In 2016, Rentskis.com set out to improve their organic traffic through the use of SEO rich content. A year and a half later, North America’s largest provider of rental ski and snowboard equipment celebrates a ~10x lift in organic traffic and hundreds of thousands of highly engaged readers.

“The most interesting result is that organic search has blossomed from 4k sessions last year to over 41k sessions this year.”

— Todd Rose, Manager of Digital Marketing for rentskis.com

Reaching their audience

Rentskis.com acts as the rental arm of Vail Resorts and exists in a space between tourism and eCommerce. As such, the two-person marketing team tackles everything from building brand awareness to analyzing regional eCommerce trends to better understand guest behavior.

For the Rentskis team, the challenges when considering a content marketing partner were several-fold:

1. First, the quality and authenticity of the content itself, combined with intuitive technology to make publishing a few-second process
2. Second, the intelligence of the distribution to drive awareness and engagement with skiers across North America
3. Third, advanced content analytics to contextualize content performance across owned and paid channels

To address these challenges, the rentskis.com team chose Matcha for the combination of technology and services.

Matcha helped the Rentskis team integrate their content effectively across different tools and measure the content with deep insights. Matcha’s content service experts allowed the Rentskis team to trust that content creation and deployment was taken care of by experts so that they could focus on an already lengthy to-do list.

“Looking at the site prior to when we started working together, we only ranked in SERP for around 500 keywords. The blog/subdomain “theliftiereport.rentskis.com” now ranks in SERP for 5,250 keywords.”

—Todd Rose, Manager of Digital Marketing for rentskis.com

In it together

In 2016, Rentskis.com began a partnership with Matcha and quickly launched a high performing content practice that has seen powerful short-term paid results as well as the compounding value of organic traffic growth over the last two winter seasons.

“The team at Rentskis understands that content marketing is a marathon, not a sprint, and they made a great investment in aspirational content + paid social. Eighteen months later, they’re now also seeing compounding value as the content drives more and more organic traffic each season.”

—Fynn Glover, CEO, Matcha

The first step was a collaboration with Matcha to set specific goals and understand the audience. Matcha’s do-it-with-you services allowed the Rentskis.com strategy to remain the focus for Todd, even while the content creation, distribution, and measurement tasks were tackled by the services team assigned to the Rentskis account.

A suite of experiential search-engine optimized content was created that was on-brand and designed to generate highly engaged traffic through paid social campaigns. The Rentskis.com team published this content directly to their blog through Matcha’s WordPress plugin.

Actively seeking new audiences was an important goal for Rentskis.com, so the Matcha social media team managed targeted Facebook posts. These posts were built around approachable and aspirational storytelling.

To monitor the results of their strategy, the Rentskis.com team leveraged their Matcha dashboard for quick access to performance data, and on a monthly basis had deeper insights reviews with Matcha’s media planners and content analysts.

SEO lift was just the beginning

Millions of impressions, hundreds of thousands of visitors, and a ~10x lift in SEO later and the Liftie Report has become one of the most important resources for skiers planning vacations or arriving on mountain. Two years into their strategy, Todd Rose notes a much broader set of benefits for the Rentskis.com brand.

“We’re up 40% in session traffic, 30% up in page views. We’re pretty much up across the board.”

—Todd Rose, Manager of Digital Marketing for rentskis.com

What’s next? Having won engaged awareness, the Rentskis.com team is beginning to think about deploying content across the customer journey to not only drive traffic but also intent.

Written by Rob Glover for Matcha.