How ( r e )ˣ Grew Organic Traffic With Intentional SEO & Content

An SEO Case Study From Chaotically Mindful

( r e )^x started on Kickstarter with a great product and no visibility plan. Paulina had a great idea, the supply chain to back it up, and the commitment to the environment. What she didn’t have was a blog, a content plan, or an SEO strategy. She cared more about telling the truth about sustainability than about tricking the algorithm. When we met, I told her both were possible! You don’t have to give up the truth or your values to get found online. This is what three years of patient, values-first content work built.

ACT ONE: 2023

I mean just look at this cutie!!

Starting From Zero: Pre-SEO

When Paulina and I began working together, the blog was non-existent. By the following year, those same posts were already earning significant clicks. Before any of this got started, Paulina was nervous about blogging at all. Sure, she trusted the strategy would work, but she was more concerned with every piece of content being meaningful, standing for the values she built the brand on.

So we agreed to try one SEO-focused post and one mission-focused post a month, and see how it went. Within six months, we weren’t even alternating anymore. The posts written for search and the posts written from the heart had become one in the same.

ACT TWO: 2024

Can SEO & The Brand Authority Survive The Website Rebuild

In 2024, ( r e )^x moved off Squarespace and onto Shopify, and went through a redesign that didn’t configure SEO into the plan. That’s a moment that quietly breaks a lot of small brands’ search visibility. The work in this stretch was reoptimizing the new site from the ground up, so that very thing didn’t happen here.

This is consistently murky ground and not the first time I’ve found myself in it. The website is done by one team, the SEO by another, the branding by another. This took me a long time to grapple with but then I think about how much I hate design, I could never do both! So this part is more about having the right people in your corner.

Are your design people acknowledging they don’t know about the SEO? Are your SEO people acknowledging they can work with the website team? If no one knows, can they refer you out? If you’re at this stage, ask those questions now and save yourself a ton of backtracking (and money).

This is the unglamorous middle of the story. It’s also usually where the wins from Act One have the highest risk of coming undone. It involved fixing newly broken links and ensuring the backlinks we already had continued to direct to live pages and ultimately ensuring the homepage had the right sections and copy, that the site told the right story, and that the keywords helped people find it. This involved new metadata, creating headers, and tagging headers correctly for SEO (not for design).

What comes next is the proof that it worked.

ACT THREE: 2026

Two+ Years Of Consistent Content & SEO

Google Search Console only retains 16 months of history, so the current-state numbers below reflect roughly the last 16 months, not a curated window.

$0 Revenue from organic traffic (note: rev wasn’t tracked before 2023)	→	~85% of revenue comes from organic search (note: only revenue that Shopify can attribute to a channel)
57 organic sessions	→	817 organic sessions
26-second average engagement time per session	→	51-second average engagement time per session
34 – Homepage average position	→	10 – Homepage average position
0 blogs getting clicks or impressions (because it didn’t exist)	→	4-5 is the average position on page 1. 1,540 clicks in the past 6 months.

And through it all, the site Authority Score stayed flat at 21.

Which is a win in and of itself. Growing off-page presence and backlinks was never part of this strategy, and Paulina had other things to prioritize so it never became a focus. The fact that we started work together with such a strong authority already in place laid the groundwork for us to be able to have organic seo success.

The two of these working together are why this score didn’t dip during the website transfer to Shopify.

THE PRODUCT BEHIND THE NUMBERS

Chasing Intention, Not Keyword Volume

More about the brand: ( r e )^x hangers are made from 100% recycled ocean-bound and beach plastic. No virgin plastic in sight. They’re also designed not to break in the first place. Where traditional (virgin) plastic hangers are not recycleable, a ( r e )^x hangers could technically be re-melted and remade through their supply chain. But because of the intentional design, it’s rarely been necessary.

It’s a simple solution to a complex problem. A product that almost every single person touches daily, built better, built to last, and made from plastic intercepted before it could do more harm.

We weren’t chasing volume with our blog content. We were answering the questions people were already asking, including the honest, slightly uncomfortable ones. Like whether a plastic hanger can really be called sustainable at all, how some of our small business suppliers were using them in their stores, and unraveling some of the mystery around (a few) sustainable topics.

Content built around real questions is what Google has been rewarding over generic, templated posts.

LOOKING BACK

The Takeaways

This wasn’t a six-month sprint or a campaign with a deadline. It was three years of blog posts, small fixes, and a founder who never asked her SEO to compromise what she cared about.

Working with Paulina was a dream. She trusted the work, told me the truth, and was always clear about where she did and didn’t want to spend her time. We both knew going in that this was going to be a long-term relationship for the work, and we developed a friendship along the way. And it didn’t hurt that within the first six months, the SEO was already showing it could pull its own weight.

The result is that intentional, values-first SEO isn’t just a nice idea; it’s a possibility. And the proof is in the fact that the content consistently became the top-performing pages, even above the products.

Unfortunately, ( r e )^x is closing its doors this year (2026). Through a combination of tariffs, green-hushing, and an economy in shambles*, one can only put so much into something. The work we did doesn’t disappear, it migrates. To the people who will have ( r e )^x recycled plastic hanger for years to come, to the readers who were informed or felt seen by our blog, and to a new generation to be inspired by what was accomplished.

Building Something That Needs This Same Kind of Patience?

If you’re a mission-driven brand, thinking about SEO, and you’re not willing to compromise what you’re building to get it, let’s talk.