Salience ranks men's clothing brands on 10 digital metrics

Burton, End, Suit Direct, Brown Bag and Cho are the top 5 brands in terms of 'visibility', according to the report. These brands have grown successfully with the market and have ‘won’ in the last 12 months, the report adds.

In ‘Visibility vs Authority’, the report states that there is a positive correlation between the number of inbound links and domain authority. Likewise, there is a positive correlation between domain authority and the potential the site has to rank. It segregates brands into 4 categories—A, B, C and D.

Category A brands are those with high visibility but low authority. These have laid good foundations for their sites and would benefit from increased search marketing activity to build on those foundations. Category B brands have high visibility and authority, have built their house right and have the search marketing strategy to expand.

Category C brands are those whose sites have low visibility and authority and have a lot of room for improvement. "Brands in this zone should consider urgently rethinking their on-site technical and structural setup, as well as their keyword strategy and off-site campaigns," says the report.

The category D brands have low visibility and high authority. "These brands have potential and there is clearly some on-site issues holding these brands back. Whether those issues lie in content, structure, or tech, an on-site review is highly recommended. These brands could benefit most from resolving their on-site tech and structural issues. Identification of those problems, and dealing with them in a priority order should be in their sites," the report mentions.

On the subject of keyword potential, the Salience report ranks brands across three distinct groups for each site in the sector, providing a snapshot of a brand’s keyword health, but also highlighting areas for improvements and fixes. The keywords are divided into groups dependent on the opportunities they present— micro-optimisation, quick wins and underperforming. 

Sites with quick win opportunities have the biggest opportunity for quick results within their current ranking keywords. "Their best next steps should be to employ technical optimisation of relevant pages to bring those keywords onto page 1," according to the report.

"For those sites who reside mostly on page 1, focusing on maximising traffic from their current position through micro-optimisation and click-throughrate optimisation will help fine-tune performance.

"A large percentage of keywords appearing below page 3 indicate serious technical issues with a site or a misguided keyword strategy. Deeper analysis of the site performance will indicate the changes needed to improve."

The report describes ‘summer keywords’ as the ones people are searching for in the market. It mentions that keywords like mens coats, mens tracksuits, jackets for men, etc are 'high competition keywords', while mens leather jackets, dungaree for men, mens designer clothes, mens designer jackets, etc are 'opportunity keywords'.

"Opportunity keywords have less competition yet high search volumes. As such, they are a perfect battle ground for all brands in the industry to increase their competitiveness. Expanding one’s keyword strategy around these keywords is a clear route to improving performance," states the report.

Brands like The Idle Man, Designerwear, Samuel-Windsor, Van Mildert, Jack & Jones, etc have good page speed scores, based on data sourced from Google's own page speed insights, according to the report.

Salience combined brand search volume with a score representing the effectiveness of content performance across social channels to rank how much umph a brand has online in their industry. Brands with a high rank but low brand searches suggest positive action to improve overall brand reach, while a low rank with high brand searches could suggest that on-site optimisation and social strategy improvements are required. 

Monthly brand searches show an indication of brand recall within search behaviour. The top five most searched brands are BoohooMan, Jacamo, Topman, Burton and End.

Social score considers followers and engaged conversations on all major social platforms. The top five in this section are Jack & jones, End, Cos, Topman and Mr Porter. These have a strong following, creating engagement through content and product campaigns.

Brands who are doing good in the online reviews game are Machesfashion, Dobell, Endclothing, Cho, Slaters and so on.  "Reviews are an essential part of one’s search marketing arsenal. Having more good reviews than your competitors is important for off-site trust signals (part of the EAT update), local pack prominence, and CTR where star-ratings feature in the SERPs."

Fibre2Fashion News Desk (PC)