Visibility Leaders in Women’s Fashion – SEO Content that Works!

From:

Steve Paine

Modified: 19.06.2024

We start by celebrating the four winners across Do and Know categories of content intent.

boohoo.com

Visibility Leader
“Do” (large)

Page 1 ratio:	65%
Monthly clicks	51.5k
Content VI	1.31

bravissimo.com

Visibility Leader
“Do” (small)

Page 1 ratio:	86%
Monthly clicks	40.6k
Content VI	0.19

realsimple.com

Visibility Leader
“Know” (large)

Page 1 ratio:	21%
Monthly clicks	64.1k
Content VI	1.51

vogue.com

Visibility Leader
“Know” (small)

Page 1 ratio:	44%
Monthly clicks	7.5k
Content VI	0.9

• Ratio – the percentage of ranking keywords that are on page 1 of the SERP as measured in August 2023.
• Monthly clicks – as estimated using SISTRIX CTR model. (Sept 2023)
• Content VI – the Visibility Index, or footprint size, of the content directory. (Sept 2023)

The complete set of high-performance directories has been published here.

Women’s Fashion – huge traffic, short funnel

The key finding from our research: With an average 4.7 million searches per month for a core of 927 keywords, this is a very active segment with a huge ‘Do’ intent. There are few info, or know-intent SERPs in the core of the keyword set but trends do appear with more informative SERPs towards the longer tail. Clearly, this is a trend-led business but trends can be quick, created by PR or news, and may not appear immediately in search keyword databases. Brands obviously pay an important part in this sector.

Traffic for the keyword set (linked below) peaks in October and November with over 6 million searches per month.

The top 5 searches in women’s fashion

For this study we harvested and curated 5896 search terms, refined these down to 927 by removing irrelevant search terms, brands and locations, and identified the following top 5 searches:

1. dresses
2. bikini
3. lingerie
4. jeans
5. dress

Boots is actually the #1 fashion item search term but it has a website / brand intent in the UK making it difficult to rank.

The best women’s fashion URLs

Across the keyword sets we found the most visible ‘do’ URLs:

• www.next.co.uk/shop/gender-women-productaffiliation-coatsandjackets-0
• www.newlook.com/uk/womens/clothing/coats-jackets/c/uk-womens-clothing-jackets-coats
• www.marksandspencer.com/l/women/swimwear

Top women’s fashion domains

By processing and weighting the rankings and search volumes for 927 curated fashion keywords we reach a visibility index for each domain.

Here are the overall top 5 retail domains for women’s fashion

• newlook.com
• next.com
• marksandspencer.com
• asos.com
• boohoo.com

All of the top five are multi-brand retailers. Here are the top 5 D2C domains for women’s fashion

• pourmoi.co.uk
• roman.co.uk
• clarks.com (was clarks.co.uk)
• gymshark.com
• dunelondon.com

What is very clear from our core list of is that very few informational domains have any visibility at all. Only by harvesting a specific set of informational queries can we find informational sites.

• instyle.com
• youtube.com
• wikihow.com

The search volume for these informational searches is relatively low but there could be a good reason for that. See below.

General news media domains for women’s fashion

• nbcnews.com
• theguardian.com
• independent.co.uk

News, PR and real trends in the world of women’s fashion

It says it in the heading above – fashion; the sector deals in highly trend-focused terms and it doesn’t take too much research into the industry to find that some trends are, in fact, attempts to seed a trend. The portmanteaus of mankini, monokini, tankini, jeggings, jorts, coatigan, shacket are recent editions to the English language. Some words stand the test of time, others don’t. The point here is that you won’t find new fashion trends in an SEO keyword database until they mature into real trends.

The informational searches, according to separate trend data used for this report, appear to be occurring in this new terms space. Read more about the trends later in this report.

Non-retail fashion domains (browse only)

The key example here is Primark who are on the record as saying that they are not going to offer their products online. A new website was launched in late 2022 and it included in-store availability information but the evidence in the data since then shows that, while there was a boost, it hasn’t changed the long-term visibility of the website which is now back to 2019 levels of visibility.

With so much ‘do’ focus in the sector, it’s hardly surprising. The domain primark.com remains a small, fan-focused website.

Compared to the Next website, Primark has what looks like a pop-up shop in the huge Google high-street.

Women’s Fashion Trends

Using a separate data-set we’re able to find trends in the sector. These aren’t last-weeks breaking news trends, but the data could be valuable for landing-page creation, informational content focus and competitor analysis.

• demin tears (brand)
• baggu (brand)
• barbie outfits
• body suit women
• tween girls clothing

You can find out more about these trends by viewing the special TrendWatch – Women’s Fashion report.

Additionally, here are some newer, potential trends that have been found in data from April 2024. These haven’t been cross-checked or researched.

ugg mini boots, sparkly skirt, ami jumper, ami paris sweater, basic pleasure mode, black ralph lauren tracksuit, blakely hoodie, blakely jumper, branded fashion, jack willis slippers, leopard jeans, leopard print jeans, lingerie near me, new balance black, nike miller jacket, ralph lauren sweater, represent hoodie, sparkly skirt, ugg mini boots.

An additional search marketing report can be found on the sub-sector of women’s sport shoes.

High occurrence of words in search terms

Here are the highest occurring words in the data-set, which gives a different perspective on what’s searched the most in the sector.

• boots
• coat
• black
• jacket
• for
• size
• winter
• leather
• sale
• shoes

(Ignoring simple numbers, multiples and the obvious terms womens, women and ladies.)

Other interesting terms

• day drinking outfits (12246 ASVPM across 97 keywords)
• nude blazer (cream blazer, white cropped blazer, nude jacket, nude cropped blazer…)
• red laces for hiking boots (200 ASVPM)
• fall [coats, jackets] (US terms in UK search)

ASVPM = Average search volume per month

Top 100 domains in women’s fashion

Here’s a list of 20 domains leading in visibility for the ‘know’ keyword bucket:

Top 100 domains for informational searches

As mentioned above, we harvested a separate know-focused list of searches for this list. The search volume for this list of keywords is two orders of magnitude smaller than for the main keyword set. High activity around very new trends might have also had an effect on this keyword set. The 20 domains

We use the list of top domains to pick high performance content directories from a list of over 52000 directories that were identified in a separate process. Two data journalists check and curate the list and add it to the list of high performance content directories.

Leading content analysis – what makes them successful?

The full analysis is available in a separate report. Here are some of the key findings:

• Category coverage is absolutely key for eCommerce
• Adaptability to new trends and opportunities
• Categories based on an aesthetic and not just product type
• Customer service in eCommerce
• Informational gap on retail sites

Presentation Video and Slides

Further reports and analysis

The Visibility Leaders project is about creating a resource for SEOs and Content Marketeers. Final, curated data can be found in the free, searchable resource and in this issue, covering retail, we’ve added over 80 examples to the list and removed some directories that are no longer present,

Three experts (and many others in the background) have put months of work into analysing and surfacing additional data. Those detailed reports are linked below.

Do your own analysis. Find leading competitors

Our data engineers have processed billions of data points to bring you the leading content directories, but that doesn’t mean you can’t do some research for your own sector. Our SISTRIX Academy for Competitor Research shows exactly how to create lists of keywords, find leading domains and then analyse them for visibility leaders. New features such as 5-year search trend and clustering will help you make decisions about priorities in your content projects.

Methodology and source data

We’re always transparent about where our data comes from. We don’t synthesise anything, we just take ‘what Google says’ and present it in ways that help SEOs, for all domains.

In this research we used our core SEO data archives and searched many millions of site directories for those which perform well in search. We call these content directories High Performance Content Formats (HPCF) and you can read more about HPCF here.

After analysing the directories we ended up with over 50,000 candidates directories, across all domains, all content types and all sectors. (UK.)

In order to filter those down to relevant B2C examples, we used a ‘baskets’ of keywords. The keywords were sourced from SISTRIX databases and filtered using our keyword list features. The list was also curated by hand to remove any obvious errors and outliers. The list of 927 keyword is available here.

Through the SISTRIX list competitors feature the SERPs were analysed for top domains. These domains were then used as an initial pick-list. Only one HPCF directory was picked for each of the domains and each was checked by hand.

The final list of directories was tagged with intent and sector and, once again, hand curated to remove errors and sites which are not relevant as ‘blueprints.’ For example, marketplaces driven by user-generated content, wikis (also UGC), support pages from brand owners and sites where there’s really only one ‘owner’ of the content, such as government citizens advice sites and government law sites.

All data is available in Google Sheets. Feel free to take a copy for your own use.