About UNIQLO
About UNIQLOUNIQLO is a Japanese casual wear fashion brand founded in 1949. Stylishly vivid and unwaveringly dedicated to quality, this fashion house has been bringing its mix of improvements and diversity of colours in London since 2001. Over the past few years, UNIQLO has launched a total of 14 stores throughout London, along with an ecommerce website that has supported it to have a shop front for the whole of the UK. The company’s presence has been growing steadily year on year, but it has always been concealed by the indisputable supremacy of the brand in its home country of Japan.
UNIQLO’s Business/campaign objectives
Maximize its natural search engine traffic and increase in visitor traffic on the website.
Approach/strategy adopted
UNIQLO needed to create a natural search campaign that incorporated the company’s brand values, integrating them into the tone of voice adopted in onsite optimization. This would help to ensure that a steady and well-worded communication strategy was adopted across the board. It was also important to take into consideration the importance of imagery to feature heavily on the site. With ambitious targets of increasing site traffic without having a negative effect on bounce rates or the time consumers spent on site, the digital team had a lot of ground to cover. This was coupled with the requirement to translate the increases in site traffic into direct return on investment in the form of natural search traffic revenue.
They undertook a thorough website analysis to gain a comprehensive understanding of the site’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as looking at the site’s main competitors to evaluate opportunities available to the online store, whilst identifying the core threats in the near future. In a market like the clothing industry, a website that stands still or adopts only a reflective outlook will be quickly overtaken by ambitious competitors.
Their strategy focused on a forward looking plan taking into account their future new product launches and seasonal campaigns, setting changes in motion before the launches to ensure that time and indexing was maximized. This ensured that the natural search engine optimization implementation was outstanding and not just reacting to changes as and when they occurred.
Perhaps the biggest component of the strategy was to work towards a successful Christmas period, which boasts of the best sales figures. Preparing for the online Christmas shopping rush that begins in the later half of November was the utmost priority. Gaining increases in ranking in the build up to this period was crucial to ensure that UNIQLO maximizes its online leverage of this short window of intense shopping. With only 14 stores, all based in London and an offline marketing strategy that focused on the London area, they needed to increase brand awareness outside of the London area if it was to create an increase in the visitor traffic. Subsequently, as well as building up additional presence on search engine ranking pages through site optimization, they also created a social media plan that would help to improve their national reach as well as approving the search engine optimization of the site.
Results achieved by UNIQLO
With an increasing number of search terms featuring highly in search engine ranking pages, including a substantial number of important terms in the number 1 spot, UNIQLO gained competitive advantage over its competitors within a very short period of time. As more and more keywords started to appear in search engine ranking pages over a period of 2 months, UNIQLO’s visitor figures started to respond significantly.
In addition to developing search engine optimization benefits, their link building strategy also benefitted the visitor traffic through referral site links, with visitor figures from referral traffic increasing by 106% from May to October. In addition to the uninterrupted increases in revenue and visitor figures, UNIQLO also experienced a significant increase in average transaction value (ATV) indicating that the quality of the traffic had also improved over the time period.
With visitor figures, revenue, quality of visitors and search engine ranking positions all at a record high, UNIQLO was well placed to perform well above expectations for the money-spinning winter shopping rush. In a marketplace as competitive as the fashion industry, the improvements that UNIQLO has experienced are pretty unique, but for a company like UNIQLO standing out from the crowd is the norm.
Learning
When you want to increase visitors to your website, you must ensure that relevant keywords are being used. Once the visitor is on the website, there should be latest content available and it should engage the visitor whilst creating a buying impulse.
Photo credits: Wikipedia
