Pro Web Consulting spreads its latest White Paper titled “E-shopping and SEO – How do the major clothing e-commerce behave on search engines” aimed at investigating the ranking on the web of the most popular fashion online stores.
The driving question is how do fashion e-commerce perform from a SEO standpoint?
In the selection there are a dozen websites, from the major online retailers to the most important, middle and smallest players, who also point to the digital store. The brands Amazon, Zalando, Yoox, Asos, Zara, Spartoo, OVS, H&M, Guess, Desigual and Pimkie were analyzed individually and compared with each other.
The analysis took into account various structural and strategic aspects: visibility, general site configuration and information architecture, on-site and off-site optimization, and keyword-based ranking.
Interesting considerations emerge for marketers of big fashion companies:
- major brands not always fully exploit their immense online potential;
- brand awareness is crucial but may not be enough to perform optimally on the web if taken alone;
- approaching SEO in a structured way before other industry players means gaining a significant competitive edge.
For example, the visibility index indicates the leadership of Amazon (Source: Sistrix), but some of the more technical parameters are held by other brands: from the URL architecture, category pages, home page and textual content standpoint, Zalando is without doubt the winner and it is comparable to Asos, which emerges as the best on-site optimized website.
Two examples of improvable e-commerce among those analyzed are Guess and Zara, which demonstrates how unquestionable brand awareness often does not result in great search engine visibility due to technical factors such as slow desktop and mobile performance, domain fragmentation, and almost total lack of written content. Amazon itself could better manage the structure of URLs, which are parameter-based.
The White Paper was born from the collaboration of Pro Web Consulting with Elis Corporate School, a training school in Rome under the Master New Communication Lab. Through a project work realized with a selected group of students, three market researches will be published to establish the level of SEO optimization of three different industries: following fashion, curated by Andrea Sebastiani, the research will include electronics and banks.
To receive the complete research, just sign up at http://bit.ly/eCommerceFashion.