike that gave itself back. Men’s vests and gilets, the range decision, were up 337%.

Tracked visibility went from 8% to 17% over a period in which the visibility of every competitor we monitored fell. Women’s visibility moved from 2.5% to 14.5%, which is the language problem closing.

Non-brand impressions rose 64% year on year. “Tweed hat” climbed 81 places. Growth was increasingly coming from people meeting Schöffel before they knew the name, which is the layer that lifts the ceiling.