#E-Commerce, #SEO, #Digital Marketing
Indian consumer is evolving. With better disposable incomes and increasing awareness about fashion and lifestyle, she has plethora of choices from the hi-street brand stores to online sites. It’s a high stakes game and the stakes keep going up with big retail brands and corporate houses entering the fray. There is many an e-commerce player flaunting veritable and exclusive international brands like D&G, Alexander McQueen, Chiara Ferragni, Celine, Sophia Webster et al. Everything from party couture` to casual wear to shoes, jewelry, bags, accessories, gift ideas e.t.c is up for grabs. Of course the ticket size is Rs. 10,000 and upwards of a few lacs. There are deals, discounts and more deals.
We partner with one of the portals as their digital marketing partners . This portal has been around since last 3 years. We have been working on this brand for last 6 months. The brand did not rank well on any of the category relevant and high volume keyword worth the salt. Recently we struck gold. We brought 102 keywords with high search volume on page 1.
I share the recipe with you on how we went about this job. I am sure to have missed many of the tools and techniques that are being employed by the giants of e-Commerce. What are the new skills and practices to be learnt? Is there something to be forgotten? I would love to hear your comments and anecdotes as this will help scores of entrepreneurs and digital sales specialists to help grow traffic profitably. There could be strategies that may work for hot couture that may work for jewelry and vice versa.
- We removed the unnecessary pages for sold out items and the earlier sale pages. From a whopping 25000+ pages as indexed by Google, the number after trimming was reduced to a little above 5000.
- We worked on optimizing the images and text to reduce the page size from an average of 5 mb to 3.5mb currently. This reduced the page download time from 26 seconds to around 12 seconds now. Consequently the bounce rate has reduced from 45% to around 39% currently. We need to send the site on an AMP diet plan. Awaiting green signal from the client.
- An intuitive and simple site navigation structure was recommended. Women, Men, Kids e.t.c were made the primary tabs. Categories, products, Designers were brought under the primary tabs to ease the search.
- Next Up, we got down to changing the H1 tags. This is crucial for e-commerce. Based on the buyer’s persona research we came up with 2 category operative keywords – Designer and Luxury. All the searches (both short and long tail) include one or both keywords. Hence all the H1 tags were change. E.g Women was changed to Designer wear for women, Jackets was changed to Designer Jackets for Men and Designer Jackets from Women.
- Unwanted content like Sartorial Box, Curated, Visionaries e.t.c was let go. Instead relevant content around the core domain like fashion, lifestyle. Designer, brands, dresses & shoes e.t.c was developed and populated on the Home page. Keyword density of category specific keywords was increased.
- Filter by Price functionality was implemented keeping in mind the Indian buyers’ sensibility.
- Adding meta tags in such a voluminous site has been an arduous task. Our team changed meta tags to bring “buy online, “India” and category specific terms. Image alt tags and meta description had to be corrected simultaneously to declare page fitness.
- The search functionality on the home page of the site was earlier a pain rather than a convenience. It worked on exact match functionality and was case sensitive too. With great effort and multiple rounds of discussions, we have migrated to a phrase match search and also enabled a suggested category suggestion. There are still issues that we need to iron out.
- We collaborated with the client’s content team and changed the product description from an esoteric and technical explanation to meaningful, succinct and search friendly. E.g “Multicolour silk leopard print dress from XXXX” is a better description than “Steal the show in a leopard print sleeveless dress from the house of XXX. It’s pleating throughout and a fierce print, this dress is a must-have for your summer wardrobe. Wear it with your favorite heels and a chain bag for a sophisticated outcome. Fall wardrobe essentials you must have to complete your closet.These fall essentials will give your closet the refresher it needs. From two-tone floral dresses and rose prints, to stripes, boots, mules, metallics, colour red, glitter, plaid & buttons, robes. These trends have become essentials that are dominating our wardrobes, street style and runways!”
- Usual suspects like spelling errors, products appearing in multiple categories, server side errors e.t.c were minimized.
- We started our journey with a list of 1600 keywords being used by our client and the closed set 5 key competitors. We categorized them into domain (fashion) related, designer related, category related (shoes). We shortlisted these into 400 keywords and then further narrowed our scope to around 110 keywords currently. We convinced the client that sniper shooting is far better than the carpet bombing. A cross-functional team has been formed comprising of product manager, content manager, merchandiser, technology team and us. We exchange notes frequently and cohesively work to improve SERP for these 110 keywords. To illustrate the point, let say celine bags online is the keyword we want to push. The merchandising team has to ensure enough inventory of Celine bags. The content team has to work to develop content for Celine bags and include keyword prudently. The tech team has to ensure that that the information on the concerned pages is updated correctly and in time. This symbiotic working has been crucial to the success achieved in SERP.
Metric of Success
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BLeap Digital Marketing is a Digital Marketing Company based out of Chennai, India. We specialize in SEO, SEM, SMM, Content Marketing and Integrated Marketing services for established as well as emerging clients. More information about us on beta.bleap.in.