Stitch Fix Case Study

By Christina Sri

In the beginning

Stitch Fix benefited from a tremendous amount of buzz from day one. Thanks to a lot of positive press and a strong product-market fit, Stitch Fix quickly gained traction with its target demographic and with little effort. In the early days, the primary goal was customer service and logistics, but in 2016 that started to change.

challenge

In 2016, organic traffic to the website started to dip. Even as much as 25%. Stitch Fix could no longer rely on “disrupter buzz” to keep it in the headlines, and new startups were entering the space like ThredUp, Wantable, and Trunk Club.

As part of our strategy to win back that traffic, we did an SEO audit. The audit uncovered that we were not ranking for all of our brand keywords. Instead, several third-party sites had claimed the top Google search result for brand keywords important to Stitch Fix.

80% of traffic clicks on the first search result for brand queries.

Since 80% of traffic clicks on the first search result for brand queries, it was a significant amount of traffic we were losing. We even found sites critical of Stitch Fix that were beating us on the search results page. Our leaders took this challenge seriously. We needed to own the story of our brand and win back that organic traffic.

Sites critical of StitchFix were outranking us for branded keywords.

Solutions

Our plan was to create high quality landing pages that perfectly answered a potential client’s questions about the service. We also needed to optimize them to outrank third party sites that were ranking for our keywords.

*Overview of Stitch Fix keywords from Answer the Public.*

Keyword research helped us identify which brand topics we needed to create content for. We tackled the keywords that led to third party sites first, and also looked at customer survey data to also prioritize the questions that were barriers to people trying our service. This included questions like "how much does stitch fix cost" and "what brands does stitch fix carry,” for example.

Screenshots of four different landing pages.

Once we had our topics prioritized, we created 13 landing pages. For each page, we focused on the following 6 SEO ranking factors to ensure they performed well in organic search results:

Make high quality content

First and foremost, we needed to consider the user and provide the best answer the question they asked in an engaging way. We redesigned the article template to be easy to read, more scanable, and full of engaging content. We made sure to use hierarchical headings, ordered and unordered lists, images, and videos where possible.

Make the page mobile responsive

This is becoming a ranking factor as more people use their mobile devices for everything. We knew 60% of our users used Stitch Fix from their phones so we made each page mobile responsive.

Put target keyword into page meta data

Because this is a huge ranking factor, we made sure our target keyword was included in our meta title, description and H1 heading. (This is part of something known as on-page SEO.)

Link page to related pages on your site

This SEO-boosting technique is important for any website. It connects your content and gives search engines an idea of the structure of your website. We made sure all our pages were linking to related pages and added a few to our footer navigation.

Longer word count

Because longer form informational content tends to rank better when the topic is covered in-depth, we aimed for a word count over 800 words.

Indicate priority of pages in a sitemap

Every website has a “crawl budget,” which essentially means the number of pages Googlebot looks at and indexes within a given time frame. Sitemaps are important for prioritizing pages you want to rank quickly. I managed a site map for Stitch Fix Style to prop up the articles that would drive the most organic traffic.

ResultS

We won back top rankings for all our brand keywords and grew our YoY organic traffic by 33%, beating the goal of 25%. This meant a full rebound our decline the previous year.

Organic traffic

Organic customer conversions were also up by 55%—beating our forecasted goal of 25%—with each landing page converting over 4% of visitors on average (which was a higher rate than the average for our site), making the pages invaluable to our new customer acquisition efforts.

Xtina Sri

Content & SEO

Owning your brand story using SEO