How Ruffwear Expanded Their Reach and Connected With New Audiences

Ruffwear faced rising acquisition costs across key paid channels—making it harder to scale efficiently without sacrificing ROI. At the same time, organic visibility was falling behind, limiting their ability to reach new customers through search. They needed a smarter, more balanced strategy to reduce reliance on high-cost media while improving performance across both paid and organic channels. The goal: lower CPAs, boost visibility, and build a foundation for long-term growth.

When Ruffwear noticed diminishing traffic and increasing costs from their paid search efforts, they called on Go Fish to create a smart strategy to drive more qualified users to their site at a more efficient cost. We obliged and developed an integrated approach rooted in SEO and smart social media targeting.

The first step of our initiative was to optimize organic search traffic to Ruffwear’s website. To get there, our strategic analysis identified the need for product-centered content and backlinking. Go Fish got to work and created content in a variety of formats—from blog posts to category and product pages—that allowed Ruffwear to target keywords they were not ranking for and ones their competitors had captured.

We then moved to improving the visibility of Ruffwear’s top category pages (such as dog harnesses, dog boots, etc.) by incorporating FAQ content and structured data into their site.

We also added other types of content, such as recipe articles and how-tos, to select pages, to help Google’s algorithms better understand the context of the on-page content and up their rankings. We then moved to building Ruffwear’s backlink strategy which helped increase their page authority and trustworthiness, earning the client’s site a coveted “Reputable” score.

Together, Go Fish’s smartly coordinated SEO tactics helped Ruffwear improve their website’s crawlability, enhanced keyword relevance, and significantly increased impressions, organic traffic, and revenue.

Fetching new audiences.

While building up Ruffwear’s SEO strategy, Go Fish also set out to optimize the client’s social strategy and tapped into Meta as a new source of customer acquisition.

To achieve those goals, we narrowed audience targeting on Meta and introduced seasonal and personalized ads that catered to the users’ specific interests.

Featuring biking, running, paddleboarding, and hiking in Ruffwear’s ads and pairing them with an image of a dog using a product built for that activity yielded outstanding results, including an impressive 336% return on ad spend (RoAS).

In addition, Ruffwear’s paid social campaigns contributed to a lift in their organic traffic and a big 43% increase in their organic traffic conversion rate. This was due to Meta audiences who were served the ad searching for the brand outside of social and converting on the organic channel.