Planet of the Vapes x Digital Position Case Study // January 2020

Planet of the Vapes (POTV) approached us in 2016 looking to take their small online vaporizer store national (and later on international). Their goal was extremely aggressive but simple; to become the largest retailer of vaporizers in the United States.

Whenever we’re working with a client that’s looking for complete market domination, we look at the most searched keyword in their space that defines what they do. For POTV, this was the keyword “vaporizers” which has a monthly search volume of almost 100,000 on Google. Before we began our strategy, POTV was ranking in the 50’s for this term. Not even close to the big retailers of the industry.

What unfolded over the next 3 years was a gradual, but extremely rewarding path to the top for POTV. This term wasn’t even in striking distance until 2019 when we finally had the authority to tackle it (we built multiple years of triple digit growth in longtail terms until we were able to capitalize on the head terms). We began reviewing their current strategy and realized that their ranking page was the “all collections” page which is a default page in Shopify and not something they were promoting in their top-level navigation. This page also listed out all their vaporizer inventory but had very little text on it. In short, we started by realizing the wrong page was ranking.

Our optimization efforts began by creating a solid foundation on a new collection called “vaporizers” (targeted title tag, persuasive meta description and content structure for the page). We suggested an appropriate word count for the text and created a header structure that would target sought after content while providing ample opportunities for keyword usage.

We worked in reviews, educational content, added backlinks to the page, added it to the main navigation, and much more. But this was just the beginning. Now that we had an optimized page, we needed more authority site-wide to push that rank up. We directed an aggressive content strategy with how to guides, best of guides, reviews, tips & tricks, and so much more. We used all this new traffic to push internal links to the new vaporizers collections page.