Frank & Oak:

About Frank & Oak

Note: We’re especially grateful to share this case study. Frank & Oak generously allowed us to publish these results as the company goes through a transition — restructuring and rethinking its long-term direction.

Frank & Oak is a fashion retailer loved for its modern, sustainable clothing in both the U.S. and Canadian markets. Well beyond 8 figures as a brand, they’d reached a point that’s familiar to many others — their existing marketing channels had exhausted themselves and were looking for the next place to scale.

The Challenge

Frank & Oak had a solid foundation in all the most important marketing channels for a D2C brand — META ads, email, SMS, social, and influencer campaigns. But Facebook ads were getting expensive, and influencer campaigns were hard to predict. They needed to diversify and add stability to their marketing.

They were interested to know if SEO was a good option for growth, so we developed a roadmap for them to see their opportunity, the cost, and the potential revenue they could expect. Based on our projections and expectations, they realized the potential of SEO and decided to invest in a more substantial campaign.

Our Strategy & Approach

Frank & Oak had in-house resources they could dedicate to SEO, so we stepped in as an Outsourced Director of SEO.

After a short sprint, we found that Frank & Oak had strong brand awareness and domain authority, but didn’t have the SEO-optimized site structure to match. For example, they hadn’t built out the pages for high-intent, heavyweight outerwear categories, like bomber jackets, parkas, or puffer jackets, which were some of their most popular and well-loved products. So one big focus of the campaign was creating more pages and optimizing them for valuable keywords.

Here’s a bit more detail on what we did:

• SEO training: Provided training on SEO best practices and SOPs for their internal team.
• New page development: Built and optimized collection pages for outerwear categories, and their popular basics, such as white shirts, tees, among others.
• On-page optimization: Optimized copy on new and existing PLPs, internal linking above and below the fold, and structured content for better rankings.
• Supporting content: Blog posts and editorial content to reinforce category authority while targeting complementary long-tail keywords.

Our efforts resulted in rankings increases across the board, for keywords ranging from outerwear, to broad terms like “mens clothing Canada”.

What We Didn’t Do

For Frank & Oak, we chose not to invest in link building. Instead, we decided to put our energy into making the most of their already-strong brand awareness and domain authority.

On the technical SEO side, the site was in good shape, so we focused on content, site structure, and strategy where they would have the biggest impact.

Results

Within a quarter, Frank & Oak saw measurable improvements in organic performance:

• Non-brand organic traffic increased 2.5× year-over-year.

This surge translated directly into revenue:

• Organic revenue grew 48%, from $262k per month to $374k per month, in just three months

While SEO is typically a marathon rather than a sprint, the early momentum they’ve created proves it doesn’t have to be done at a slow pace.

Guillaume Jaillet