How Avenue Found Success With Nonbranded Search Traffic

Julie L. Daly, president of the e-commerce division of Avenue, a cross-channel retailer of plus-sized women's fashion, offered attendees to her session at eTail in Boston this week a peek into how the brand increased its number of new buyers by implementing an organic search program based on nonbranded search terms.

Daly first discussed how Avenue is currently in a transitional phase, moving from a retail store-focused brand to a web-based one.

"Due to the difficulties in the retail store environment over the last few years, you'll see that in the next few weeks Avenue will be shifting from having a 500 store presence to just over 300 stores," she said. "This puts the growth of the web as a business-critical directive, focusing web contribution at close to 30 percent."

As a result, Avenue is constantly trying to grow its web traffic and generate new revenue, Daly said. A key tactic in its marketing arsenal is search engine optimization. After all, by using the most appropriate and popular keywords, it's possible for SEO to drive a large volume of traffic to Avenue's site for minimal cost.

What's more, organic search generates intent. "It allows you to attract buyers before they've finalized their business decisions," Daly said. "It helps searchers determine what they need and from which supplier to buy from."

However, Avenue has found out that SEO isn't perfect.

"For starters, it isn't free," Daly said. "Best practices are great, but SEO projects using consultants, in-house experts or an agency are expensive, and it's difficult to tie results back to the spend and resources required."

The bottom line, Daly said, was that Avenue wasn't doing a good enough job figuring out how much traffic (i.e., revenue) was going to its competitors. As a result, it turned to an organic search marking company called YourAmigo and its Spider Linker technology to improve its SEO program.

"The technology analyzed our content and search keyword data to find highly relevant, nonbranded search terms that weren't driving traffic to our site," Daly said. Nonbranded search terms are keywords, search queries and terms that people type into search boxes and subsequently use to find a company's products and services on the internet. These terms don't include formal company names.

Spider Linker identified that no pages existed on Avenue.com for nonbranded search terms like "Women's Tummy Control Swim Skirts" or "Plus-Size Black Dresses." Using this information, Avenue created new, highly optimized web pages based on these terms. Now when consumers are looking for these skirts or dresses on search engines, the link to these Avenue.com pages will rank at the top of the list. When a searcher subsequently clicks through to the Avenue pages, they can see the whole range of these types of products available for sale. Spider Linker drives 98 percent of Avenue's nonbranded traffic.

Daly has become a believer in nonbranded search traffic. "While branded traffic is generally less competitive, generates a high conversion rate and better ROI in the short term, it doesn't deliver revenue growth or capture market share from my competitors," she said. "Unbranded traffic is actually the most valuable traffic, in my book."