Fashion Industry | Client WD ~ Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Saskatchewan Fashion Industry

Client WD asked ELNCO to help build and implement a large scale Search Engine Optimization (SEO) strategy for out of stock items.

Challenge

As a result of a recurring audit, Client WD identified a swelling number of out of stock (OOS) product pages ranking for their seasonal queries in the SERPs. These pages had low click through rates and drove the risk of damaging the domain’s competitiveness. ELNCO was assigned to sample some of the OOS pages and provide suggestions on how to treat them.

What was achieved?

After three days, a vital uplift in revenues and visits had already been measured, simultaneously with enhanced keyword rankings, which reached its peak one week after the initial redirections were set in place. After analyzing over 10,000 keywords, ELNCO marked the number of keywords OOS product pages ranked for to have decreased by 15%, largely superseded by the category page URLs.

The number of optimized keywords that category pages began ranking for improved by 11.19%. Those consisted of rankings that were passed along from the out of stock products, as well as exposure to new keywords.

Within nine days, these category pages earned 7.14% more visits and revenue figures increased by 4.5%. Highest target pages (these with > 3,500 OOS product pages redirected to them) have grown their average order value by 4.62% also their conversion rate by 12.6%.

Overall, the OOS redirections have also had a positive impact on preexisting keyword rankings. 12% of the keywords tracked have now listed in the top 10 results, opposed to only 3% of keywords that fell from the top 10 results.

66% of keywords that appeared already on the first page of results still grown in ranking by 1.64 positions. That compares to the outstanding 18% of keywords that drifted in ranking (but still stayed on the first page) and lost by only -1.38 positions on average.

How did we solve the problem?

After examining all the options available and given the scale of WD’s website, we determined that redirecting out of stock items to related category (sometimes referred as “PLP”s or “Grid”) pages would produce the largest overall benefit. We accumulated a list of 4,200 OOS pages and implemented a map to redirect these to 150 category landing pages that we considered would provide the best user experience.

Conclusions

WD’s website increased its overall competitiveness, with the category pages (that were redirected to) outranking the OOS product URLs. Furthermore, the number of keywords that those pages ranked for risen significantly, resulting in an improvement in both revenue and visits.

Due to overall competition and fluctuation, rankings shifted towards longtail keywords, counter-balancing the seasonal drift in rankings of generics keywords.

Since previously sold products can be associated to a value different than their physical ownership (such as the formation of on-site product reviews, design and an optimized site navigation), how to most efficiently deal with OOS product pages will depend upon the scope of your website and the strength of your business.

Based on the data produced from this project, however, when dealing with a large-scale eCommerce site, it is extremely efficient from an SEO perspective to redirect OOS pages to a related category or product pages with the support of an overlay explaining the redirection to the user.

Fashion Industry ~ From The Client

“Within nine days, category pages gained 7.14% more visits and revenue figures improved by 4.5%.” Client WD | Saskatchewan Fashion Industry Client