Fixing the SEO of an £80M Monthly Fashion Store (Adding 22% In Revenue in 12 Months)

Learn how eCommerce SEO expert, Louis Smith, increased a fashion retailers revenue by 22% in 12 months.

eCommerce SEO expert, Louis Smith, came on the podcast this week to talk through one of his case studies.

When he started working with this fashion brand, they'd grown rapidly through paid acquisition channels.

SEO hadn't been a focus at all, so they had a ton of technical issues, content strategy needs, and best practices to implement across the board.

We look at what those changes were and why they were pivotal to success.

In the full teardown [below], you can watch extra videos, get concepts explained, and deep dive into this full strategy.

Expect to learn

⚡ Why product coverage is so important in eCommerce SEO. But why there are still benefits to being a niche brand.

⚡ Why you shouldn't build all your backlinks to your product pages, and what to do instead.

⚡ Building the perfect navigation menu for SEO and other internal linking best practices.

⚡ Finding opportunities for category pages and why you probably need more of them.

Table of contents:

• Intro: eCommerce SEO tips
• Part 1: Ranking category pages [and website architecture tips]
• Part 2: Creating a content strategy
• Part 3: Fixing technical issues
• Part 4: Growth results

Quick Enterprise eCommerce SEO Tips

Before we dive head-first into the case study, here are some quick learnings on eCommerce SEO.

How is eCommerce SEO different from other types of SEO?

Non-eCommerce SEO, like service-based SEO and local-based SEO, typically involves:

• Creating landing pages
• Creating content (blog posts)
• Building topical clusters
• Building a logical internal link structure, and similar

While all of those principles apply in eCommerce SEO, according to Louis, eCommerce SEO is a whole different ball game.

The key difference between traditional blog SEO and eCommerce SEO is the concept of product coverage.

Product coverage - why so important?

⚡Definition: Product coverage of an eCommerce website is quite simply the range of products it offers. The bigger the product coverage, the better the website will rank in Google.

For example, the intent behind the keyword white t-shirt is to browse lots of products. Naturally, online stores that have many different white t-shirt options will come out on top of the search results.

“The best thing about enterprise eCommerce brands is that they have this power switch, I like to call it. They can flip the switch and that can push the pages to the top of Google. Because they have that authority, they have that product coverage.” - Louis Smith

Louis gives an example:

“If you’re gonna do a marathon and you search for running trainers, Google anticipates you’re gonna be looking further in-depth than that. There’s going to be different running trainers, different sizes, different colors, different brands. So Google wants to provide that customer the website that offers all of [the product variations]. That’s what’s important to Google today.”—Louis Smith

In short, the more products and variations you have to browse, the better you’ll do. This naturally favours brands with a larger product range (i.e. large stores).

Enterprise eCommerce SEO vs small brand eCommerce SEO

If product coverage is crucial for eCommerce SEO, doesn’t that mean that bigger brands that offer more products (such as Amazon, Asos, Walmart, etc.) are always going to be on top of the search results?

Yes and no.

In terms of SEO, bigger eCommerce brands have the advantage of:

• Higher domain authority
• Larger number of products
• Higher number of backlinks to their pages

However, small and medium brands have the power of niche relevancy - finding a highly specialized gap in the market they can fill in better than a big brand can.

At the same time, bigger brands also face their own set of challenges, such as:

• A lot of red tape makes fast decision-making near impossible
• Setting up technical SEO for international rankings (including deciding between subdomains and subdirectories - here’s a neat Twitter thread by Rand Fishkin on the matter)

“With enterprise, it’s almost like you’re shooting a moving rabbit where you get one chance. [...] You’ve got to be critical in what you’re saying and what you’re recommending. You’ve gotta be critical of the why.” - Louis Smith

How to prioritize decisions in enterprise-level SEO

Because of how strict enterprise eCommerce brands can be with making changes on their website, an SEO might have only a limited amount of time and resources to make the biggest possible impact on their bottom line.

So, how do you prioritize what’s first? How do you make strategic decisions and push for them?

1. Create a mini case study. Look at the data you have in Google Search Console and other tools at your disposal. What will bring in quick yet significant wins? For example, keywords that are close to the top 10 positions are perfect opportunities to optimize for.
2. Create a revenue growth model. Prioritize SEO tasks that will have the highest impact on revenue. Find an example on how to do this in our Typeform case study.
3. Communicate effectively. Once you identify the steps you want to take, you need to get buy-in from the management to execute on them. Here’s how Louis does it:

“A lot of the bigger brands I’ve worked with - the project managers are under so much stress. [...] They can come across as quite arrogant sometimes, but you know, they’re just under pressure. I understand that. I’d get them on a call and I’d explain, This is why we need to do it. We need to explain to your manager that this is going to lead to revenue, potentially. So this is why it’s a priority.” - Louis Smith

Linking your efforts to higher potential revenue (especially with data to support your claims) will never fail.

The Case Study: How a global enterprise eCommerce brand reached $80M in MRR

Background

Company: Global fashion eCommerce brand (name confidential)

SEO status at the start: No SEO work done at all; company grew via paid advertising to £80m monthly revenue

“There was no SEO leading it. They did grow absolutely phenomenally, but they were doing mainly 90% paid.” - Louis Smith

Challenge:

• Many orphan pages
• Ranking for different countries with the wrong domains - wrong geo stack
• Bringing in the wrong traffic
• Bad UX

Tech stack:

• Wordpress
• Completely custom stack on top of WP

“We had to put the strategy in place to make sure we’re ranking in the right country, that everything is in the right place. Building on top of the 20% that was working. With any website, I always say that 20% of the website probably brings in 80% of the revenue. So how can we focus on that and build on top of that?” - Louis Smith

Here’s what you will learn from this case study:

1. Building out best practice category pages
2. Setting up proper navigation menus
3. Building out support content + content strategy for eCommerce
4. Backlink building strategy for eCommerce
5. Adding product review blogs for your own products
6. Importance of product coverage in eCommerce SEO
7. Fixing technical issues

Part 1: Fashion eCommerce: Ranking category pages

In this case study, Louis focused on two crucial things:

• Identifying orphan pages and fixing them
• Organizing category and collection pages

What is an orphan page and what to do about it?

“An orphan page is a page that’s created and not linked to. It’s almost like hidden in the background of the website.” - Louis Smith

Orphan pages are a problem for two main reasons:

• Search engines can’t rank the page because it’s not linked to the website
• Customers have no access to the page

“The further a page is from the root, the more PageRank it loses.” - Louis Smith

Your website architecture should be set up to ensure internal links occur automatically between pages, so no page is more than 2-3 clicks deep.

“The last thing you want is 10+ click deep products, which is common with big enterprise sites. These landing pages have the potential to drive a lot of revenue. So how can we bring them together, make sure they’re accessible in 2-3 clicks?” - Louis Smith

A highly effective solution to orphan pages is creating hub pages.

For example, our case study fashion eCommerce brand had several pages related to Calvin Klein products, i.e. Calvin Klein Shoes, Calvin Klein Shirts, etc.

These category pages were not interlinked properly, resulting in poor UX for the visitors of the website.

Here’s how Louis solved the problem:

“We have these pages here, so let’s make sure that we’re internal linking all this relevancy from top-level Calvin Klein as a broad query to the subqueries i.e. t-shirts, etc. And making sure that the Calvin Klein query is linked well within 2 clicks of the website, so making use of hub pages.” - Louis Smith

How to organize eCommerce category pages

Let’s take two fictional websites to study:

1. The first website has 1000 products in a Calvin Klein category page

This was the situation of the brand before Louis started working with them.

2. Second website also has 1000 products, but instead of them all piled on the Calvin Klein category page, they are divided into subcategories on the main category page.

This was the categorization Louis implemented with them.

As another example of the second website, take a look at this John Lewis page for the category Furniture & Lights.

Instead of listing every single product they have under this category, first, they present the user with subcategories.

The subcategories can be different rooms (Bedroom, Kitchen, Living Room, etc.), but also types of furniture (Sofas & Armchairs, Coffee Tables, etc.).

So, what happens with our two fictional websites in SERPs?

1. Website #1 - The main Calvin Klein category page that lists all 1000 CK products will rank for 100s of keywords, such as Calvin Klein Jumpers, Calvin Klein Jeans, etc. However, it likely won’t rank higher than page 2 in Google for any of those.
2. Website #2 - By breaking apart the main CK category into subcategories, each subcategory page can target a specific keyword itself. The subcategories better satisfy the search intent better and as a result rank higher than the pages of Website #1.

So now that you know why you should divide your main category page into subcategories and create hub pages, the question is: how do you organize your menu navigation?

How do you help users easily navigate your eCommerce website, but also help Google crawlers index everything properly?

How to build great eCommerce Menu Navigations

Louis notes that the key to intuitive menu navigation is to keep it simple:

• Plan out the navigation in a spreadsheet
• Place the content categories and/or hubs within the navigation
• Emphasize internal links, but don’t overdo it

“Some brands overcomplicate it. It’s good to have that internal linking there, but customers don’t want to look at 100 links in the navigation. No one’s got time for that.” - Louis Smith

A good example of keeping it simple is Apple’s menu navigation.

In their dropdown menu, they only have the base of their offer, which expands when you click on the section you want, breaking that cluster down.

Another benefit of a simple, logically structured nav menu is that Google’s bots can recognize the hierarchy and structure of your website, making its indexing easier.

Part 2: Content Strategy: Are blog posts still important in eCommerce SEO?

Product coverage, internal linking, navigation menus… With all of this, do eCommerce brands even need a content strategy?

Yes, of course, they do.

Blog posts such as buying guides, tips & tricks, and reviews are still important in eCommerce SEO for several reasons:

1. Retargeting readers
2. Properly serving search intent via multi-intent hubs
3. Building backlinks (and passing PageRank via internal links to your product pages)
4. Reviewing your products

1. Retargeting

Creating an effective content strategy is useful for eCommerce brands that use paid marketing, for moving interested users down the sales funnel.

“Especially brands that are investing heavily into paid; you can bring the potential customers into top of the funnel [with guides], and they’re going to get followed up with the paid media. So, you bring them into that ecosystem.” - Louis Smith

Top of funnel content gets retargeted with product ads to drive conversions from topically engaged buyers.

2. Multi-Intent Hubs

A key element of an eCommerce content strategy is what Louis describes as ‘multi-intent hubs’. These are pages that target multiple users in different stages of the buying journey.

For example, in our case study with Cazoo, their category pages were multi-intent hubs.

Each one included:

• The cars in that category
• Commonly asked questions about that car
• A buying guide for that car brand

Google will understand that you are providing relevant, helpful content for the user regardless of whether they are ready to purchase trainers or just browsing for more information.

Blog content helps build backlinks (3-step strategy)

An eCommerce website’s highest value pages are its product pages.There’s no doubt about it, those are the pages you most want to rank.

But hardly anyone would naturally backlink to a product page. Would they?

So how can you naturally build authority to your categories without it looking unnatural to Google?

Here’s a three-step process:

1. Create blog posts

Blog posts related to your collection/hub/category pages will do a great job of reeling in users from every level of the sales funnel.

Here are some blog post types you could create:

• Product X vs product Y
• How to use product X
• Best product X in 2023

2. Link to your product pages in your blog posts

Where it makes sense, distribute internal links to relevant product pages in your blog posts.

3. Build high-authority backlinks to your blog posts

By building quality backlinks to your blog posts, your product pages will receive that “link juice” (PageRank) via the internal links you created in step 2. This will improve the authority of your product pages and category collections.

But how to go about the link-building?

“The link industry is on its arse. You go to Google now and search for buy guest post or whatever, you will see it’s like £400 for a DR 45-50. And the sad thing is, obviously, that link builders make a lot of money just by doing that. So a myth in the industry is that you need these high-DR links to rank. And unfortunately, a lot of business owners still think that.” - Louis Smith

So if a high-DR website linking back to your blog post isn’t important, what is

Niche relevancy. If you’re running a fashion blog, a backlink from a high-DR water filter website won’t mean much.

“As much as Google understands topical relevance within a website, it also understands topical relevance within a cluster of websites. That’s the type of links you want to be looking for. Links from trusted websites that are ranking for relevant keywords in your industry. That’s what’s important.” - Louis Smith.

The best way to go about getting backlinks to your pages is networking.

Here are some tips from Louis on how to build good backlinks through networking:

• Access communities with people writing for or owning websites within your niche.
• Engage with them.
• Don’t just straight up ask someone for a link - build a relationship.
• Offer them something that will be helpful for them as well (such as a great article, report, statistics, etc.).
• Many people are open to guest posts where you can add links to your website.
• Be smart - if you can’t go for tier 1 websites (the ones with the highest DR in your niche), go for tier 2 websites.

Creating reviews for your own products

“Just because it’s your brand, it doesn’t mean you can’t write a review on your brand.” - Louis Smith

Write in-depth reviews for your own products, list their pros and cons, do an unboxing video, be creative!

Thanks to Google’s product review update in 2022, first-hand product reviews with unique insights and original research will now rank on page 1 pretty quickly.

And who better to review your own product than yourself?

“When a customer is searching for reviews for your brand, don’t leave it up to other websites to bring that traffic to others, for them to put the wrong thought of your brand. Bring that traffic in yourself, which could lead to sales.” - Louis Smith

This works even if the products you’re reviewing are not your own. Just make sure that you have actually tested the product and that you have a unique angle on the review.

“This year, I think it’s super important with all this AI content coming in, people are going to be using a lot of the same, similar content. [...] So it’s important now when you’re putting out content to put a unique angle on and put different angles about the content, just to differentiate from every other piece of content out there.” - Louis Smith

Because that’s what the added E (experience) in E-E-A-T is all about, isn’t it

Google now rewards having actual experience with the products you’re reviewing.

Part 3: Fixing technical issues

Two vital issues had to be addressed in the fashion eCommerce website:

• Fixing geotag problems for international SEO
• Removing internal search indexing

International SEO - fixing geotags

The biggest challenge of the fashion eCommerce brand was that they had the wrong geotags.

For example, if you’re from the US, when you open IKEA’s website, it will lead you to the version of the site for US customers:

However, if you’re from Spain, for example, it will direct you to the version of the site for Spanish customers:

Having the wrong geotags on a website means that customers from one country are accessing the version of the website meant for a different country.

You can understand why this isn’t good for an online store brand.

“The last thing a brand wants is customers from, say, Italy, going to a Spanish domain and asking questions like, Why is this showing up, we’re trying to buy a product?” - Louis Smith

Should you allow indexing of internal search?

Aside from fixing the geotag issue, Louis also had to tackle an internal search indexing issue.

What does this mean?

Indexed internal searches happen when a customer uses the search bar on a website. The new page of their search that pops up gets saved and indexed by Google.

Pros of this are:

• More keywords to rank for
• More landing pages to rank on Google

Brands such as Etsy employ internal search indexing for their website.

However, for Louis, cons far outweighed the pros:

• High number of bot searches disrupting the functionality of the website and the data gathered from the site

Once these two major technical SEO issues were fixed, the fashion eCommerce website started rapidly increasing in traffic and revenue.

Part 4: Growth results

Finally, here are the results of Louis’ hard work on technical SEO, foundational SEO, and applying the same principles to international websites:

• MRR going up to £80M
• 22% increase in revenue in 12 months