The Edit LDN is an online marketplace selling limited edition clothing and sneakers. Their business is unique, offering sneakerheads and streetwear fans not only a premium shopping experience, and access to the latest drops from the biggest brands in fashion, but the ability to sell their preloved designer pieces via The Edit LDN Marketplace.

As the first business of their kind to have concessions in the legendary Harrods London, The Edit LDN already had a great industry positioning, and had been embraced by the fashion community.

It was their Shopify website, the beating heart of this eCommerce business, that they identified could further accelerate their success, and generate more traffic, with a little help.

Enter The Marketing Optimist. We got to work on an advanced eCommerce SEO strategy, to align their website with the strategic aims of the business, and crafted optimised content that not only generated organic traffic, but led users to convert.

Forming an advanced eCommerce SEO strategy

To create an SEO strategy that got to the heart of The Edit LDN’s products/services, their range of potential users, and connected the two, we started with an audit of their existing website.

We created a detailed website audit which identified issues we uncovered, outlined required changes to the website’s architecture, design, functionality, and content, and included a new navigation, to prepare the site for effective optimisation.

In agreement with our newly proposed changes and navigation, as The Edit LDN’s in-house designers actioned the points raised in the audit, we began Key Word Strategy, an essential part of advanced eCommerce SEO.

Due to the sprawling nature of The Edit LDN website, we proposed that we optimise their 4 main “levels”of website page:

• General
• Product Category
• Brand pages (all products by a particular brand)
• Brand Range pages (E.g Jordan 1’s).

These pages lead the user to individual product pages, that we proposed be left unoptimised, as this kind of page is likely to change frequently, and would require minutely detailed key terms with little value in search.

The key to advanced eCommerce SEO is detail, and so we started by making headings of the topic each “general” website page was tackling: About the business, Sell with us, Personal shopping, New-in products, etc.

Then product category headings: Sneakers, Streetwear, Accessories, Kidswear, and Preloved clothing etc. Followed by brand headings: Nike Shoes, Nike Clothing, Jordan Sneakers, Off-White Clothing etc.

Finally, under brand headings, we noted the brand ranges we needed keywords for: Nike Airforce 1, Yeezy Foam Runners, Omega/Swatch Watches etc.

This provided a strategic framework for keyword research, outlined the 4 different keyword structures required across the site for each “level” of website page, gave a clear indication as to how specific each keyword needed to be, and the role each keyword would play in search, in relation to a traditional marketing funnel.

Essential eCommerce keyword research

Keyword research is an essential part of advanced eCommerce SEO, but is often oversimplified, and therefore deployed ineffectively, failing to connect both the incredible audience understanding you can gain for the process, and the relationship between keywords, the funnel, and the website.

We used industry-leading tools to explore real life search terms, using our headings as a starting point, to discover what Edit LDN’s potential customers were searching for, before grouping keywords, and their associated estimated monthly search metrics, under their respective headings.

After grouping hundreds of real life search terms (keywords), we could see a clear picture of the terminology being used most commonly, how people were structuring their searches, and see patterns in terms of the keyword structures under each of our headings (relating to various “Levels” of website page).

Next came the process of assigning keywords to pages, selecting key terms based on the estimated monthly metrics of key terms Vs their competitiveness, and the search landscape around each.

With key terms assigned to website pages and our new navigation, we sent this hefty 27 page document off to The Edit LDN for their clearance, completing our advanced eCommerce SEO strategy.

The relationship between copy and advanced eCommerce SEO

While effective optimisation hangs on these technical elements, effectively optimised copy is the second crucial part of the puzzle.

Of course, there’s a certain level of creativity required to produce engaging, optimised website copy, but the principles of advanced eCommerce SEO are essential in effective copywriting of this nature, to ensure the copy both effectively generates organic search traffic, and leads users to convert.

Armed with a new navigation and agreed upon key terms for pages, we began crafting optimised copy for 32 website pages. We did this in 5 page chunks, due to the scale of the project.

Audit and rank

As we completed crafting optimised copy for 5 website pages, we sent them to The Edit LDN for their clearance. As they would be deploying The Marketing Optimist’s page optimisation process, we also sent along a page optimisation document that we created for them.

When their in-house team completed the page optimisation process for each group of 5 pages, we ran each page through an industry-leading tool to audit its optimisation, gauge its effectiveness, and ensure no optimisation opportunity was left untapped. This part of the process was critical as we weren’t personally deploying each stage in the shopify-backend ourselves.

Because search landscapes shift, and the competition out there is fierce, tracking terms is essential for advanced eCommerce SEO success. As our groups of 5 website pages passed the optimisation audit process, we added the terms to our ranking tool for monthly rankings, so we can react to The Edit LDN’s changing search landscape.