
MIDDLE SISTER CASE STUDY
Year over year we increased organic traffic by 392% from 11k to 69k sessions and new organic users increased by 320%
Optimizing Middle Sister's website achieved explosive growth in sales.
THE CLIENT
Middle Sister is an online women’s boutique that is always carrying the trendiest styles. This fashion label started out as a Etsy shop and has quickly grown into a successful online fashion store. Over the course of our campaign so far, we have increased organic traffic by 392%Their chic and contemporary clothing and accessories are perfect for creating a variety of looks. Middle Sister is for women who live free, searching for wild passion and endless fashion inspiration.


THE CHALLENGE
After digging deep into the data, running a six-layer manual SEO audit that combines data from ScreamingFrog, Ahrefs, Google Search Console, Google Analytics, SEMRush, OnCrawl, and several other advanced SEO tools, we identified problems that were contributing to the steady loss in organic visibility: Our main goal was to drive further brand awareness and boost online traffic numbers. This was to be done through both SEO optimization and Google Search Ads.
One of the biggest challenges we faced with this campaign was a spammy link profile. Prior to engaging with A16 Studios, Middle Sister worked with a service provider who acquired tens of thousands of international low-authority links through black-hat SEO practices. We identified a distinct negative correlation between the acquisition of these links and the organic search visibility of Middle Sister.
Also, since the website was too new to be able to outrank certain competitors, especially for the more competitive keywords.
Since SEO is a long-term strategy and requires some time to become fruitful, we designed an SEM campaign to complement it and achieve the results Middle Sister needed in time.
THE STRATEGY
We started our SEM campaign by targeting high-traffic keywords. This gave us an instant traffic boost and allowed us to get our foot in the door. We also targeted certain competitor's brand names in order to steal some of their online traffic. In terms of SEO, we targeted high-purchase intent keywords in order to drive more high-quality online traffic to their website in the long term.
We also got rid of some of their broken links and bad links and create a content marketing strategy which increased the number of blogs post per monthly to 3-4 blog posts per month. We also focused on increasing the number of low-volume keywords within their niche by optimizing their keywords strategy to focus on those low-hanging fruit.
We also optimized their My Business Listing on Google and focused on building their inbound and outbound links. The entire team would agree this has been the most fun part of the Middle Sister campaign. The E-Commerce industry is always changing, and acquiring links from high-value publishers can be difficult, especially if you don’t have a well-planned strategy.
In just 12 months, our guest post, infographic, and link placement outreach campaigns have resulted in massive authority increases for the RCS domain. Here are a few bullet points on our strategy:
- Natural Links – We performed outreach naturally and organically to avoid a manual penalty from Google.
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Relevant Targets – We selected a combination of product, category, branded, and blog posts and funneled authority to our money-making pages with a strong internal linking strategy.
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Ongoing Efforts – We perform outreach on a monthly basis to further build the RCS authority profile while maintaining a small, white-hat footprint
THE RESULTS
We were able to achieve the client’s 6-month KPI within that time frame, and they saw a consistent month-on-month sessions growth of 25.44% from the organic channels alone – with Google Search Console clicks climbing from 2.3K to 5.3K.
This strategy was very rich content-heavy, and our best-performing piece has received 1,200 new clicks after being updated.
The best-performing product page received 6.38K clicks after being updated. Ongoing optimizations have allowed us to earn exposure and traffic through featured snippets placements, and now Middle Sister appears on Google's SERP within their niche.

683%
12-Month Traffic Growth
215
Top-3 Keyword Rankings
1,457%
12-Month ROI
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