SEO for luxury brands!?

[Jungles]

Hi all,

It is widely known fact that you will be a bit in trouble if you will need to do SEO for luxury brand that is not willing to sacrifice design, layout etc. for SEO purposes. So basically - there is no content to optimize and there is almost no keywords to rank!

Just wondering - how would be the best to approach such kind of terrible situation?

Regards,

Jungle

[Jungles]

Thanks m8! Transcripts for videos is a great idea! Will definitely need to utilize that!

Regards,

Jungle

[Jungles]

Cheers to the answer!

Can you share your experience with link building strategy for them? Did you boost the brand or you ranked unique product by their keywords. Or combination of both?

Keyword use bottom line:

• the problem is that standard approach regarding keywords is not working here as you can not choose keywords that have high and valuable traffic. As far you don't have a brand awareness for the site and credibility for the brand in general - you can not compete for high quality keywords. You will be outranked with easy by any blog that has 1,5 k words in it and that is optimized by this general keyword.(remember, I am able to use only Meta tags and Img Alt  attributes in this battle. +Off-Site campaigns of course)

Thanks,

Jungle

[Jungles]

Yeah At least one positive sound D;) Thanks for that!

One question though - you mentioned link building - what do you think would be the best approach to that? Product keyword or boost a brand? In both situations anchors etc. will be unique - which is good. So we don't need to talk about highly competitive keyword rankings etc.

The problem that I will be facing is affiliates of the brand and affiliates of the product. They will be my most competitors and as far I aware - they are quite big.

For example - how would you fight with Amazon if you need to sell exactly what they are selling!?

Example situation - Just imagine that you have built new site for brand.......and that brand already sells on Amazon it's products.

Thanks,

Jungle

[ColumbusAustralia]

We have worked on a few high end fashion brands in the past, some times it is hard to make them step away from the flash sites and the image heavy sites but in the end of the day it is all about training, Even if you work with a site that has limited images you need to develop a strategy which will allow the site to incorporate some SEO elements, then you really need to push the off site elements in a big way, any thing is possible it just takes time and education.

[CMC-SD]

If they have videos, they could add transcripts in a collapsible div. That also address accessibility and general user experience. After all, if someone is sneaking a peek at the site at work, they probably don't want to have the sound on for videos.

[waqid]

You need to find a new approach in discussing website usability for the user + search engines. Set realistic expectations (as stated above) and do the best you can. I would continue impressing the need for a better website design which includes more content and functionality. Give them some examples. Pull some competitor data, show them other sites. If these are publicly held companies you might be able to find some great information or press releases on how companies are fairing with internet marketing.

Regardless, you can get that website to rank well for specific keywords by building more high quality links than the competition. Ive seen it work numerous times. Without allot of content you simply are not going to be able to target long tail keywords or less competitive keywords.

You can also build a blog for them and drive traffic there.

[CMC-SD]

Set realistic expectations for your client. It's fine if that's how they want the site to work, but explain to them that search engines primarily read text; without much text, the search engines will have a harder time figuring out what the page is about. Also explain their options: They can have more text on each page without compromising the design, by using tabs, collapsible divs, etc. Figure out whether or not visitors want more text on each page. If you can make that case, they might be persuaded.

Meanwhile, focus on the things you can control, like title tags and img alts. Then focus on linkbuilding. That should be relatively easy -- fashion is popular and has great potential for compelling content. At least you're not working for a plunger manufacturer.

[Jungles]

Not really - they have all digital content in place - videos, pictures html5, sliders etc. Apart from that - Max  50 words per page:(

[Jungles]

Matthew,

Thanks for insight but unfortunately this is not the case. Maybe in travel field everything is exactly as you say but in the big Fashion it's not

There are factories, teams and really a lot of money spent on just a homepage and whenever you want to justify any change it is just feels ridiculous.Try to understand, that people with who I dealing with will newer sacrifice anything. They will pay 10x more....but newer sacrifice. So, SEO standards, terms, explanations etc.  are not discussable. They will not publish content in text format and everything regarding visual design is forbidden talk ;)..........................

Of course, all meta data and hidden things that could be corrected is corrected, but how to rank such kind of website without textual content, keywords, density etc, I do not have any clue.

Of course Social Media campaigns and blogging will help but I highly doubt that this will be enough in competitive niche because apart from referral traffic we will miss organic rankings and traffic from this part of the Google.

regards,

Jungle

[CMC-SD]

Do you mean they have a flash website because they think it's prettier?

[MattBarker]

My company provides search & content marketing services for a number of high end / luxury travel brands.  We don't really share your problem.  We don't build sites ourselves, but the sites we work with have usually been well built by SEO standards. When we come across a site that does need some work, it's usually very easy to explain to a client why they need to take a second look at their architecture, and how they can do that without sacrificing their branding.

There's absolutely no reason that a luxury brand shouldn't have content on its site. In fact, I'd say the opposite: a luxury brand should be finding every opportunity to communicate its unique expertise and authority in its field, using a variety of content to do that.

When it comes to content creation and off-site SEO working with luxury brands can be trickier than most since the bar is often much higher in the level of quality that is expected.  So our luxury clients usually end up spending more on content development, which means we have to be very careful how we deploy that content to ensure they get best value.

We also spend a lot of time on publisher & blogger outreach and building relationships with high end publications that we can partner with to help promote our client sites.

But in some respects, this is actually easier than doing SEO for a non-luxury brand, because the client already has an understanding of the need to invest in quality, and they don't expect results from cheap, spammy tricks.

Regards, Matthew