Case Study

Slotflops eCommerce SEO and PR Outreach Case Study

Why Slotflops founder Matt Potts and serial entrepreneur chose to partner Vab Media Digital Agency to help launch an ecommerce website and run an organic SEO and PR campaign to drive awareness and sales for his latest Slotflops sandals product.

Matt Potts, inventor of ArchPort footwear, was introducing a new flip flop innovation, called “SlotFlops” which are very thin and flexible flip flop with slots in the arches of the soles, designed to carry credit cards and identification. Cards are placed into the arch area of the sole where they maintain the flexibility of the sandal while also contributing to arch support.

Matt Potts, a serial startup entrepreneur and founder of SlotFlop Ventures, came to us to get an e-Commerce website developed, so that he could sell his new and improved product line of slot flop flip flops – patented flip flops with concealed stash wallet compartments in the arch. This was going to be a third version of his sandal products, with previous ones being sold in stores like BrookStone.

He was looking for a digital agency firm that had writing and marketing experience with eCommerce industries and could collaborate and act as an outsourced CMO to his firm to develop creative content that would help bring the website increased traffic and conversions.

Slotflop's Business Goals

Build an eCommerce platform that would support the usability of easily adding and selling products online
Begin aggressive initiative to rank for competitive, non-brand keywords in addition to the brand staples.
Increase organic performance overall, targeting people who were looking for travel or nifty gadget gifts
Increase brand awareness with PR outreach to get coverage from travel bloggers and news publications journalists

What We Did

We decided to use Shopify because he was on a very tight deadline to launch this product and Shopify makes it easy to get a template and customize it. Shopify also allows merchants to have a shopping cart functionality with features like cart abandonment tracking with automated emails as well as a persistent shopping cart to allow people in the middle of a transaction to come back to their computer and proceed with their order.

Once the site was ready to launch we started testing and making technical on-site optimizations specifically tailored to the needs of maintaining an international e-commerce site. These improvements would allow search engines better access for crawling while ensuring the site displayed consistently across different regions. Finally, we optimized this shopping cart so that it could outrank Reef Stash Flip Flops, who Matt sued and won for infringement on his patented flip flops with stash pockets in the sole.

Check out our search optimization work for this website. Vab Media’s digital marketing team researched the best keyword phrases and trends. We then worked with SlotFlops to develop relevant content initiatives to both improve the site’s content profile and leverage creative off-site campaigns. These two efforts combined helped build brand awareness globally, and increased the site’s authority with the search engines. We also created each page on the site to rank for long tail keywords that had a high appeal to its target audience searchers. By taking into account the way people search and buyer personas we were able to open up a whole new demographic of travel and beach vacation consumers.

Here are a few pages that were used to rank this website: “Authentic Patented Reef-r Stash Flip Flops,” “Flip Flops with Arch Support,” and “Bottle Opener Flip Flop Sandals.” These pages have allowed the website to rank on the first page for the following terms “stash compartment flip flops,” “stash compartment sandals,” “Reef stash flip flops,” and dominating with three top listings for the keyphrase “stash flip flops.” Our research allowed us to discover that Reef’s top selling sandal of all time is the “Mick Fanning bottle opener sandal,” which sells millions each year. Therefore, we created a page to target the phrase “bottle opener flip flop sandals” to capture some of that traffic. We also created other creative graphics and digital assets to increase conversions on the site.

Stash compartment flip flops

"Andrew and Vania of the Vab Media team have expertise and competitor research skills that are top notch. Their ability to dive in, research, analyze, and apply their findings into the content they developed that get real results, has been so valuable for our business and bottom line."

Matt Potts
Founder of Slot Flops Ventures

Reef Stash Flip Flop

Flip Flops Hidden Compartment

Create content that is interesting and clever to stand out with your target audience

By creating compelling content for this site, using our digital technology & Copy-writing expertise, combined with PR outreach skills to connect with influential journalists this resulted in increased organic rankings, PR coverage, and links from authoritative top tier publications such as UK’s Daily Mail Online and the popular travel site Cheap Flights.

WHAT WE ACHIEVED

ACHIEVED #1 RANKINGS FOR BRAND AND NON-BRAND TERMS

Increased organic traffic, significantly in the US, as well as providing a lift globally. Slot Flops moved from no ranking on the first page to dominating the top 1 to 3 positions.

OUR SHOPIFY SITE DESIGN IMPROVED

Over All Key Performance Indicator’s (KPI’s) including page speed, goal conversions and authoritative inbound links to the website were achieved to align with goals.

PR OUTREACH INCREASED AWARENESS

After all the press and optimization work Slot Flops I started to get wholesale orders of 1,000 pieces at a time, so they needed to find a more cost effective manufacturer in order to keep up demand.

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