| The project | |
|---|---|
| Client: | Rockstar Original |
| Industry: | Fast Fashion |
| Solution: | Shopify Custom App |
| Year: | 2024/25 |
| Visit the Website | |
| What we did |
|---|
| Custom App Development |
| Shopify Store Speed optimization |
| Advanced SEO strategy |
| Data Automation for SEO |
TL;DR(?)
Rockstar Original, a leading streetwear and fast fashion brand, partnered with Bluedge USA and Reflexive Media to enhance their Shopify store's performance and SEO strategy. By developing a custom Shopify app to automate server-side data preprocessing, they significantly reduced homepage load times, improved user experience, and implemented a robust SEO strategy focusing on evergreen category pages.
Key Achievements:
- ✅ Custom Shopify App Development: Created a bespoke app to automate data preprocessing, reducing page load times by over 3 seconds.
- ✅ Enhanced SEO Strategy: Collaborated with Reflexive Media to develop evergreen category pages, capturing high-volume search terms relevant to their audience.
Outpacing the Competition: Leveraging Website Speed and SEO Strategy for a Fast-Turnover Inventory Store
Boosting Performance for a Leading Streetwear Retailer
As a top player in urban streetwear and fast fashion, Rockstar Original constantly grapples with staying ahead in the fast-moving e-commerce space. With its high traffic and daily product drops, they need efficient data handling. Unfortunately, dependence on third-party apps like Fast Simon for merchandising was slowing their site, creating performance bottlenecks that affected user experience.
To tackle these challenges, Bluedge USA partnered with Reflexive Media to tailor a solution. They combined Reflexive Media's advanced SEO strategies with a Custom Shopify App developed by Bluedge USA, enhancing both the site's performance and data processing. This approach improved Rockstar Original's SEO results and ensured a smoother shopping experience for customers.
Why Page Speed Is a Game-Changer in Ecommerce
Fast-loading websites are vital — they boost conversion rates and make customers happier, encouraging them to buy now and in the future. With Google treating page speed as a key SEO factor, we zeroed in on this area for improvement. Speeding up the website was crucial for maintaining high visibility in search results and outpacing competitors.
To address the technical hurdles, Bluedge USA built a Custom Shopify App to automate data preprocessing on the server side. This smart move reduced delays and made sure that product data was up to date and ready before the pages even loaded. The result? They slashed homepage load times by over 3 seconds, all while keeping every feature running smoothly.
Ecommerce Is Business – That's Why We Built a Robust, Fail-Safe Solution
To ensure uninterrupted operations in the event of potential system failures, or need for maintenance, Bluedge USA implemented a fail-safe mechanism. This allows Rockstar Original to seamlessly switch back to the previous, slower system if necessary, providing peace of mind and operational stability.
Edwin Kim —VP of ecommerce @ Rockstar Original, with so many aspects to manage on an online store the size of Rockstar Original, how did you coordinate the mission with Reflexive Media and Bluedge USA to get the most of the SEO and development effort? We focused on leveraging each partner's specialized expertise. Reflexive played a key role in boosting SEO through data driven strategies, while Bluedge provided custom development and shopify solutions to optimize the user experience. Agile project management allowed for efficient and seamless collaboration, with regular feedback calls to ensure continuous improvement.
The SEO Strategy: Turning Keyword Data into Actionable Insights
Reflexive Media addressed SEO challenges with Rockstar Original's fast fashion business model. Product pages were not suitable for long-term SEO strategies because of the short lifecycle of fast fashion items. Instead, Reflexive focused on creating evergreen category pages that would remain relevant over time. These category pages were designed to capture the high-volume search terms that Rockstar's audience uses to discover streetwear for men, women, and kids.
Organizing over 20,000 keyword phrases into a clear, structured system is a complex task—but technology makes it much more manageable. Using its proprietary keyword mapping platform, Audience Key, Reflexive grouped thematically related keywords and aligned them to an expanded set of planned category pages. This approach led to strategic SEO growth while preventing page overlap and keyword cannibalization across the site.
The Taxonomy Problem: Shopify's URL Structure Limitations
Unlike more flexible ecommerce platforms, Shopify has a rigid URL structure, allowing only one level of category or collections. This posed a problem for Rockstar Original's ambitious SEO goals, where deeper category structures were needed to target specific keywords and improve internal linking via bread-crumbing.
| Other Ecommerce Platforms | Standard Shopify |
|---|---|
| https://competitor.com/category/mens/ | https://rockstaroriginal.com/collections/mens |
| https://competitor.com/category/mens/jeans/ | https://rockstaroriginal.com/collections/mens-jeans |
| https://competitor.com/category/mens/jeans/skinny | https://rockstaroriginal.com/collections/mens-skinny-jeans |
The Solution: Custom Middleware for Shopify SEO Flexibility
To overcome this, Reflexive Media developed Audience Edge, a middleware technology that allowed greater control over Shopify's URL structure. Bluedge USA collaborated with Reflexive Media to implement this solution, creating new, optimized URLs that allowed for deeper categories like:
| Standard Shopify | Reengineered Shopify |
|---|---|
| https://rockstaroriginal.com/collections/mens | https://rockstaroriginal.com/cat/mens |
| https://rockstaroriginal.com/collections/mens-jeans | https://rockstaroriginal.com/cat/mens/jeans |
| https://rockstaroriginal.com/collections/mens-skinny-jeans | https://rockstaroriginal.com/cat/mens/jeans/skinny |
This new URL structure gave Rockstar Original a competitive advantage, enabling better hierarchical organization, improved breadcrumb links, schema integration, and enhanced internal linking.
Maximizing Ecommerce Success with Reviews and SEO
Rockstar Original used Yotpo to collect and leverage thousands of customer reviews, significantly enhancing both social proof and SEO. The introduction of the new review schema has markedly improved search rankings by enabling rich snippets in search results, which include star ratings and review counts. These changes make product listings more attractive and enhance click-through rates.
Structured reviews refresh content relevance and enrich keyword density, which aligns well with shoppers' search queries. The integration of reviews bolstered the site's credibility and user trust, indirectly benefiting SEO by improving engagement rates and lowering bounce rates. As we monitor these changes, we see clear gains in organic traffic and SERP click-through rates, underlining the direct link between customer feedback, SEO enhancements, and overall business growth.
Overcoming Fast Simon challenges by leveraging our Shopify Custom App
Fast Simon dynamically loads product information from its servers, rather than delivering all product data directly from Shopify. While this approach has its benefits, it presents unique challenges for online merchants. Key product details are often missing, requiring us to enhance Fast Simon's product data “on the fly” to meet the advanced user experience (UX) expectations of Rockstar Original.
Our solution, using a Shopify Custom App, included implementing features like a second product image on mouse rollover, “Quick Add to Cart” functionality displaying all available sizes on hover or tap, and advanced backend capabilities for showcasing promotional messages directly within the product grid—enhancements that go beyond the basic data provided by Fast Simon.
Streamlining Merchandising and Inventory for Rockstar Original with Shopify Metafields and a Custom App
For a fast-paced brand like Rockstar Original, which launches new styles daily, managing merchandising and inventory comes with unique challenges—especially when color variants are treated as separate products. To address this complexity, we combined Shopify metafields with our Custom App to enhance and extend Fast Simon's data capabilities.
This solution allows related products to be seamlessly displayed as color options on the storefront, creating a smoother and more intuitive shopping experience for customers. By integrating Shopify metafields and Metaobjects with Fast Simon's dynamic data, we provided Rockstar with a powerful, flexible tool to manage their ever-evolving inventory with ease.
Edwin, in your experience, how has the enhanced product data provided by the Custom App improved Rockstar customers' experience compared to your competitors? Additionally, has it made operating and merchandising your products more efficient?
The technical SEO efforts by Reflexive Media, coupled with the implementation of the Shopify Custom App by Bluedge USA, have significantly enhanced our visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). These improvements have led to increased rankings in product searches as well as overall keyword rankings across many of our webpages.Planning and Developing a Shopify Custom App: A Long-Term Investment
Building a Custom Shopify App for enterprise-level brands like Rockstar Original has proven to be a smart investment on multiple fronts. One of its standout features is a robust library of metadata for products, enabling Rockstar to create a merchandising system tailored to their needs. By leveraging Shopify's native tools like Metaobjects, the app ensures fast, reliable data access—eliminating the need for prolonged interactions with customer support to resolve simple issues or answer routine questions.
Another game-changing feature is the app's ability to process Shopify webhooks—real-time signals for critical store events. This capability allows Rockstar to automate tasks that tools like Shopify Flow cannot, such as auto-fulfilling digital products only after approval from a third-party fraud-prevention system and complex logics. This streamlined approach saves Rockstar's logistics team hundreds of hours of manual work each month.
The Custom App ensures that order processing—whether auto-fulfillment or other workflows—occurs only after fraud checks are completed. This tailored solution addresses challenges beyond the scope of most third-party apps, making the RSO Custom App an essential and long-term asset in Rockstar's operations.
Bluedge USA Team, is it possible for merchants to build on top of third-party features, and enhance it with Shopify data, or even other API?
Yes, merchants can build on top of third-party features and enhance them using Shopify data or other APIs. In Rockstar Original’s case, a custom app was used to gather additional product data not available through Fast Simon’s API, such as metafields and extra images. This data was then stored directly in Shopify using metaobjects, allowing seamless integration with the theme and enhancing third-party functionality with native Shopify performance.The Results: A Faster Site with SEO Growth
Bluedge USA's Custom App development combined with Reflexive's keyword insights, and Audience Edge's URL flexibility to deliver impressive results:
- Page Speed: The Shopify Custom App reduced homepage latency significantly, improving customer experience and boosting overall site performance. It has since been leveraged to implement numerous additional features, such as reporting and automation, tailored to align with the unique business logic of Rockstar Original.
- SEO Growth: The new long-tail category pages generated over 488,000 impressions in the first 6 months in Google, closely aligning with estimated projections. The collections pages also saw a 75% increase in impressions year over year.
Knowing that SEO takes time and is an ongoing strategy, Reflexive Media continuously monitors the growth of striking distance terms (keywords ranking in positions 10-25) for Rockstar Original. Striking distance is an excellent indicator of future growth. As keywords gain traction, they close in toward the first page. Within 16 months, long-tail category pages grew to over 2 million monthly impressions in striking distance, poised to fuel the next phase of SEO traffic growth.
To illustrate the impact of these efforts on search performance, we chose a long-tail, niche keyword "black bandana jeans" which had an estimated monthly search volume of around 260 in the U.S.
Prior to the custom-app-category strategy, several product pages competed for "black bandana jeans", none of which showed up on the desired first page of Google organic search. Within five months, the category page /mens/jeans/bandana was within striking distance for "black bandana jeans".
By continuously monitoring performance for category pages, especially those that contain Rockstar Original's priority products, Reflexive has been able to close the striking distance gap.
Bluedge's Custom Shopify App combined with Audience Edge was the perfect match to get the results that Rockstar needed, said Tom Rusling, CEO and founder of Reflexive Media and Audience Key. We could not have achieved these results without Bluedge.
Future Outlook: Continued growth and control over SEO data
With over 1 million impressions in striking distance (keywords ranking in organic positions 11-25), Rockstar Original's category pages have driven further growth, even through the 2024 Google core updates. The combination of SEO strategies and technical innovations promises to fuel the next phase of traffic growth.
By leveraging Reflexive Media's SEO expertise and Bluedge USA's technical development, Rockstar Original transformed its Shopify website into a faster, more competitive ecommerce platform. The improvements in site speed and SEO performance have laid the foundation for continued success in a highly competitive market.
Since the strategy launched, we have published hundreds of additional targeted longtail category pages and continue to monitor striking distance, high-priority keywords (such as “black distressed mens jeans”), applying further optimizations to those category pages.
Our Shopify Custom App created new opportunities for Rockstar Original. SEO, website speed, and user experience all improved—leading to a higher conversion rate and strong business growth.
Bluedge USA - Nico
