OOLY
OOLY is a DTC creative-stationery brand — pens, markers, journals, art kits — designed for kids and the adults who still draw. Category demand is steady, but search competition from big-box retailers is brutal.
The engagement was scoped to recover organic share in a category where big-box retailers dominate national search. The program is a textbook National SEO build — technical foundation, long-tail intent capture, content authority — executed inside a category where indie DTC brands typically lose to scale.
From discovery
to compounding.
Three steps in the engagement narrative — challenge, solution, results. Each card expands for the longer detail.
Challenge
Big-box retailers dominated every commercial query in the creative-stationery category. OOLY's product pages outranked nothing in non-branded search. Organic traffic was nearly all branded, which meant new-customer acquisition was paid-only — and paid CPAs in the category were climbing toward unprofitable.
Solution
A National SEO program scoped to the realities of competing with big-box. Technical foundation rebuild. Long-tail keyword capture targeting buyer-intent queries the big retailers don't bother optimizing for. Content authority built around use cases (gift guides, art techniques, age-appropriate creative kits) that the category leaders ignored.
Results
Organic sessions +163%. Organic revenue +124%. Organic transactions +87%. The non-branded share of the funnel grew from near-zero to a real driver of new-customer acquisition. Paid CPA stopped being the only acquisition lever.
Brand work
in production.
Long-tail PDP optimized for buyer-intent queries
Real production work. Live on the brand’s domain. Not mockups — what’s actually deployed and earning revenue.
Loved by everyone who knew the brand. Invisible to everyone who didn't. The category had a discovery problem no amount of paid could solve.
We found the surface the big retailers stopped paying attention to. Then we owned it.
Strategy by
discipline.
Long-tail intent + content authority against big-box dominance.
Technical SEO foundation rebuild. Long-tail keyword strategy targeting the specific use-case queries big-box retailers don't optimize for — where the intent and conversion live. Content authority built around gift guides, technique tutorials, and age-appropriate creative kits. The non-branded organic surface that the category leaders ignored is now owned outright.
Authoritative content the big retailers couldn't ship.
Big-box site architectures can't support the depth of category-specific editorial that buyers actually use to make decisions. We built the gift-guide, technique-tutorial, and age-appropriate-kit content that ranks because it's the best answer to the query — and because the competition can't build it in a way that ranks on intent rather than authority alone.
One discipline. Executed against the realities of competing with big-box retail. The win is in the long-tail, not the head terms.
What the program
actually delivered.
Real and measured. Compounded. They didn’t arrive all at once.
Sessions, revenue, and transactions all compounding. The composition shift — non-branded organic from negligible to a real driver — is the line that changes the unit economics.
Organic sessions +163%. Organic revenue +124%. Organic transactions +87%. The composition shift matters as much as the topline numbers: non-branded organic went from negligible to a meaningful share of new-customer acquisition. The paid program is now a complement to organic instead of the only acquisition lever, and the CPA pressure has been replaced by margin-positive organic traffic that compounds quarter over quarter.
It’s our business
to get proven results.
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