How Candor Helped Dibbs 10x Organic Traffic and Launch a B2B Offering

Capturing the collector market’s attention

Web3 provides exciting new opportunities for businesses, brands, and creators to connect with their fans and collectors while generating new revenue streams, but it can be a tricky landscape to navigate. 

Enter Dibbs, a business founded in 2020 amid the COVID-19 pandemic — a time when many people were finding ways to connect with others while at home, including digging up old collectibles –– to help collectors and businesses give physical products a new digital life. The NFT market soared, alongside sales of trading cards. When Web3 emerged as an outlet for those using digital expression to form authentic, meaningful connections, Dibbs saw an opportunity to unify all these trends using blockchain technology through its one-of-a-kind “Tokenization-as-a-Service” platform. With Dibbs, anyone can easily convert their physical collectibles — such as trading cards, movie and music memorabilia, and more — into digital tokens.

As a startup, Dibbs faced several challenges in making its offering a success. The most pressing: gain a critical mass of initial users to help build enough momentum to carry the business into its next growth stage. Dibbs needed users to list high-valued sports and trading cards on its marketplace, which in turn would draw in other users to buy, sell, and trade fractionalized shares of these rare and valuable assets, generating a sustainable user acquisition and growth loop.

To draw in new users, Dibbs set out to capture its share of the current Web3 user market and the larger collector’s market, currently valued at over $360 billion. However, Dibbs was well aware that Web3 pros can sense paid marketing from a mile away, and they don’t like it. Anyone can buy traffic — Dibbs needed to earn organic traffic if it was going to win the respect of the community. Meanwhile, hardcore collectors are experts in their respective hobbies, forming communities with like-minded individuals to share knowledge and brag about their latest pickups. These collectors may be skeptical of newcomers into the space, so Dibbs needed to quickly and authentically earn their trust by positioning itself as an expert resource in a nascent industry and in a diverse array of collectibles.

With these challenges in mind, Dibbs brought Candor on to help drive organic traffic to its site, position it as an expert in the NFT and broader collectible space, and help grow its user base.

10x traffic in less than a year

People share a common drive to collect rare and valuable objects, whether hard-to-find rookie cards or limited digital recreations. Candor wanted to tap into this innate human desire and connect it directly to Dibbs’ value proposition.

An initial round of keyword research for Dibbs surfaced more than 60 high-traffic search keywords related to sports cards, Pokémon cards, and other collectibles — the bread and butter of Dibbs’ marketplace — all claimed by pages that didn’t reflect the latest SEO standards.

Candor proposed an initial selection of 26 articles to quickly claim those keywords for Dibbs and drive more traffic to its marketplace. The articles were just as friendly to curious readers as they were to Google’s web crawlers, providing knowledgeable, helpful content that informed and enlightened readers about the growing digital collectibles space. As Dibbs continued publishing authoritative content, its link profile grew and Google came to recognize the Dibbs blog as an important resource for readers, leading to organic backlinks and increased domain authority, boosting its search visibility even higher.

The results were impressive — and swift. About three months after Dibbs started working with Candor, the company saw a 193% increase in non-branded search impressions, with a nearly 240% boost to monthly unique visitors. The content also delivered a nearly four-fold increase in non-branded search clicks.

Candor also boosted page one keywords by a factor of ten. In under a year, Dibbs went from around 100 page-one keywords to over 1,000, including 100 keywords featured between the number one and number three slots in Google search results. 

This growth wasn’t achieved through short-lived search engine fodder, either: Dibbs’ top growth queries for baseball card values and Pokémon card values quickly shook out to seven thousand and five thousand impressions, respectively.

Candor’s approach to crafting genuinely helpful content while targeting critical keywords has contributed to a ten-fold growth in organic traffic to Dibbs’ website. Its high-value content is poised to keep delivering results to Dibbs for years to come.

Driving the expansion into B2B

With the growth of its fractionalized marketplace well underway, Dibbs saw an opportunity to leverage its experience in B2C and expand into B2B Web3 partnerships. Dibbs began offering tokenization-as-a-service to businesses and larger enterprises, and Candor was agile and strategic enough to move with it.

Brands and IP holders with valuable physical assets — movie franchises, musicians and record labels, trading card companies, comic book publishers, and fashion houses — are looking for ways to create digital revenue streams by tokenizing these assets, helping them forge a new path for deeper connection within their communities. However, they may lack the knowledge or expertise to bring a Web3 project to market. Dibbs, backed by a passionate team with deep blockchain experience, has perfected the process to do just that and wanted to reach these brands looking to maximize the value of its IP, market to an engaged community, and minimize risk.  

Additional keyword research was needed to aid in Dibbs’ expansion plans. Candor identified up-and-coming keywords framed around tokenization and the broader NFT market to capture what businesses were looking for while examining new opportunities within this space to capitalize on future trends. 

As Dibbs started unveiling its tokenization-as-a-service offerings, Candor was ready to publish content to draw in leads. As a result, Candor has achieved top rankings for articles like "How to Tokenize an Asset," "What is an NFT Vault?" and "How to make a Music NFT," moving beyond the foundation Candor laid for Dibbs' first chapter as a volume-driven B2C marketplace and into a B2B tokenization solution for global brands and enterprises.

With new lower-volume, higher-value keyword rankings starting to roll in, Dibbs has positioned itself for success going forward — with Candor behind its partner every step of the way.