Established in 1894, Barbour continues to call the North East home. Today, Barbour remains true to its core values as a family business and encompasses the unique values of the British countryside, whilst bringing a touch of glamour to its beautifully functional clothing.
Barbour had seen success across other marketing channels, but were falling behind in SEO as they were not ranking well for non-branded terms. Competition from high-profile, third-party retailers selling Barbour products was high, with both UK and international domains to consider. Barbour came to us after the launch of their Magento site, and emphasised that after seeing so much success across other channels, they wanted to partner with our SEO team to improve organic performance across the board.
Our SEO and content teams devised a strategy to boost organic visibility and outrank competitors in the SERPs, both for branded and more generic search terms.
In 2020, we devised an SEO strategy covering content, taxonomy and technical fixes in order to improve Barbour’s organic visibility in the UK and the US.
Technical audits revealed that there were various issues that were impacting not only search visibility, but user experience and conversion rate too. We found that the most relevant URL was not being served for numerous keywords in many instances. We implemented redirects to guide customers to the category most relevant to their search query in order to improve their overall experience on the Barbour website.
A taxonomy project was undertaken with the intention of improving Barbour’s website menu structure. This began with a review of the current menu and category menu performance, followed by keyword research to suggest appropriate category optimisations and new category opportunities. We found that the menu structure at the time was not optimised for search, and created a poor user experience due to collaborations taking up the majority of menu space and products not being properly ordered with appropriate headers. We then took our findings to propose a new website menu for both desktop and mobile.
Barbour is an international brand with multiple storefronts, which led to issues with duplication. Incorrect language tags led to search engines showing the wrong version of the website, for example, prices were being displayed in the wrong currency. This was clearly having a negative impact on user experience and conversion. We implemented fixes by amending incorrect language tags to ensure every user is seeing the correct storefront regardless of their location. After successfully launching a new menu structure on the UK site, we rolled out a similar strategy for the Barbour US site ensuring collections were optimised for US search terms such as “vests” instead of “gilets” and “sweaters” instead of “jumpers”.
We devised a new blog strategy for Barbour UK, driven by keyword research whilst remaining true to the Barbour tone of voice and branding. At the time, the blog was underperforming, with very few ranking keywords and content needing to be optimised for organic search. We began by setting clear objectives and conducting a full blog audit.
With a strategy in place, we began to create monthly keyword and brand-focused blog articles, including solution-based content that answers commonly asked questions. We were then able to begin refining our strategy based on performance.
We also optimised categories on the Barbour website that had dropped in search rankings over time. This entailed optimising page titles, meta descriptions and on-page content. In 2020, non-branded terms accounted for only 5% of Barbour’s total keywords, so we knew we had to increase visibility for more generic terms like ‘waxed jackets’ and ‘lightweight jackets’.
*2020 vs 2021