HauteLook.com SEO Case Study

The Campaign

We were charged to prove that an SEO campaign can drive membership growth and incremental orders for a member’s only online retailer that relies on regular Flash sales to sell products.

HauteLook was seeking a test that would deliver enough volume to determine the potential ROI of SEO for their business and they wanted the campaign to be able to quickly scale should they decide to expand the channel.

The Challenges
HauteLook’s business is focused on selling products with limited inventory over a very short period of time, usually just 48 hours. These products are generally related to popular consumer apparel and accessories.

We had to ask ourselves the following questions.

How do we create a campaign that pulls just enough information outside of the membership wall to make the site compelling enough to drive membership growth?

How do we avoid over emphasizing the brands that are being sold? One of the difficulties in liquidating inventory from major brands is after the Flash sales have completed the brands don’t want records of their sales publicized.

The Solution

We developed a plan that would target fifty keywords related to discounted consumer apparel and fifty keywords that were related to general consumer apparel. We took seasonality into consideration and including a mix of summer and fall related keywords in our list so that we could learn about the fluctuations of seasonality within the test campaign, making potential scaling easier in future.

The Cost and Timeline

The test campaign was produced on a budget of just $7,500. The kickoff date was six weeks after contract execution. We then ran and reported on the campaign for the following 90 days. The reporting emphasized search rankings, total traffic, total searches, membership growth and orders.

The Results

At the end of the test we were able to generate the following ranking percentages
27% of our targeted keywords ranked on the 1st page
19% of our targeted keywords ranked on the 2nd page
43% of our targeted keywords ranked on the 3rd page
11% of our targeted keywords ranked on the 4th page or beyond

The campaign was also successful in generating new memberships and turning those memberships into sales. The campaign saw thousands of new members join the site and over 5% of those members made a purchase during the 90 day test period.

Testimonial
“Ioerger Creative took the time to understand the elements of our business model that pose a unique challenge for traditional SEO tactics. In a short time they were able to demonstrate SEO as a viable, high quality channel for member acquisition.”

David Sobie, Vice President of Business Development for HauteLook