Case Study forHistorybymail.comthrough SEO & Marketing
Strategic SEO that drives traffic, increases rankings, and grows revenue for ambitious e‑commerce brands.
Project Overview
History By Mail
Client: History By Mail operates a unique subscription box service on Shopify Plus, sending customers historical letters and artifacts. Their model is equal parts e-commerce and education, relying heavily on storytelling and content to convey its value.
Primary Goal:
To build topical authority around historical topics and figures, attract a audience passionate about history, and drive subscriptions through organic content marketing and strategic SEO. The focus was less on transactional keywords and more on capturing informational search intent.
Our Approach:
We implemented a content-led growth strategy, leveraging the clients incredible stories to create a powerful SEO asset. The strategy was built on creating comprehensive, pillar-based content that would rank for broad historical terms and seamlessly integrate with the product offering.
Why Choose Our Development Team?
Our developers have 8+ years of experience with Shopify Plus, custom app development, and enterprise e-commerce solutions. We've helped over 200+ stores scale from startup to multi-million dollar businesses. Every line of code we write is optimized for performance, security, and scalability.
Development Excellence
Custom solutions that scale with your business
Key Services Delivered:
Content & Topic Cluster Strategy:
Moving beyond product pages to build a content universe. We identified core pillar topics (e.g., History Gifts, Space Exploration) and created supporting cluster content.
E-commerce Blogging & SEO:
Transforming their blog into a primary traffic driver by targeting long-tail historical questions, dates, and figure biographies that their target audience searches for.
On-Page SEO for Storytelling:
Optimizing key landing pages (e.g., Civil War Letters Subscription) to balance narrative with keyword targeting and clear calls-to-action.
Linkable Asset Creation:
Designing content (e.g., detailed timelines, historical deep-dives, image galleries of artifacts) specifically to attract natural backlinks from educational and history enthusiast websites.
Technical SEO for Content Discovery:
Improving site structure and internal linking to ensure visitors discovering them through content could easily find and understand the subscription product.
Challenges
The Unsearchable Product:
Unlike kitchen handles, people do not search for historical letter subscription box. The core challenge was bridging the gap between what the product is and what their target audience actually searches for online (e.g., Abraham Lincoln facts, Apollo 11 mission details).
Establishing Authority:
Competing for historical keywords against giants like Wikipedia, History.com, and museums (.edu domains) is incredibly difficult. We needed a strategy to prove to Google that HistoryByMail was a credible, expert source on history.
Long Conversion Funnel:
The path from reading a blog post about WWII trivia to purchasing a monthly subscription is long and non-linear. The strategy required nurturing content that built trust and demonstrated the products unique value over time.
Monetizing Informational Traffic:
Driving traffic was only half the battle. The critical challenge was converting information-seeking users into paying subscribers, requiring seamless integration of content and product.
Results & Impact
Our authority-building content strategy successfully positioned HistoryByMail as a premier digital history destination, directly fueling their subscription growth.
+324% Increase in Organic Blog Traffic:
The content hub became the sites largest traffic driver, accounting for over 65% of all monthly sessions.
Acquired Top 3 Rankings for High-Value Informational Keywords:
Achieved first-page rankings for highly competitive terms like civil war timeline, apollo 11 crew, and vintage love letters, often outranking major publishers.
Built a Portfolio of 150+ Quality Backlinks:
Our linkable assets earned natural links from reputable sources including educational blogs, history forums, and resource pages, significantly increasing domain authority and trust.
20% of New Subscriptions Attributed to Organic Content:
By implementing strategic CTAs and content upgrades within articles, we created a direct and measurable path from learning history to experiencing it, making organic content a primary revenue source.
Reduced Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC):
By establishing a owned organic channel, the client significantly reduced its reliance on paid advertising, improving overall profitability and business sustainability.