Using content marketing to generate demand
Background
In its early days as a startup, Stitch Fix had a lot of organic buzz. Online personal styling was a novel concept and Stitch Fix had little trouble acquiring new customers. When I started working there in 2016, that demand was starting to soften. Organic traffic, for example, had dropped 25% and was costing the company hundreds of thousands of dollars per year.
The bread and butter problem
Stitch Fix needed to generate demand for women aged 25–40—our “bread and butter” demographic. These customers increased their spend over time and tended to keep using our service. We needed to bring more of these users to the website.
Becoming an authority
Finding our audience was part of the equation, but we also needed to build trust and keep clients coming back. Our strategy was to establish Stitch Fix as a go-to authority on style advice. The challenge from an SEO standpoint was competing with established online fashion publications like InStyle Magazine and WhoWhatWear.
An ambitious redesign
We redesigned, rebranded, and relaunched our blog as Stitch Fix Style in 2016. It became our engine for attracting new clients and engaging existing ones. Because Growth was one of many goals within marketing, I had to negotiate with stakeholders to secure 25% of the content calendar to achieve our SEO objectives.
Challenge #1: Customers In Need of Fashion Help
To drive customer demand, we dug into our marketing personas. Among them, we had one that was very interested in fashion and actively sought information online. We felt this person was a key target for our blog. We wanted to provide content that would reach her and help her discover her personal style.
Solution: Fashion Tips & Trends Articles
The first step in our blog strategy was keyword research. I discovered strategic opportunities to rank for fashion advice and trend keywords, e.g. “how to wear [trend]” or “what to wear to [occasion]”.
But finding keywords isn’t the only factor in acquiring traffic via SEO. There are over 200 ranking factors and it can be difficult to get them all right. Your focus should depend on the industry you’re in and who you’re competing with for your target keywords. How do you choose which to focus on? You look at who you’re competing with and analyze their sites to see which ranking factors they are trending for.
Based on my competitive research, these factors guided our SEO content strategy:
Make High Quality Content.
Articles written with the reader in mind rank well, so provided quality information and added engaging content like images, infographics, polls, and quizzes.
Put The Target Keyword into Page Meta Data.
Because this is a huge ranking factor, we made sure our target keyword was in our meta title, description and H1 heading. (This is part of something known as on-page SEO.)
Word Count Matters.
SEO studies have shown word count matters. So we aimed to make ours long form, around 1,500 words each.
Update the Site Content Regularly.
We were competing with publishing sites, so cadence was important. We published new articles every month and updated existing ones to help them continue to rank.
Indicate the Priority of Pages in a Sitemap.
Every website has a “crawl budget,” which is the number of pages Googlebot indexes within a given time frame. Sitemaps help prioritize pages you want to rank quickly. I managed a site map for Stitch Fix Style to prop up the articles the drove organic traffic.
Make the Page Mobile Responsive.
Mobile use is growing. We made sure all articles had responsive page design and launched Accelerated Mobile Pages to improve user experience on mobile devices.
Link Page to Related Pages on Your Site.
This is an SEO-boosting technique important for any website because it connects your content and gives search engines an idea of the structure of your website.
Make the Page Layout User Friendly.
We designed the article template to be scannable and full of engaging content. We used hierarchical headings, ordered and unordered lists, images, and videos where possible.
Results
In our largest category of SEO content, this strategy led to an increase to 300K organic visitors per month from 20K visitors per month. An increase of 1,400%. This became our biggest traffic channel with a signup rate that was 1.5x the site’s average.
SEO Content can have a reputation among writers for being boring and uncreative. Our focus on making articles that were actually engaging and useful—and seeing the results of those efforts—inspired the Content Team to fold our SEO best practices into everything they did.
Challenge #2: The Struggle With Clothing Fit
According to our market research, consumers around the US struggle to find clothing that fits their body shape. This challenge is made harder by brands that use vanity sizing—the practice of using smaller numbers to encourage sales.
One of Stitch Fix's key differentiators is using data science to match each client with the best clothing for their measurements. We decided to drive demand among Americans who have fit problems.
Solution: Body Shape Guides
There were a lot of web searches for fit and body-shape-related fashion questions. We decided to target these searches and introduce a new segment of people to our brand. Our fit-oriented value proposition would help drive them into our marketing funnel and convert them into customers.
My keyword research revealed a lot of queries about body shapes. For example, "how to dress pear shape" has 1,000 searches per month and was one of many related keywords we decided to target. Once I mapped out our target keywords, I worked with the Content Team to create an article series centered around body shape guides.
We used the same 8 tactics used in our Fashion Tips articles to help this article series rank, and also used another tactic that helps boost rankings:
Hub & Spoke Linking Architecture.
Hubs are lengthy articles on a broad topic that provide a way for users to navigate to a more personalized article on a related granular topic (a Spoke).
We created a Body Shape hub post that explained the different kinds of body shapes, with a calculator to help the reader find her shape. Then we provided links to 4 granular articles on each shape.
We continued to write more granular topics for each body shape over time, based on the unique fashion problems each body shape faces. For a pear shaped body, for example, we produced articles on “Best Dresses for Pear Shape” and “Best Jeans for Pear Shapes,” as well as topics like “Skirts for Wider Hips” and “Tops for Narrow Shoulders,” which are common characteristics of pear shapes.
Results
We created a large ecosystem of body shape content, all connected via internal links. We achieved the #1 organic ranking for our top target keywords which together have an average monthly search volume of around 50K:
Pear body shape
Apple body shape
Hourglass body shape
Athletic body shape
This series brought 385K new visitors to the site in its first year alone. This was about 9% of the total traffic to the site for that year and converted around 6K new customers (a conversion rate 0.5% higher than the site’s average).
Challenge #3: Customers Worried About What They’ll Get
After about a year of scaling growth, we were still seeing soft demand for new clients. One of our biggest conversion barriers was that potential clients didn’t know what they were going to get in their box.
Not telling customers what they are going to get is a conscious choice for the brand. Part of the magic is the “surprise and delight” of getting a box handpicked for you.
We were missing out on a demographic that needed more control, but leadership did not want product listing pages for our inventory. To add to this challenge, clients would often request specific pieces from marketing emails which we didn’t have in stock. This was a poor experience for our clients.
We needed a way to showcase products to customers in a creative way that promoted “styles” rather than items. And we needed to do it in a way that would compete with—but not look like—ecommerce sites.
Solution: Outfit Inspiration Gallery
We started by setting up processes to ensure we only promoted products that were likely to be in inventory. This let clients request specific pieces and actually get them. We also created the Inspiration Gallery to showcase more products to clients. While working on this, I found an opportunity to use this gallery to bring in new clients looking to buy outfits via organic search.
Keyword research showed there was a large volume of people searching for “outfit ideas,” and the results were very visual: ecommerce product pages or Pinterest-style pages. So we decided to rebrand the Inspiration Gallery to an Outfit Ideas gallery to compete for that traffic.
We worked with the Content, Merchandising, Engineering, and Product to redesign the page. We made the experience more visual and enabled users to Pin outfits they loved. We also curated outfit photos to complement our current clothing inventory.
Once the design was finalized, we created filters and a search bar to help the user personalize the outfit results even more. We used what users were searching for on our site to choose our top-level filters: Latest styles, seasonal, casual clothing, denim, athleisure, and date outfits.
I customized the meta titles, descriptions and image alt text to help the page rank for the target keyword, as these are important ranking factors.
Results
The page received 115K organic visitors in its first year alone, 3% of the total organic traffic that year. It became the top converting page on Stitch Fix Style, with a conversion rate 2.5x the site’s average. This showed us that customers were inspired by product images, and that it drove them to buy.
Among the rankings we achieved, we got #1 for our top keyword “outfit ideas,” which receives 60.5K searches per month.
Challenge #4: Customers Needing Options
Due to the success of the Outfit Ideas gallery, I started doing research into broader outfit keywords, e.g. “fall outfit ideas,” to drive even more demand. During my research, I noticed a trend: many top results were “Content Hubs,” or navigational pages that connected users to lots (and I mean lots) of images and articles on a given topic.
It occurred to me that the top-ranking website experiences might have a lot of different pieces of content because they were a way for many different kinds of people to browse, filter and ultimately find style content that appeals to them personally.
Solution: Content Hub Pages
To compete for this potential customer demand, we created 20 content hubs of our own. This required a whole new kind of page on our blog.
We didn’t have a lot of resources to design the pages, so I worked with our developers to design a template which had content blocks that could be customized based on the keyword. Blocks included: An outfit ideas gallery with images curated for that topic, a link block linking to related articles on the blog, text blocks for editorial, and custom call-to-action (CTA) blocks.
Once the template was created, we made 20 Content Hubs targeting outfit keywords such as “fall outfits,” “summer outfits,” and “leggings outfits” to name a few. As with our articles and outfit gallery pages, we ensured the hub pages followed the SEO best-practices we had established.
Results
It took six months before anything really happened. Spring and summer outfits didn’t really do that well, but Fall Outfits went gangbusters, ranking #3 for the season and driving thousands of organic visits. It was a pumpkin spice miracle.
After that, many other hub pages began to rank and drive significant organic traffic. Between the launch in November 2017 until I left in March of 2019, these pages were responsible for 4% of the total organic traffic (around 200K visitors) with a conversion rate that was 2x the site’s average.
Conclusion
The SEO Content Strategy I led was successful at growing top-of-funnel traffic to our Stitch Fix Style blog. Our strategy grew traffic so well on the women’s blog, we used the same strategy for the men’s blog. I led the launch of the men’s blog in 2016 and grew that traffic by 300% as well.
In addition to driving demand (our core objective), we also analyzed the quality of customers we brought in via organic search and found that they were very high quality clients. They were the most likely to have a positive first order experience, used our service over time longer, and bought more items over time.
The best part for me personally was inspiring the Content Team to use SEO as a tool. I helped them overcome an assumption that SEO was creatively stifling. When they saw that high quality content was being rewarded with good rankings and more traffic, they were inspired to bake the SEO process into everything they did. We even had some surprise hits when articles not originally intended for SEO started ranking well.
This cross-functional relationship and buy in was valuable. It meant that, over time, I could let the content team take more ownership over the process allowing me to focus on other SEO priorities.
