A luxury brand needs to attract its target audience of affluent customers. Whilst a stylish store in Mayfair, London would be one way of doing that, another is digital marketing. Increasingly, affluent customers look for luxury brands online, using a search engine. Just as you’d want your store to be positioned in a prominent spot on Bond Street or Park Lane in Mayfair so it gets noticed by the right people, you also want your online store to be visible in prominent spots online – the top of search engine results pages (SERPs).
But, how? In this guide, we’ll take you through key tactics for successful search engine optimisation (SEO). We’ll share our expert advice on how to market your luxury brand online and attract your ideal, affluent target audience.
Why SEO matters for luxury brands
A bespoke SEO strategy can bring many benefits to a business, and a luxury brand is no different. When a luxury brand implements an SEO strategy successfully, quality online leads who are searching for the goods or services that brand provides will find the brand’s website. It’s a valuable way to grow your luxury business.
Better visibility: even if your brand name’s well-known around the world, you still want it to have a relevant digital presence. Effective SEO will place your brand’s website in a coveted spot at the top of a SERP for the most relevant search terms. In turn, that helps people to discover your brand and website.
Brand awareness: when you optimise content so that your brand name appears alongside certain search terms, you align your brand with those particular terms. Every time a potential customer searches for those relevant terms, the connection with your brand name is reinforced. For example, search for ‘luxury high heel shoes’ and the first search results include Selfridges, Harrods and Jimmy Choo.
Attract target audience: it’s important to know who your potential customers are and where they spend time. You don’t want to attract simply anybody to your brand’s website, you want the people who are most likely to buy. Market research will help you to identify your ideal customer and work out the search terms they may use and places to find them.
Increase website traffic: SEO will drive more organic traffic to your website. It’s not about quantity though, SEO focuses on quality referrals. Each website visitor has the potential to be converted into a sale with the right content and customer experience.
Competitive advantage: the luxury brand market is super competitive. If your brand name appears way down the SERP, there’s a high chance that the potential customer will click through to a competitor’s brand website that appears above it on the page. A good SEO strategy will ensure your brand is top of search, and more likely to be top of mind, for your target audience.
Boost profitability: ultimately, you want sales and SEO plays a key part in achieving high conversion rates on your website. It’s also one of the more cost effective marketing strategies, delivering a decent ROI. An SEO campaign will continue to deliver results ongoing, unlike an advertising campaign which stops when funding ends.
A bespoke SEO strategy can bring many benefits to a business, and a luxury brand is no different. When a luxury brand implements an SEO strategy successfully, quality online leads who are searching for the goods or services that brand provides will find the brand’s website. It’s a valuable way to grow your luxury business.
Better visibility: even if your brand name’s well-known around the world, you still want it to have a relevant digital presence. Effective SEO will place your brand’s website in a coveted spot at the top of a SERP for the most relevant search terms. In turn, that helps people to discover your brand and website.
Brand awareness: when you optimise content so that your brand name appears alongside certain search terms, you align your brand with those particular terms. Every time a potential customer searches for those relevant terms, the connection with your brand name is reinforced. For example, search for ‘luxury high heel shoes’ and the first search results include Selfridges, Harrods and Jimmy Choo.
Attract target audience: it’s important to know who your potential customers are and where they spend time. You don’t want to attract simply anybody to your brand’s website, you want the people who are most likely to buy. Market research will help you to identify your ideal customer and work out the search terms they may use and places to find them.
Increase website traffic: SEO will drive more organic traffic to your website. It’s not about quantity though, SEO focuses on quality referrals. Each website visitor has the potential to be converted into a sale with the right content and customer experience.
Competitive advantage: the luxury brand market is super competitive. If your brand name appears way down the SERP, there’s a high chance that the potential customer will click through to a competitor’s brand website that appears above it on the page. A good SEO strategy will ensure your brand is top of search, and more likely to be top of mind, for your target audience.
Boost profitability: ultimately, you want sales and SEO plays a key part in achieving high conversion rates on your website. It’s also one of the more cost effective marketing strategies, delivering a decent ROI. An SEO campaign will continue to deliver results ongoing, unlike an advertising campaign which stops when funding ends.
How do I market my luxury brand online?
At MGX Digital, we’ve helped to market luxury brands online. Our #1 SEO strategy is to think like your target audience of luxury consumers. It really helps if you align yourself with the High Net Worth Individuals that you want to attract – speak like them, relate to them, and put yourself in their (luxury) shoes. Start by looking at other businesses selling luxury items for inspiration.
A few ways to do this:
- Research other luxury brand websites
- Follow their social media channels
- Create a Pinterest board of relevant, inspiring brand images
- Browse magazines and media aimed at luxury consumers.
Use this research to inform your keyword research. When you think like your potential customers, it’s easier to identify the most likely search terms they’ll use to find luxury products online. You can create optimised content that they’re likely to be interested in. You’ll come up with better promotions that they’ll click on. Overall, you’ll engage your target, luxury market of consumers and drive organic traffic to your website.
How to optimise your website
Now we’ll get into the specific details, the SEO nitty gritty. These tips will help to optimise your brand website and boost organic traffic to it. We’re focussing on organic search here rather than paid advertising campaigns like PPC.
On-page SEO
Apply these elements onsite to make your content easier to read for both your users and search engines. Incorporate descriptive, relevant keywords into your web pages. We’re not just talking the main copy in the body text here, it’s important to use them in other places like the url, meta descriptions, titles, sub-headings and image alt text.
Technical SEO
Make sure your website performs well technically to send positive signals to the search engine algorithms, and also ensures a better user experience too. A good user experience on a slick, easy to use website builds trust and credibility which is vitally important on ecommerce sites in particular.
A few key technical SEO aspects to look at include:
- page speed – neither search engines nor users like slow load times, so try to optimise pages
- mobile device friendly – use a responsive web design that works on different device types
- structured data – organise your content so that bots can crawl and understand it easily
- broken links – fix any issues like broken links asap
- implement performance metrics – track success and identify areas of concern.
Content marketing
Devise a content strategy that focuses on attracting your target audience of luxury consumers. Define the best, high quality content to match your luxury user’s search intent and the steps required to achieve that.
Start with keyword research to identify the relevant terms that your users are likely to type in to find your content. Map out where to use these descriptive keywords – which terms would be most effective on product pages and which on high quality content pages like blogs?
Don’t just go for the obvious search terms with high search volume as they’re likely to be used on competitor pages too. Look at more niche terms. Long-tail keywords may have a lower search volume, but they have higher conversion rates. They allow brands to capitalise on more discerning customer searches.
Local SEO is an important consideration too. If you run a luxury boutique or service, you’ll want to attract a local market. Use specific keywords relating to your area.
Link building
Linkbuilding is another important part of a successful SEO strategy. When you secure high quality backlinks from other luxury brand websites and social media channels, it enhances your website’s reputation and improves your SEO rankings. Build relationships with reputable and relevant influencers. Their endorsement of your luxury product or service, coupled with a backlink, can pay dividends.
On your own website, it’s important to incorporate internal links from one page to another. This encourages users to spend more time on your website consuming content.
Case study
Mylands
We’ve worked with Mylands Paints for years. Understanding the company and their clients is directional in how we conduct keyword research for them. For example, they don’t want to be the biggest paint company in the world, but they want to create the highest quality products. So our content strategy will include a focus on quality products and services – and we know that’s important for luxury consumers too.
Tiffany & Co
The luxury jeweller, Tiffany & Co, was one of the early luxury brands to realise the importance of online marketing and ecommerce. They have an effective strategy for both technical and content SEO. The high-end jewellery brand website ranks highly for branded keywords first and foremost. They have strategic categories to target important keywords like ‘engagement rings’ and ‘necklaces’.
Knowing the issues that are important to their luxury consumers, Tiffany create content to explore their brand heritage and also their social and environmental responsibility. They place importance on themes including love/ engagement, gifts and sustainability on both landing pages and blogs. You’ll find these terms used in sub-headings and the urls of their high quality content.
Boost your luxury brand’s online presence
In our opinion, the most important thing to remember with SEO for luxury brands is to think like your target audience of luxury consumers. Picture your High Net Worth Individual when you create content and define your website structure. Understanding the search terms that they’re likely to use is your best way to get the Google algorithm to work in your favour.
We at MGX Digital can bring your closer to your luxury audience. We provide effective SEO services designed to drive traffic to your brand website. We’re a trusted and experienced SEO agency focused on effectively optimising business websites.
If you’d like some help and advice with your luxury SEO strategy, we’d love to help you.