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Analysing top fashion sites' SEO performance
An analysis of three US fashion websites across three aspects: SEO visibility, backlink profiles and social share reveals interesting trends in how websites try to win the SEO game. According to previous research by the author, 61% of consumers use search engines to search information when shopping online and this trend continues to go up. Facing the online shopping behavior shift of consumers, online shopping websites need to be more SEO savvy nowadays.
The three sites compared are net-a-porter.com, gilt.com and saksfifthavenue.com.
SEO Visibility
SEO Visibility indicates the frequency and manner of the search terms in the search results of Google. It roughly indicates the keyword rankings of a site. The higher the SEO visibility, the more 'visible' the website is to the users. It indicates more keywords are ranked in the search results of Google.
As can be seen, saksfifthavenue.com has the highest visibility. It and gilt.com are growing the visibility, while net-a-porter.com drops the visibility a bit. It looks like saksfifthavenue.com is doing SEO quite aggressively.
Backlink Profiles Analysis
Page Element:
From this chart, one can see that three websites do not have too many differences in the page elements. However, net-a-porter.com is doing relatively better than the other two websites, especially in the quantity of linking root domains. It indicates that the backlinks of net-a-porter.com are more diverse. One can also compare the unique IP C-block to get the number of unique linking root domains since there may be the same owners of different domains. IP C-block is a more accurate indicator of how diverse the links are. Majesticseo.com provides IP c subnet information. If one is not familiar with IP C-block, one can check out here. Note: percentage of deep links means the percentage of links linking to a page other than the homepage of the sites. Deep links are more valuable than homepage links, since these links are highly relative to that page. Homepage links can be directory links, etc. Google places more value in deep links. Therefore, the more deep links, the better the page. However, these three websites all have very high percentage of deep links and the difference is not significant, therefore there is no winner from this comparison.
From the above graphs, one can conclude that net-a-porter.com, which does not show aggressive move in link building, results in decreasing SEO visibility as shown in the visibility graph. Saksfifthavenue.com built many links in April, which further prove that it is doing SEO quite aggressively and it explains the increase of the visibility of the website in search results. Gilt.com, which also has an increased visibility, also built links aggressively in April. From here, we can see that link building is a very crucial part of the SEO game.
Link Type Distribution
After analysing the page elements and the quantity of backlinks, one moves forward to the quality of the backlinks. Since not only the quantity of the links matters, but also the quality of the links, the research will compare the quality of the backlinks in link type and anchor text distribution.
Google places different value on different types of links. For example, those directory, sidebar and comment links are less valuable while article links, blog post links and social media links are more valuable. When doing link type analysis, one finds linkdetective.com very useful. It visualises the link type in pie chart where one can figure out the percentage of good quality links vs. low quality links.
Judging from the link type chart, the backlinks of saksfifthavenue.com seem to be quite healthy. There are only less than 20% of the backlinks of low quality (including directory, comment and footer links). In general, the links do not seem to be spammy - giving it 4 points out of 5 points.
The backlinks of net-a-porter.com seem to be low quality. Over 50% of the links are low quality, including sidebar, footer, comment, directory and blog roll links. Good links suck as article links has very small percentage, only 14.07% of the links, giving it 2 points out of 5.
The backlinks of Gilt.com seems to be very spammy with 60% of the links being low quality, giving it 1 point out of 5.
To conclude, saksfifthavenue.com has the highest backlink quality among the three websites, while gilt.com has the lowest quality.
Anchor Text Distribution
Over 50% of the anchor texts of saksfifthavenue.com are branded anchor texts and only very small percentage of the anchor texts are keyword anchor texts.
There are less branded anchor texts for net-a-porter.com but it still looks good.
About 60% of the anchor texts of gilt.com are branded anchor texts.
Based on the above analysis, the three websites seem to be doing well in anchor texts. There is no winner in this comparison. However, one can go deeper and check the anchor text profile from opensiteexplorer.org, ahrefs.com and majesticseo.com to do deeper analysis. Keep in mind; the mixture of branded anchor texts and keyword anchor texts with branded anchor texts more than keyword anchor texts is the best scenario. Too many backlinks with keyword anchor texts can be a spam signal to Google, which will result in less value.
Social Shares
Good social signals can help websites rank better. To simplify, this compares the social signals in social visibility and total social links. If one wants to conduct a more comprehensive social signals analysis, one can use a social listening tool, such as Marketwire Sysomos to obtain the sentiment data, etc.
Saksfifthavenue.com has the highest social visibility while net-a-porter.com has the most social links. From social media standpoint, net-a-porter is the winner while Saksfifthavenue.com is the second place winner.
Conclusion
Based on the above analyses, the SEO winner of the three website goes to saksfifthavenue.com. It has the healthiest SEO performance and is growing aggressively in SEO. Gilt.com is the loser in this game due to the low-quality backlink profile and it has the lowest SEO visibility and social visibility. However, it looks like gilt.com has been making effort in SEO recently. Net-a-porter.com seems to have slowed down the effort in SEO since it has established a very good SEO.
In a competitive environment such as this one, lack of growth can be hazardous. This can provide multiple opportunities for one's competitors, which in turn, will result in the loss of market share, especially with new customers. Above all, SEO is very critical for a business' success. One cannot afford to lose the SEO game!
About Jiafeng Li
Jiafeng Li is an inbound marketing analyst for iAcquire.
