CASE STUDY
SHOP DIRECT CONTENT STRATEGY BOOSTS SEARCH RANKINGS
The UK multi-brand home shopping retailer is building out its digital growth plans using a coherent content strategy to support its search engine optimisation activities and enhance its brand communications
W
ith £1.7 billion in annual sales, Shop Direct is a leading multi-brand
home shopping retailer in the UK and Ireland. Delivering 46 million products every year to five million active customers, more than 80% of the company’s sales are online, with over a third of those from mobile devices. Its websites also receive 880,000 visits every day. Although the company has been
around for more than 80 years, each of its digital department stores is now a household name brand including
Very.co.uk,
isme.com and Woolworths.
co.uk, as well as its heritage brands,
Littlewoods.com and
KandCo.com. Retail T
echnology spoke to Paul
Hornby, head of e-commerce at Shop Direct, about the growing importance of content online, the recent impact of natural search and the changes to search algorithms, and how engaging a third party content creation specialist has helped the business establish a strong digital presence.
50 Winter 2014 “Content is king with onsite articles,”
he said. “High quality, engaging and ‘link baked’ articles can be placed offsite too, but we realised the content had to be useful. That’s very difficult to do at the scale and with the quality we need,” he said, adding that the company would have had to create a “news team” to fully support these requirements in-house. “We use a variety of different pieces
of content that need a wide variety of writers and language translation skills,” he explained. “For example, there are 53 types of content brief, from general blog content to ‘How To’ guides, celebrity features and our ‘Get The Look’ content. It also covers content generation right through to our descriptions of our women’s dresses so that they are picked by natural search.” That’s where Quill and its bespoke
publishing technology platform and services comes in. “The industry is changing,” he continued. “Customers have higher expectations of retailers online. Typically this means they expect more than
just a shop.” Some have dubbed it ‘content marketing 2.0,’ but Hornby said what it really means is that it is “not enough to just to put links on someone’s site. The quality of content that site links to ultimately reflects on the brand”. After putting content at the heart
of its search engine optimisation (SEO) activities it saw a 25% year-on-year growth in SEO traffic and a 50% growth in generic traffic, despite a number of recent updates introduced by Google, as the dominant global search engine provider. “The fact that we ourselves as a top-
end digital retailer means the elephant in the room for us is natural search,” he said. “Gone are the days where competitive keywords and links building gets you a high ranking. With its Panda, Penguin and Hummingbird algorithm updates, Google is putting the customer first.” So there clear payback for a retailer trying to attract those consumers using search engines to find not just product information, but relevant additional content.
www.retailtechnology.co.uk
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