Who’s in scale mode!?
In this newsletter you’ll find: 👇
🌎 Misfits Market SEO analysis.
👀 Utilizing the bottom third of your creative.
🍷 Alcohol-free wine with Surely.
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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.
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
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.
🔑 Takeaways
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
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
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!!
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Why the Pilothouse team loves this 👆
It’s eye-catching, but the diamond shower effect obscures the product.
The viewer might not immediately realize what they’re looking at, reducing the graphic’s viability as a TOF ad.
However, incorporating the product image at the bottom right of the screen provides a clear visual of the product, resolving the issue.
Placing the product in the bottom right corner also draws the eye closer to the CTA.💰
Here’s another example of bottom third creative:
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DTC Newsletter is written by Thomas Schreiber, Sadie Evans, Collin Tate, and Rebecca Knight.
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