How Clove Generates 29,000 Monthly Visits (Mostly Via Their Homepage)

In this growth through content case study, we look at Clove.

You’ll learn:

Let’s dive in.

What is Clove?

Clove is a shoe company for those working in nursing. 

Founded by Joe Ammon, who witnessed the pressures his wife felt as a nurse.

He saw first-hand how tiring - both physically and mentally - healthcare can be for professionals like himself so he made Clove: A modern sneaker, designed by him with input from other medical personnel alongside innovative designers.

The site only sells their shoes and a few other accessories.

What are Their SEO Metrics Like?

According to Ahrefs, Clove has a UR of 47 and a DR of 49.

With over 8000 backlinks from 836 referring domains, they rank for 9600 keywords, and these help to deliver organic traffic of 29.2K visitors per month.

This is worth $18.0K in organic traffic and over $20.0K in equivalent PPC spend.

How Do They Generate Their Traffic?

78% of their traffic comes via their homepage which, while being a brand page, also ranks for numerous keywords. And this is what I want to focus on with this case study.

The thing with homepages, you tend to have two routes.

The first is to hire a copywriter. They’ll deliver you great reading homepage copy that will grab your customers by the eyeballs.

If you do this, you’ll probably only rank for brand targeted keywords.

The other option is to go down the brand and SEO route.

This is where the copy might be created by the business owner or an SEO-focused copywriter.

Now let me be clear, the copy on this site is not heavy; in fact, there really isn’t much on the page.

So what’s going on here?

Why Serving an Underserved Market is One of the Fastest Ways to Grow Online

The Clove homepage ranks for 2400 unique keywords and these generate 21,000 monthly visitors.

All from just 434 words on their page.

And they rank on page 1 for lots of money keywords such as:

“Nursing shoes” KD 47 

“Shoes for nurses” KD 51

And a whole bunch of others.

Sure, they do get brand searches and you’d expect it.

But how on earth does their homepage generate so much traffic from such little on-page copy?

Well, the truth is, they focus on an underserved market.

Let’s look at the SERPS for Nurses Shoes.

Every single result on page 1 is from a company that sells other things.

Whereas Clove is the only homepage of a site.

So what does this mean?

Micro-Ecommerce: How to Find Gems of Potential

It’s no secret that it’s easy to build links to a homepage. PR lends itself well to this approach.

But if you want to grow an ecommerce business, it’s worth looking into what I call micro-ecommerce.

Clove found a genuine issue; the footwear for nurses was pretty awful.

It was only sold by sites that had fingers in other pies.

And so by focusing on this single product, they were able to generate links and rank.

So, how can you do the same?

My advice is to look at professions and products to see if you could enter and own this space.

Take this site for example:

They have chosen to focus on clothing for firefighters.

Or take this low-calorie alcohol brand.

They focus on selling alcohol with low calories.

And this example:

They sell weapon resistant clothing.

With a tiny bit of SEO know-how and some decent PR you can quickly own a small space of the internet that is currently being underserved by a big player.

This is a great example:

It's a wine decanter product.

OK, I know what you’re thinking.

How does this help me?

Hold on, I have that covered.

Split Your Services and Products into Their Own Brands

In almost any business, you’ll offer many products or services.

We’ve been taught to do this as it tends to allow for greater wealth extraction through upsells and down sells.

And yet, what I’m about to tell you is that there is great power in niching down.

Do you do keyword research?

Why not build a keyword research-focused brand and business?

Are you a Facebook Ads business?

Why not specialise in a niche such as Facebook ads training for Karate clubs…”Karate Ads”.

Remember, the key here is to look for an underserved market and niche down.

Key Takeaways

We’ve seen with Clove that by focusing on an underserved market, you can rank.

And you can also rank with lots of keywords and little copy.

The key is to niche down, but remember you don’t have to start launching new businesses.

The flexibility of the internet means that you could create micro brand websites to launch new products or services quickly.

Thanks for reading.

Andrew