Case Study — Content SEO
Non-brand organic search up 63% year over year — 76.8K to 125K clicks.
Non-brand organic search clicks
Prior year
76.8K
Non-brand clicks, trailing 3 months
Year over year
63%
+48K clicks in Q4
After the content program
125K
Non-brand clicks, trailing 3 months
Rich, original recipe content paired with in-house how-to-cook video, published into hub-and-spoke meat category pages built to capture fan-out cooking queries.
Milestone Timeline
- 77K
Non-brand clicks
Prior year baseline
- 1 category
Ranking depth: Wagyu only
Starting point
- 4 hubs
Beef, pork, chicken, seafood
Mid 2020 rollout
- 125K
Non-brand clicks
Q4 2020
Non-brand organic clicks, trailing 3 months
Clicks (thousands)A year before this program, Crowd Cow essentially ranked for Wagyu and a handful of beef long-tails. Everything else — pork, chicken, turkey, seafood — was invisible in search even though the catalog was already there.
This was never a programmatic play. Each recipe was written to be cooked from, with real directions and recipe schema, and paired with a how-to-cook video shot in house so the page answered the query in both formats.
Those assets were published into hub-and-spoke category pages: a hub per meat category, sub-hubs beneath it, recipe and how-to spokes fanning out across every phrasing of the same question, and links running down to the product pages that take the order.
The result was a search footprint that grew by category rather than by post — and lower-funnel wins on buy-intent terms once the same discipline reached the product category pages.
Search performance
Trailing 3 months vs the same window a year earlier
125K
Total clicks
From 76.8K
7.85M
Total impressions
From 3.61M
1.6%
Average CTR
Larger query set
11.4
Average position
From 14.5 — lower is better
Video Production
Two paid social campaigns concepted, written, directed and edited in house — the creative half of the same engagement.
Top-of-funnel brand campaign
Grillville
A top-of-funnel spot built to introduce the brand to cold audiences. The distribution strategy came first — paid social plus on-site integration — with audience targeting planned alongside the media buyers, then script, storyboard, casting, direction and edit before the spot went live.
- Script and rough storyboard before the shoot
- Cast and directed on location with a second camera operator
- Cut for social placements and on-site integration
- Became the cheapest ad the brand had run on Facebook
$0.01
Cost per view
2%
Click-through rate
And above
200K
Added to retargeting funnel
First two weeks of the run
$0.46
Cost per product view
New top-of-funnel benchmark
Corporate gift note readings
Holiday gifting campaign
The 2020 holiday gifting push: concept, scripts, direction and edit for a set of gift note reading spots plus a midnight snack piece. The readings were cut into 10 to 15 second variants and run head to head on social, and the fireplace and Elf gift note cuts came out on top on engagement and click-through.
- Gift note readings cut into 10-15 second social variants
- Head-to-head creative testing across social channels
- Fireplace and Elf gift note cuts won on engagement and CTR
- Traffic pointed at the corporate gifting landing page
2%
Click-through rate
Just under, into the gifting page
2
Spots produced
Gift note readings and midnight snack
2
Winning cuts
Fireplace and Elf gift notes
15s
Variant length
10-15 second social cuts
Handled in house
Category Breakout
Category keyword growth
Clicks and average position, trailing period vs the year before
Turkey
Position 28.2 → 5.8
Before199After7,830Chicken
Position 28.2 → 15.4
Before557After3,320Steak
Position 16.6 → 14.6
Before9,190After13,100Pork
Position 40.1 → 18.4
Before87After585Seafood
Position 80.0 → 44.4
Before1After108
Hub & Spoke Architecture
Sub-hubs
- Fish
- Shellfish
- Salmon
How-to & recipes
- How to eat Dungeness crab
- How to grill king crab
- Wild caught vs farm raised
Product pages
- Icelandic arctic char
- Wild Alaskan black cod
- Copper River coho salmon
Every category hub links down to sub-hubs, recipe and how-to spokes, then across to the product pages that convert.
Fan-out query capture
One how-to asset, dozens of phrasings — position before and after
- thawing a turkey#69.3#4.2
- how to thaw a turkey#34.3#4.8
- thaw frozen turkey#84.4#3.4
- defrost turkey#57.6#4.4
- bacon wrapped turkey tenderloinUnranked#1.5
- defrosting a turkey#58.7#3.6
- how to defrost a turkey#83.0#5.6
- how long to thaw a turkey#93.7#6.9
Video paired to the page
How-to videos shot in house and published onto the matching recipe page — views in the trailing period
- How to Cook Frozen Burger Patties13,679 viewsApr 2020
- How To Cook Top Sirloin12,768 viewsMar 2020
- How to Cook TriTip Steak9,630 viewsApr 2020
- How to Cook Bavette Steak4,350 viewsApr 2020
- How to Cook Chuck Eye Steak2,727 viewsMar 2020
- How to Cook a Flat Iron Steak2,542 viewsApr 2020
- How to Cook Chuck Roast1,736 viewsApr 2020
- How to Cook Skirt Steak1,476 viewsApr 2020
Execution Roadmap
- 01
Category hub architecture
Build the hub-and-spoke skeleton so every meat category has a page worth ranking.
- Category and sub-category hub pages
- Interlinking hierarchy down to product pages
- Meta data and URL structure per category
- Keyword mapping by category, not by post
- 02
Recipe content + video
Write genuinely useful recipes with real directions, then shoot the video that belongs on the same URL.
- Original recipe copy with full directions
- Recipe schema wrapped around the content
- In-house how-to-cook video per cut
- Video embedded on the ranking page
- 03
Fan-out expansion
Extend each how-to asset to cover the full family of phrasings people actually type.
- Question and how-long variants
- Seasonal cooking demand (turkey, holiday roasts)
- Internal links from hubs into each how-to
- Rich result eligibility through schema
- 04
Lower-funnel optimization
Push the same discipline down to product and buy-intent pages.
- Manually built product category pages
- Buy-intent meta data and URLs
- Backlinks from category hubs to product pages
- Reviews and ratings for star results
Growth Drivers
Unique recipe content
Recipes written to actually be cooked from — full directions, ingredients and cooking basics, not thin blog filler.
Video on the ranking page
How-to-cook video shot in house and placed on the same URL as the recipe, lifting engagement and search visibility together.
Hub-and-spoke interlinking
Category hubs feeding sub-hubs, recipes and product pages, so authority flows to the pages that convert.
Recipe schema
Structured recipe markup making the pages eligible for rich results and richer SERP real estate.
Key Insights
- Non-brand organic clicks grew 63% year over year, adding 48K clicks in Q4 alone.
- Impressions more than doubled from 3.61M to 7.85M as category coverage widened.
- Turkey queries went from 199 clicks at position 28.2 to 7.83K clicks at position 5.8.
- Buy-intent category pages ranked too: Copper River salmon moved from position 25.3 to 7.2.