The original sweatshirt was invented by football player Benjamin Russell Jr. in 1926, the namesake of Russell Athletic.
This iconic crew neck sweatshirt has taken off in popularity since then, but unfortunately, queries related to this topic were inaccurately showing other brands as the sweatshirt inventor.
Russell Athletic needed to take ownership of relevant search terms to be properly recognized as the Inventors of the Sweatshirt in the digital age.
Services include:
- SEO
- Film & animation
- Creative content production
- Paid social amplification
- Strategy
- Analytics
The challenge
Identifying Russell Athletic as inventor of the sweatshirt
This was a high priority for the brand to correct. We had to ensure people everywhere were able to identify Russell Athletic as the inventors, thereby allowing the brand to own a proportionate share of the online conversation regarding the sweatshirt. Various PR efforts were undertaken to seed this information to the media, and Investis Digital was challenged to help Russell Athletic own “the inventor of the sweatshirt” search term and all related queries through performance marketing tactics.
The solution
Multi-part strategy to position Russell Athletic as the true inventor of sweatshirt
We began with extensive keyword research so that we could understand the intent behind each search term and why search engines were rewarding some content over others. When consumers search for sweatshirt-related terms, we needed to know: their goal, their questions and concerns, and what type of content captures the attention of this traffic.
We identified a portfolio of target non-branded terms like “men’s sweatshirt” and “men’s crew neck” with more purchase intent, while also including questions like “who invented the sweatshirt?” to catch people at the top of the purchase funnel. By expanding RussellAthletic.com’s content strategy to increase its relevancy for related topics, queries, and keywords, we set out to bring the conversation about sweatshirts and their history back to Russell Athletic and own more related SERP features, predominantly paragraph-style ones.
While identifying the type of content that ranked for these search terms, we quickly found that either they were highly competitive, usually owned by product category pages on retail and ecommerce powerhouses rather than any one brand on their own, or ranked long-form blog posts that provided recommendations and high-quality imagery rather than information alone. Plus, the predominant SERP features were featured snippets, which required an integrated SEO and content strategy to obtain.
With this research, we ideated a series of content types and topic ideas that would be as relevant and useful as possible to these search queries and their respective ‘People Almost Ask’ queries. And to maximize the overall utility of our content, we leveraged photo galleries, infographics, and video content.
Since we knew the search terms were highly competitive, we took content quality very seriously and coordinated photo shoots and video production to source the materials fully required to get the content right. We ensured our content was authoritative by supplementing it with images, galleries, infographics, and video tutorials to help the content stand out against competitors. In addition, this combination of assets helped us naturally acquire backlinks over time. Finally, from a promotion perspective, we amplified the messaging by running a paid social campaign to drive traffic and introduce the brand to new audiences. We were also able to collaborate with Russell Athletic’s PR agency to source high quality links back to our website and further enhance our SEO results through collaboration.
The end product was a series of high quality content posts that set the foundation for a content hub that will support diverse content experiences on RussellAthletic.com for years to come.
“Working with Investis Digital is like working with an extension of our own marketing team. For this specific project and throughout our partnership, they have provided creative solutions and data-driven insights to drive our business forward. Bringing the content hub to life and achieving these impactful results in the amount of time that it’s been live has surpassed expectations, and it’s a valuable resource that we’ve continued to lean on.”
, Manager, Digital Marketing & eCommerce
The outcome
Content hub means increased visibility
We earned our target rankings earlier than expected. We tracked keyword rankings and quickly observed that Russell Athletic dominated search results for queries related to the inventor of the sweatshirt. Additionally, the related content that offered an in-depth guide to caring for sweatshirts earned RussellAthletic.com the featured snippet for “how to wash a sweatshirt” and similar queries. The content hub now created the opportunity for increased visibility of awareness and consideration content. The initial pages resulted in 592,308 organic impressions and 9,351 organic clicks in the first 5.5 months of blog publication.
These accelerated rankings were supported by the traffic we earned from paid social advertising and resulted in a reach of 499,584 unique users on Facebook and Instagram, 29,202 sessions (at $0.40 cost per session), and 1.14 pages/session.
Prior to publishing these top of funnel educational pieces, the site predominantly ranked for bottom of funnel keywords. Not only did a full-funnel keyword strategy mean more visibility in the SERPs, it also built a larger Connected Audience to retarget across various paid media tactics. Across all channels’ 40,488 sessions to our newly written content, 94% of those were from first-time visitors, thereby increasing brand awareness among a new audience for future purchase consideration.
page 1 rankings from Google
organic impressions
unique users reached on Facebook and Instagram