Gio Stockings
An established international ecommerce brand selling premium, authentic, fully-fashioned stockings.
- Sector
- Ecommerce · Fashion
- Where
- International
- Web traffic increased 33% in the first month after launch
Where they started
The brand needed a storefront that looked as good as the product. Every design decision had to stand up next to luxury fashion competitors, not a generic ecommerce template, or the price would look wrong.
What we changed
We researched the luxury fashion category and mapped where competitors fell short, then built into those gaps: sleek UI and UX on top of a traditional fashion ecommerce structure shoppers already know how to use.
Competing on design in a category that mostly does not
Gio sells premium, authentic, fully-fashioned stockings, a product with real craft in it, in a category where most storefronts are a generic e-commerce template with a logo dropped on top.
That gap was the basis of the whole build. We benchmarked against luxury fashion generally, not other stocking retailers, because that is the standard the product is judged by. A premium product on a budget-looking store is a pricing objection you have created for yourself, and it costs you at every checkout.
The answer was sleek UI and UX on a traditional fashion e-commerce structure. Familiar enough that customers know how to shop it without thinking, considered enough that the product never looks cheaper than it is.
Category pages are the money pages
This is the structural decision that matters most in e-commerce, and the one most stores get wrong. Shoppers rarely search for a product name. They search for the category: the material, the style, the occasion. Rank the category and you catch the whole market rather than one line.
So the category page has to earn the ranking, and an H1 above a grid will not do it. It needs a proper introduction explaining what the category covers and how to choose, filters that create crawlable URLs only where there is real search demand, and internal links from the relevant guides.
Product descriptions have to be written, not pasted. Manufacturer copy repeated across every retailer makes your page identical to four hundred others, and Google has no reason to rank yours above any of them.
International adds constraints most guides skip
Selling across borders brings problems a domestic store never meets: currency and shipping expectations that change by market, stock that varies by region, and the question of whether to run separate localised pages at all.
Our honest view is that most small international stores should not. Thinly localised copies of the same catalogue cost time to maintain, risk duplicate-content problems, and rarely pay for themselves below a certain scale. One excellent store with clear shipping and returns information beats four mediocre localised ones, and it is a quarter of the work to keep up.
What a launch figure does and does not tell you
Traffic up 33% in the first month after launch is a real number, and we should be plain about what it is: a launch figure. A month is not long enough for rankings to have moved much, so an early jump like that mostly reflects a site that is faster, more crawlable and better structured than the one it replaced.
The compounding comes later, as category content and product copy build up over quarters. We say so because the alternative, implying a redesign delivers permanent 33% growth, is the kind of claim that makes case studies worthless and clients suspicious.
If you run a store, start with e-commerce SEO or web design, depending on whether the problem is being found or being bought from.
More clients, more numbers
Different sectors, same approach: a named client, real figures, and work that paid for itself.
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Ready when you are
Tell us what you are trying to rank for and we will look at the site and the search results before we reply. You get a straight answer, including if SEO is not the right spend for you yet.