Milk Bar is a dessert company with bakeries known for making original desserts inspired by classic American sweets, like Cereal Milk Soft Serve. Based in New York, Milk Bar was founded by pastry chef Christina Tosi in 2008. Tosi received the James Beard Outstanding Pastry Chef award in 2015 and was featured in season four of Netflix’s documentary series, Chef’s Table, in 2018. Since the opening of its original location in New York’s East Village neighborhood, Milk Bar has expanded across North America, with locations in Los Angeles, Washington D.C, Boston, Las Vegas, and Toronto. Milk Bar also offers baked goods delivery nationwide through its website and same-day delivery in select cities.
Milk Bar’s engagement with Sure Oak coincided with the coronavirus pandemic, which was a devastating blow to the economy, particularly the service industry. And while you could say it was unfortunate timing, it also offered a unique opportunity to focus on improving Milk Bar’s overall organic search visibility, especially for its eCommerce capabilities. This strategy ultimately paid off, as revenue sitewide from organic visitors more than doubled in just two months. The additional demand from people who wanted sweet treats delivered to their homes, combined with a thoughtful and timely SEO strategy, ensured everyone at home was still able to scratch their Milk Bar itch.
In order to identify the biggest opportunities for Milk Bar, Sure Oak conducted an SEO Game Plan, a proprietary methodology used to lay out exactly how to build a sustainable foundation for long-term growth and success in organic search.
Through the Game Plan, Sure Oak identified the biggest opportunities were to optimize the existing content on the website and create new content targeted at high-value keyword phrases, including phrases related to specific holidays, like Mother’s Day.
The majority of the existing content optimization revolved around targeting phrases that included the word, “delivery.” There were already several pages on the website that were ideal for retargeting those types of phrases. They were a great starting point.
Sure Oak worked closely with Milk Bar’s internal marketing team to churn out updated content for 15 existing pages in two months. Those pages included:
All content was reviewed by Sure Oak to ensure it aligned with the original strategy. And as the revised content was added to the site, Milk Bar started seeing results immediately.
The strategy Sure Oak laid out in the original Game Plan was exactly what Milk Bar needed. Focusing on optimizing existing pages spurred a 202 percent increase in revenue on targeted pages. The demand for online orders due to so many people staying at home in April and May also contributed to the increase.
Improved search rankings also generated a 171 percent increase in organic users in April and May compared with the previous two months — February and March.
In addition, the number of keywords the website ranked for was 34 percent higher at the end of May compared with the end of March two months prior.
