Why Is SEO Always So Ugly?

The Aesthetic Problem With SEO strategies (And Why Luxury Brands Can Do Better)

TL:DR - SEO does not have to be ugly or jarring, in fact, it works better when aligned with your brand marketing and creative aesthetic.

In luxury, luxury fashion especially, appearances can be everything. The reason so many buy luxury goods is most often an appreciation of how they look, as well as respect for craft, talent, and integrity. So it is unclear why the representation of SEO for luxury fashion brands is always so ugly and, often, uninformed.

Numerous SEO agencies relentlessly champion the power of building trust with your audience as a fundamental part of your website optimisation strategy, which is 100% correct. Yet when these agencies speak about luxury fashion with a copy-and-paste subject line, lime green CTAs, clip art illustrations of clothing and a wide, round sans-serif font, they undermine their own argument.

Not only does this poor design aesthetic and lack of considered copywriting suggest these agencies do not understand their target audience, it also highlights their own lack of craft, talent and integrity. The thing is, SEO and a well-optimised content strategy do work exceptionally well for luxury fashion websites when properly considered and executed in line with the brand's aesthetic and DNA.

Why Is SEO Important For Luxury Websites?

A fundamental component of an SEO strategy is the content, especially on the customer-facing pages of your site. In this, one must acknowledge that just as on-page copy is fundamental to an SEO strategy, this same copy, and your tone of voice, are key to luxury brand marketing and how you build trust with your audience.

Similarly, the user experience and design of your website also directly impact how your brand is perceived online. The Stanford Web Credibility Research found that the majority of users admit to making judgments about a company's credibility based on their website design, with 46% judging trust by visual design (a more useful summary of the findings is on Wikipedia). When Google made UX a ranking factor (through the introduction of Core Web Vitals) in 2021, this was a clear indication that how you communicate your brand online also matters to your rankings, and that presentation matters for SEO as much as in luxury brand building.

If your website looks refined, considered and demonstrative of who you are and what your business is about, users associate this with your brand, and this builds credibility. This is crucial for luxury brands, and SEO. If your website is full of poorly structured pages, ill-fitting keywords, a thousand links and impossible to navigate, users will quickly switch off and move on. SEO, therefore, has to be considered in alignment with wider brand marketing efforts, UX and editorial, to be most effective.

Furthermore, on-page engagement is also a performance indicator for search engines, with average session duration and bounce rates both feeding back whether it is worth sending more users to this site (i.e. ranking it well). This means that the presentation of your brand through your content, imagery and web design is fundamental to its successful performance in search. So you would think the SEO experts would understand the flaw in this thinking when trying to attract visually focused and quality-led fashion professionals.

Why SEO Works So Well For Luxury, When It Looks Good

SEO that works with the design, works with the creative team and feeds into the creative brief, and sometimes even art direction, gives your content strategy a cohesive and intentional feel that subliminally tells your users you have thought this through. This is a key factor in building trust, and these little nods of cohesiveness, the details, are what make a luxury content strategy stand out.

Given that SEO and brand marketing share the same goals of relevance, resonance and reach, and that a core element of an SEO strategy is the content on your site, SEO should live within the creative process, not outside of it. In fact, some of the most effective and successful multi-channel marketing campaigns I have run have been led, shaped and guided by SEO data and insights, but executed almost entirely by creative teams.

Take JW Anderson's site, for example. The brand's signature avant-garde style is prioritised, but so are the optimised product titles, the colour options, optimised PLPs, optimised PDPs, entertaining videos, stylised imagery, need I say more! This is a really strong example of eCommerce execution combining performance with design, entirely within an authentic aesthetic for the brand. It does not try to hide the functionality of its site, but has factored it into the design from the beginning.

This exact approach will not work for all luxury fashion sites because it is so ingrained in JW Anderson's own brand DNA, but finding eCommerce, SEO and CRO solutions that integrate seamlessly with your brand's DNA will be possible if you have the right teams involved.

JW Anderson's eCommerce site perfectly blends function and creativity

Similarly, Jacquemus' latest campaign highlights the ongoing power play between commerce vs creative. Always one for pushing creative boundaries, Simon Porte Jacquemus' highly curated content consistently pleases the fashion crowd because it is rich in artistry and craft, with just the right dose of humour.

Yet, as this reference shows, commercial performance does not have to come at the expense of creativity. Yes, there needs to be space made for commercial requirements to drive performance, but the two are not mutually exclusive. Finding ways to integrate performance drivers with the same intention as the creative and design only adds to the value of the campaign.

Jacquemus plays with this push & pull between creative and commercial in a way that is completely on brand.

For luxury brands, the challenge (and opportunity) is creating a digital presence as considered as the branding. The best way to do this is to balance creativity with performance and seamlessly incorporate your SEO strategy into your wider marketing and business plans. It is most effective to do so early in the planning stages - and with constant collaboration across SEO, UX and creative - to create something that really resonates.