Intro and goal of project 

In a shrinking market where high street retailers are facing difficulty, we worked with Paradox London to diversify their business away from being a predominantly Wholesale operation to developing a direct to consumer sales channel through their website and SEO. 

Business Case 

Paradox London had been wholesaling to high street retail giants including House of Fraser and Debenhams. Whilst historically this proved to be an excellent route to market, the business realized that as consumer buying behaviour changes so does the existence of their wholesale partners.  

Paradox London realized that in order to survive market change they needed to adopt a Direct to Consumer (D2C) approach to their business and searched for a reputable, experienced, and affordable partner that could guide them and help them begin their online marketing journey with SEO.  

Liasing directly with the business owners, the POLARIS team collaborated to identify a cost effective SEO strategy that allowed Paradox London to start investing in their SEO future with a clear line of sight of what would be achieved financially for the investment.  

Solution delivery 

Focusing on the primary product of wedding shoes for women, a retail SEO strateg plan was defined and put in place for the wholesale retailer to focus on user experience, trust and authority to ensure both the initial visibility for customers researching for wedding shoes online and secondary brand led searches for the final purchase were apparant. Partnering with the web development agency, we directed an onpage SEO strategy and onsite technical SEO strategy that ensured the website was optimum for the needs of search engines such as Google and that the website was designed to provide an efficient user experience that gave consumers the information and ability they desired at any point of their customer journey.  

Being experts in Google marketing and getting wholesale websites ranked for discovery, informational and transactional keyword targets, close attention was paid to ensuring that the fashion retail website conformed to Your Money or Your Life (YMYL) principles, enhancing the customer experience as the key goal. 

Alongside focusing on the UK market for increasing direct sales at a higher margin within the business, we also partnered to develop the business’ SEO profile in other European markets, including France and Germany.  

Outcomes 

Using Industry Data and Ecommerce SEO Experience to Capture Key Moments in the Buying Journey of a retail, fast fashion consumer in the UK & Europe. 

Tying together our experience as a leading ecommerce SEO agency, and independent research and data analysis into the customer journey of buying wedding shoes, the agency team devised an SEO strategy that took the website from the 4th page of Google to 1st Position ahead of House of Fraser and Debenhams in Google.co.uk, within just 18 months.  

To achieve this, a fully functional approach was executed across all aspects off SEO, from consumer analysis and targeting to digital PR and outreach. Research was conducted into partner websites, and landing pages were also critiqued and developed with best practice SEO in mind for user behaviour.  

Optimising key product lines and categories to increase the SEO footprint of the fast fashion retail website in Google.co.uk for high traffic keywords 

We improved category and product content and information, adapted returns policys, enhanced product purchase options, added new payment gateways and built a targeted onsite content and outreach plan to increase the equity of the website. By doing this we increased the opportuniy to increase rankings and traffic and subsequently audit this traffic for conversion or drop off points. We also looked at two types of competitors at this stage - highstreet retailers with an online presence and online competitors only. This ensured we were best placed to beat both types of retail and fast fashion competitors for high traffic keywords including “wedding shoes” and “bridal shoes”  

We worked periodically over the course of 18 months to improve both on-page experience, content and offsite profile through exposure in the right magazines to increase rankings for core terms. 

Within 6 months of launching with the retail wholesale business we aimed to be on page 1 for these terms, with the next 12 months spent working our way up the page to beat all organic competitors, achieving a 1st position ranking and sustaining it for over 12 months.  

Results 

954%Increase in Organic Traffic 

By building exposure from outside of the blog we were able to drastically increase traffic to categories and products on the site 

831%Increase in Visibility 

By working to increase core rankings, the website now shows over eight times more in search results than previously 

245%Increase in Conversion Rates 

Based on UX work and testing, we have increased conversion rates significantly on the website 

Testimonial 

"Polaris have been honest and realistic about the time and approach needed to get our business the digital perfomance we needed." 

Adam BenjaminDirector, Paradox London