Lingerie E-Commerce Company SEO Case Study
4,313% Increase in YoY Traffic!
402%
Increase in Indexed Keywords
1,444%
Organic Traffic Increase YoY (After One Year)
Challenges
Website Technical Issues
As mentioned, the client started as an Etsy store before intense consumer demand prompted them to transition to their own website. This was a necessary switch, but it presented its own set of challenges. Running a standalone website—and keeping it continuously operational—requires a unique skill set and the company’s team struggled to keep up.
No Keyword Focus
As an Etsy shop, the client existed in a broader, self-contained ecosystem that could reliably feed new customers to its page—they were popular enough that, if a customer was searching for lingerie, they would stumble on their products eventually. As a standalone website, though, things were much different: instead of competing to stand out on Etsy, they were competing to stand out against every other existing lingerie store, in an ultra-competitive search environment. And they were struggling.
In large part, this was a consequence of the fact that, when the client came to us, they completely lacked keyword focus. They also lacked collection pages, which are essential in an e-commerce context—their offerings were spread over dozens of individual product pages, but there was no way to efficiently browse them.
No Organic Traffic
The result of all this was that the website was receiving virtually no organic traffic. In consequence, they were forced to overspend on paid social campaigns, with diminishing returns. A sustainable business, they knew, would only be possible if new customers could find them organically.
Solution
Again: running a store within a siloed marketplace and running a website are two very different things, and best practices in one rarely translate to the other. Case in point: the client’s product URLs. These were extremely long, for reasons that made complete sense in the context of the Etsy ecosystem but virtually no sense outside of it. Accordingly, our first order of business was redoing every one of these following SEO best practices
From there, we moved on to the main business of SEO: keywords. High-quality SEO demands high-quality research: you need to intimately know how your competitors work and which keywords they’re using to attract customers. Our team did a deep dive into the world of e-commerce lingerie and began mapping high-priority keywords to specific products and collections.
It’s worth noting that this market niche is very competitive, with a sizable roster of established players. Our mission was to find under-utilized entry points—high-volume, low-competition keywords that we could leverage to get eyeballs on our client’s products. Ultimately, that meant remapping the way their products were organized on-site. We created several additional collections and categories—and optimized the existing ones—to bring in high-intent traffic on specific, high-volume keywords with low keyword difficulty.
This was a massive undertaking: by the end, every last product on the client’s site had been optimized through carefully researched primary and secondary keywords, meta descriptions, titles, H1s, and keyword-optimized product descriptions. All this was done while simultaneously implementing all needed updates.
Results
High-quality SEO isn’t something you can just switch on at will: it’s a slow, careful process, and even the most successful campaigns will have their share of setbacks and false starts. This case was no different: at the very beginning of the process, traffic actually decreased, and Google’s March Core Algorithm update further slowed momentum.
And yet—just one year after enlisting our services—the site’s organic traffic reached an all-time high. Organic traffic expanded by 1,444% YoY, and total keywords increased by 265%.
Organic Traffic
Those numbers have only continued to climb: two months later, YOY traffic had increased by 3,936%, with total keywords increased by 402%.
Organic Metrics Month Over Month
Most recently, traffic was still on the rise: just two months after that, YoY traffic had risen by 1,657%, and total keywords had risen by 234%.
About the Lingerie E-Commerce Company
This client is a boutique e-commerce store specializing in unique, elegant, and affordable lingerie. Having begun as an Etsy store, the client has since scaled up considerably, without losing its distinct charm or its willingness to experiment with new styles.
Like their larger fast-fashion counterparts, this client offers all the features that digital-first shoppers have come to expect, like free shipping and guaranteed exchange and return. But they’ve managed to do this while staying intentional about their selection, preferring a highly-curated, quality-over-quantity approach to Millennial and Gen Z-oriented e-commerce.
These tactics—and the company’s highly unique lingerie designs—have earned them a dedicated audience of young shoppers and extensive national press. In addition to lingerie, the company offers gloves, sleepwear, and loungewear—all of it marked by their inimitable design.
