There’s a lot to love about Misfits Market, including their mission of equal, affordable access to quality food, fight against food waste, and use of eco-friendly packaging.

It’s no wonder they’re now worth $2B (2x unicorn status). 🦄🤑

We’re breaking down SEO strategies that helped Misfits Market reach this major milestone along with improvements that can take their brand (and yours!) to even higher heights.

Well Organized Content

Modern content marketing is all about understanding what your audience likes, knowing the product, and creating stuff people will enjoy and share. A far cry from keywords and backlinks.

Misfits’ blog content is engaging, well-organized, and split into categories like recipes, news, guides, how-to’s, and stories.

This makes things super easy to find. 👍

💬 The Misfits blog is rare because it allows comments, which is cool.

Even cooler is that their Social Team responds to everyone. Comments are great for SEO and create value for visitors.

⭐ Misfits has star ratings on their recipe pages which helps them stand out on Google.

Following Google’s review snippet documentation will ensure that you’re structuring reviews the right way.

📦 Misfits should consider moving their blog from a subdomain (blog.misfitsmarket.com) to their Top Level Domain (misfitsmarket.com/blog).

Making this change can boost their rankings.

🔑 Takeaways

• Create your content using audience intelligence first and keywords second.
• Allow comments on your blog, but only if you have people to respond and a good spam filter in place.
• Use star ratings and reviews on your product pages.
• Host your blog at examplesite.com/blog for better SEO.
• Take risks with your content and create stuff worth reading and sharing.

Combining SEO with CRO

SEO and CRO are like peanut butter and jelly.

They naturally go together. One enhances the other. Incredible things happen when SEO and CRO team up.

Regular CRO testing impacts your organic rankings. This is because CRO can improve UX and page speed which benefits SEO.  🥪

Misfits gets this. They use Google Optimize to split test their way to more conversions. A culture of testing leads to better results.

Getting started with CRO is pretty straightforward.

1. Identify areas of a site to test and reduce friction.
2. Select a testing platform like VWO, Convert, or another compatible tool.
3. Create a CRO process. This split testing 101 guide makes it easy to get started.
4. Develop a backlog of pages and elements to A/B split test.
5. Posit a hypothesis for each test, record the results, and iterate.

🔑 Takeaways

• SEO and CRO are an effective, tasty combination.
• Dedicate 1-2 people to CRO and collaborate with your SEO team.
• Few of your tests will be home runs, but lots of small wins add up to big gains.

Impeccable Design and UI

Strong design and a solid User Interface (UI) make great websites.

There’s a lot to love about Misfits’ website. It’s simple to navigate and easy to read. Kudos to them.

That being said, there’s room for website improvements.

Running Google’s Pagespeed Insights tool revealed that Misfits’ site takes a long time to load on mobile. Google is a mobile-first index. Slow page load speeds impact rankings. 📉

All major eCommerce platforms offer plugins and tools for optimizing page load speeds. This is a fairly technical topic, so involving a developer is a good idea.

Multiple tracking scripts loading on the homepage are causing the slow load times for Misfits. They should consider removing unused scripts or use Google Tag Manager to manage them.

A review of the Misfits website turned up some other SEO issues.

🤖 Misfits robots.txt file (it’s like a website README file for search engines) is malformed and needs to be corrected.

There should be a field below “User-Agent:” that reads “Disallow: /”. This will ensure Google doesn’t cross its wires when crawling and indexing the site.

🚫 Visiting the Misfits Market homepage with JavaScript (JS) turned off returns a white page with the error You need to enable JavaScript to run this app.

Google has gotten better at parsing, crawling, and indexing JS, but it’s still not great.

‍

Most people don’t browse the web with JS off, but Google does. If they can’t see the content on a site, ranking for important terms will be tough. A site should always function without JS.

🔑 Takeaways

• Use Google PageSpeed Insights to uncover what’s slowing load times.
• Ensure your robots.txt file is formatted according to Google standards.
• Prioritize your tracking scripts. Regularly remove unused scripts.
• Use Google Tag Manager to help manage and deploy your scripts.
• Make sure your site works when a visitor has JavaScript turned off.

Focusing on Non-Branded Terms

Misfits ranks for broad, non-branded terms like fruit and vegetable store, which is huge. Most DTC sites only rank for terms that include their brand name.

Misfits could rank for even more broad, non-branded, food-related terms by creating content hubs with a topic focus. A great example is What's in Your Box?

Misfits should create a sub-page for each fruit and vegetable listed. Each sub-page could cover things like item history, growing region, growing climate, nutrition information, seasonality, fun facts, and/or a ripeness guide.

These would be good pages to include plenty of colorful pics with optimized image alt text to rank in Google Image Search and drive more traffic to their site.

🔑 Takeaways

• Get creative and develop content that will add value to your visitors.
• Organize your content into topic hubs with valuable, supplemental info.
• Create content that answers FAQs people have before/during/after purchase. And don’t forget to mark FAQs up with schema for an extra boost to your SEO efforts.
• Think of your content in terms of its usefulness to people not yet ready to buy.
• Use multiple optimized images so you can rank in Google Search.

Misfits Market gets a lot right with their SEO. 🙌

They also get some things wrong. No matter how big or small your DTC brand, one thing is clear.

There’s always room to improve and help your brand reach farther.

If you enjoyed this analysis, reply to this email and let us know!!