B2C eCommerce brands have a relatively unique challenge with content marketing in terms of true urgency. The B2C sales funnel is often much shorter than B2B customer journeys, so it’s important to capture customer intent quickly when they’re researching buying decisions.

A business may take several weeks (or longer) to decide on a communications platform shift, for example, but a customer researching something like attire may act much faster.

As a result, it’s critical for eCommerce brands to rank for the relevant high-intent keywords in their industry. It can mean the difference between capturing a customer or having that customer select a competitor instead.

Today, we’re going to discuss how uSERP helped a fashion brand rise to the top three positions for 186+ new keywords to capture some of that intent and drive more sales.

The challenge 

The client is a fashion brand that sells custom suits to customers. 

The suits and men’s suit attire industry was valued at 17.061 billion USD in 2021, and it’s only projected to continue growing through 2027. 

Not only is the industry competitive, but the SERP is competitive, too. There are plenty of competitors targeting keywords like “quality men’s suits,” “custom men’s suits” or “italian wool men’s suits”— and the client wasn’t ranking well as a result. 

On a domain level, the client was up against SERP competitors with much higher Domain Rating (DRs), and much stronger domain-level link metrics.

They were struggling to rank well on a domain level and a page level. That meant they were struggling to attract traffic for product page keywords, and consistently losing potential customers to higher-ranking competition. 

The reality is that around 70% of clicks happen in the top five positions in the SERPs. 

The solution 

SERP success for this client meant that we needed to increase traffic for product page keywords. 

In order to do that, we realized that we needed to get to work on the client’s linking strategy, both in terms of backlinks from external sites and internal linking. During an in-depth audit of the client’s site, we also realized that we could improve rankings for buyer intent keywords with improved optimization, and create an anchor strategy to grow rankings for multiple keywords.

Let’s break down the solution we implemented for the client.

1. Acquire branded links to the home page 

Gaining more branded links to the client’s URL was crucial, and we knew that getting links specifically to the site’s home page would be essential.

By getting more branded backlinks from high-authority websites, it would significantly strengthen the website’s Domain Rating (DR) and URL Rating (UR). 

The reality is that even a well-written site full of strategic keywords will struggle to compete against established sites that have more high-quality backlinks. Google has long held backlinks to be an important ranking factor, and they consider it a signal of quality, relevance, and authority. 

Now that quality and trustworthiness has become even more of a concern over the past few years (and especially now that AI has entered the scene), backlinks are an essential differentiator that can help you stand out.

It’s important to note, too, that all of the backlinks we generated for the client were earned backlinks. We didn’t spam other sites or pay fees to get promoted on cheap affiliate sites. 

We conduct extensive research to look for optimal link placements in high-authority and trusted publications, and we reach out to discuss potential opportunities. In some cases, this may mean generating content that the site publishes, and in others it may mean just getting on their radar. 

When doing backlink outreach, we only choose trusted, respected websites in the client’s industry. Ideally, these will also be publications that our clients’ audience will read, potentially increasing traffic both from an SEO perspective and increasing traffic directly to the site from those branded backlinks. 

2. Identify product pages to implement buyer intent keywords 

As a quick recap: Not all keywords are going to have strong buyer intent. 

Someone searching for “where to buy a custom suit” or even “men’s custom Italian suit” is much further ahead in a sales journey than someone searching for “why do people buy custom suits.” 

The latter is looking for information, and while in theory they could begin a journey into researching custom suits and realize they are, in fact, superior, that search phrase doesn’t indicate immediate intent to make a purchase.

“Where to buy a custom suit” or “men’s custom Italian suit,” on the other hand, are two very high intent keywords. People search for these terms when they’re undergoing research for a purchase decision.

We realized that the client’s website could benefit if we implemented more high-intent keywords onto different product pages. We conducted extensive keyword research to determine what phrases people were searching for while researching, and we made specific recommendations for the client to implement valuable buyer intent keywords on key product pages as a result. 

3. Develop an anchor strategy to grow rankings for multiple keywords  

Anchor text is the text that users can click to access a link. You can see an example of anchor text in the image below with the “related keywords” text. The unique-colored font on this website indicates a clickable link. 

Anchor text is important, because Google uses it for context to assess the backlink. As a result, it matters both for external backlinks and internal links. 

Some good examples of anchor text might include:

• Branded anchor text that links to the home page
• Anchor text that details products for individual product pages (“custom wool suits for men”).
• Positive descriptions of the product (“high quality custom suits”).

By having an anchor text strategy in place, site developers knew how to create internal backlinks and we knew how to drive external backlinks that would be more successful at driving a stronger SERP impact. 

4. Define an internal link strategy

While external backlinks are always going to drive the most significant results (and fastest), internal linking also matters.

Internal linking can improve how users move through your site, which can directly impact the experience (and conversions!) of users already visiting you.

It also can impact your SERP results, too. A strong internal linking strategy can make it easier for Google and other search engines to actually crawl your website, and the easier it is, the better. The anchor text you use can also help establish some context for Google, which is always a good thing.

When looking at the client’s domain, we realized we needed to create an internal linking strategy that would help bolster high-value pages on the site. By prioritizing important pages with our internal links, we were able to provide an extra boost on the page authority level, increasing SERP rankings and traffic to those high-value, high-intent pages. 

The Results 

After 13 months of working together with the client since December 2022, our engagement helped the fashion brand with significant gains in keywords, keyword ranking, and page and domain rankings. 

The home page alone saw impressive results, which included the following:

• Domain Rating increased by +14 points.
• The site overall is now optimized for 53.9k new keywords, for a total of 71.2k ranking keywords.
• 4.1k keywords have increased in ranking and are now in the top three positions in the SERPs. 
• The backlink profile has grown by 52.9k backlinks, and all backlinks that came from uSERP were earned on high-quality and trustworthy sites. 

There was also significant page-level growth. We obtained the top three positions in the SERPs across multiple product pages for competitive buyer keywords. 

A fantastic example of this is the client’s linen suits product page. 

In the duration of our engagement, we managed to increase this product page’s URL Rating by an entire point, and the page itself gained 594 new keywords for a total of 863 diverse keywords. 186 of those keywords are now ranking for the top three positions in Google, which almost certainly contributed to the 6.3k+ increase in page traffic. 

We also gained the top positions for multiple high-intent, short-tail product keywords, including what you can see in the image below: 

Final thoughts 

The reality is that many eCommerce industries can be exceptionally competitive, as the client knew all too well. The ability to tap into high-intent keywords, have a solid SEO strategy in place (which should consider both anchor text and internal linking), and acquiring high-quality, high-authority backlinks the right way can be a game-changer.

uSERP knows how to help companies of all shapes and sizes scale with true organic growth. We’re ready to help you revamp your link building and SEO strategy, and get you ranking in the SERPs. 

Ready to gain more earned backlinks and rank higher for high-intent keywords? Learn more about how we can help here.