Solstice Outdoor sells technical hiking and camping gear in a retail category where organic search is dominated by a handful of large, well-funded competitors. Their marketing spend was climbing every quarter, but revenue wasn’t keeping pace.
The Challenge
Organic traffic had plateaued for over a year despite continued content investment, largely because that content was built around generic product keywords the big incumbents already owned. Paid media was covering the gap, but cost per acquisition was rising quarter over quarter as the same generic keywords got more competitive and more expensive.
The Approach
A full technical SEO audit surfaced crawl and indexing issues that were quietly capping organic visibility regardless of content quality, and we fixed those first. Content strategy shifted away from competing head-on for generic product terms and toward the specific, lower-competition questions Solstice’s actual buyers were searching, trail-specific gear questions, seasonal use cases, comparison queries an outdoor specialist could credibly answer better than a big-box competitor. Paid media was re-optimized against cost per acquisition rather than raw click volume, cutting spend on keywords that were driving traffic but not sales.
The Results
Organic traffic grew 156% over the following two quarters as the new content strategy took hold, and cost per acquisition dropped 32% as paid spend concentrated on what was actually converting. Solstice has since expanded the content program to cover new product categories using the same intent-first approach.
