LUXMII is a luxury linen fashion brand from Australia. Their sustainable linen clothing spans from tops and dresses to sets and a few linen accessories as well.

When they came to us, they had a smooth-running eShop with Google shopping ads being their basic marketing channel. Once they had a well-established channel, they were ready to try another one, namely organic.

This is when they reached out to us. And this is what happened, starting with the good.

The Good

LUXMII’s marketing team was wise enough to first have their on-site fundamentals on point before venturing with any off-site endeavors, such as link building.

To begin with, the folks at WeDoHype, the agency that developed LUXMII’s website, had done a fantastic job with the site. Which is very important to us. Because no matter how good your on-page and off-page SEO is, if the domain you’re link-building for is a mess, you aren’t going far. Thankfully, the site was fast, secure, and mobile-friendly, while also maintaining solid website architecture for crawlability and indexability.

What’s more, they had just finished their CRO optimization, fixing anything from adding missing features such as an About Us page to optimizing their CTA buttons.

LUXMII also had a Blog with about a dozen articles. Of course, none of them was ranking for any keywords. However, they were properly interlinked, and most importantly, were also properly linking to the product/ money pages of the site.

Last but not least, LUXMII has some very fine products – the very essence of any website. This, along with all the previous points, was the solid foundation we found – and took it from there.

The Bad

From the get-go, the two main obstacles we’d face with LUXMII were clear.

On the one hand, this was the first time that the brand was doing anything organic-related. LUXMII had almost 0 organic traffic, with the only keywords ranking being branded ones. In practice, this means that the domain hadn’t been really tested: can it rank? And how difficult is it to rank?

On the other hand, although we had link-building experience with eCommerce to this point, it wasn’t about fashion. So this was our first time doing link building for a purely fashion site, meaning that most of our established collaborators and partners were rendered irrelevant.

Therefore, both LUXMII and us were venturing into uncharted territory. Which is why we decided to first test the waters before diving head first.

This led us to a 6-month link-building campaign. We would then evaluate the results, and proceed from there.

The Process

The start was the hardest part for us. Although we have partners and collaborators in industries such as SaaS and Marketing, this was not the case for Fashion. Therefore we had to outreach -cold outreach in most cases- to sites that are related to LUXMII’s targets.

Those targets being, first and foremost LUXMII’s linen collection pages with the most sales.  Accordingly, there was one with ‘linen dresses’, one with ‘linen pants’, another with ‘linen maternity clothing’, etc. We also built some links to its blog content and homepage, too, especially in the form of brand mentions.

Most of the domains we reached out to, were fitting into one of these categories:

• Pure fashion domains
• Luxury goods domains
• Mom/ parenting blogs
• Sustainability domains

 

During these months, we also tried HARO (Connectively) link-building. But we didn’t manage to land any link from the already limited fashion-related opportunities. And Connectivity shat down a little later anyway.

The Results

It’s common knowledge by now that no serious link-builder or link-building agency should guarantee any specific results. This was especially true for us who, as already mentioned, hadn’t worked with a Fashion domain before.

Thankfully, we didn’t have to hold our breath for too long.

Not even a month after our first landed links, the SEO needles were moving. First, we started ranking for keywords in the top 100 results. Then, those keywords made it to the second page of Google, and some of them were even already peaking on the first page of Google.

But how was that possible? Was the on-site SEO & our link-building that good?

Partly, yes. But there was also one more factor into play: SERP volatility.  In other words, the degree of fluctuation in Google’s search results.

When LUXMII first reached out to us and we started analyzing, we understood that SERP volatility was on our side. Of course, high volatility, as with anything in SEO, doesn’t come with any guarantees. However, it implies higher chances for domains that want to rank higher, to do so. As it came to be, we were one of these domains.

Fast forward a little later, the six-month trial period passed with flying colors and we continued our collaboration with LUXMII.

And 10 months into our collaboration, we hit the 10K organic traffic mark.

And, at one point, we reached 12K in organic traffic. And then we dropped, went up, etc. Remember the volatility part?

No matter the volatility, we’ve been steadily growing, with monthly organic traffic ranging consistently between 7K and 10K.