98% increase in organic traffic for a brand that was on the decline
The Challenge
This was a very interesting challenge. PLT is in the fast fashion space, a brand that risers loved, but needed help. The brand needed a sustainable organic growth strategy, which relied less on brand and more on non-brand traffic and visibility. They had one of the biggest global brand teams we've seen, doing amazing top of the funnel activity to driving awareness and turn round a negative brand image however when it came to the messy middle (consideration/search) PLT did not own the market. They had a weak backlink profile, high affiliate programs, and super competitive niche.
They were going after top-line generic terms but needed a smarter way to target the customer. PLT came to us for our chasing consumers approach...
We noticed that audience search behaviour and trends were being influenced by other channels like TikTok and we needed to make PLT more discoverable.
Dominating outfits category
What We Did
A strategy to drive:
- Destination outfits - e.g. Ibiza outfits, Paris outfits, Greece outfits & more
- Event outfits - e.g. Airport outfits, Brunch outfits & more
- Trend outfits - e.g. Cottage core, Clean girl
- Media moment outfits - Beyonce tour outfits, Taylor Swift concert outfits & Barbie movie outfits, etc
Rise at Seven was hired to build trust and authority signals to site to drive non-brand organic growth. But we spotted an opportunity. We saw that the consumer behaviour around some of their core categories was wider than they thought. For example, instead of searching for joggers and a hoodie, consumers were looking for airport outfits. Instead of looking for a bikini and a beach dress, they were looking for Ibiza outfits. So we created an outfit category-driven strategy where we grouped popular items for travel destinations and occasions to capture intent like it hadn't before.
Airport outfit category: for example, our search tracking tool highlighted ‘Airport Outfits’ as a new search trend. We also cross-checked this on Pinterest as a trending category term. As the keyword volume grew from 2k-6k per month, we created a category, onsite content and used Digital PR to ensure we capitalised on it. We wanted to capture people looking to buy joggers, but also encourage them to buy everything else - the full outfit.
We also spotted the same for destination outfits. Like Ibiza, Greece, Paris and more. We rolled out this strategy across the UK and US and used digital PR and social to drive off-site signals to drive rankings.
Alongside category creation, we also ran both product PR, jumping on style trends consistently and creative campaigns to generate demand around certain products and categories including halter-neck tops and homeware.
A 3 year non brand growth
The Results
In 3 years, traffic non brand for PLT went up 95%. Over 2300 new domains were built to the site, of which 81% of them were followed links.
Airport outfits: We landed over 136 links into the category driving PLT to be the most searched for brand alongside the airport outfit keyword, and rank pos 1 organically in the UK and US. It got featured on Huffington Post, Cosmo, The Sun and more. Searches reached 21K a month, generating 7K of monthly traffic organically to the site. This category also ranked for 379 keywords. We did this again for 15+ more category trends.
Destination outfits: Ibiza outfits ranked pos 1 on Google, alongside Greece and Paris. PLT became the most searched for brand alongside these categories positioning them as category leaders.
Rise at Seven was hired to also grow Boohoo, BoohooMAN, and Nasty Gal all within the group for this activity.
