Courtesy La Grande Dame Catherine Wood Hill, chief executive
In July, She Owns It introduced readers to La Grande Dame, an online retailer of high-end, plus-size designer clothing for women. The post chronicled the start-up’s experiences with Google AdWords and search engine optimization and its eventual decision to cut Google’s pay-per-click advertising product from its marketing mix. Several readers commented that La Grande Dame’s Web site contributed to its S.E.O. challenges and urged an overhaul to address that issue and improve the site’s appearance and functionality. La Grande Dame took the comments — and similar ones from its customers — to heart, and unveiled its new site last week. “Our ultimate goal was to improve the user experience and make it easier for shoppers to find what they want,” said Catherine Wood Hill, La Grande Dame’s chief executive.
To build its first site, which made its debut in April 2009, La Grande Dame used multiple coders. The result, said Ms. Hill, was multiple coding errors. Fixing them was a high priority. Google rankings, Ms. Hill said, are affected by the quality of a Web site’s code. Before the redesign, La Grande Dame appeared on page 12 of Google’s search results for the term “plus size clothing” (recently, the company appeared on page 2 following the same search).
Ms. Wood was initially leery of hosted shopping cart solutions, which contain the coding e-commerce sites need. “I’d always thought they were hokey and looked cheap,” she said. But a conversation with a venture capitalist who works with online retailers persuaded Ms. Wood to reassess them. She found the offerings much improved and opted to have her site hosted by BigCommerce. “We basically rent our site’s internal code from them, and customize on top of that,” she said. La Grande Dame pays BigCommerce $79.95 a month to host its site.
The start-up also hired the Web design firm Schawel, which Ms. Hill found through an online search for e-commerce Web designers. Ms. Hill instructed Mike Schawel, the firm’s founder, to make her site “look expensive.” She is thrilled with the results and the cost — $6,000 for the entire redesign, which compares favorably with the $25,000 La Grande Dame spent on its first site.
To optimize the site’s content, Ms. Wood did a lot of rewriting. “On the old site, we had all these words floating around that weren’t connected to the term ‘plus size,’” she said. As a result, Google didn’t recognize La Grande Dame primarily as a retailer of plus-size clothes. Instead, as Ms. Hill discovered by using the Google keyword tool, the search engine most frequently pegged the company as a retailer of women’s or designer clothing. This time, whenever she wrote a word that described a type of clothing, she prefaced it with the term ‘plus size.’ For example, “lingerie” became “plus size lingerie.”
In response to a She Owns It, commenter, Jonathan Bouman, who noted that Google “factors page load time into its rankings,” La Grande Dame decided to speed things up. Previously, its pages took more than 2.7 seconds to load. It turned out that the site’s photos, which were as large as 2,000 by 2,000 pixels in some cases, could be downsized. La Grande Dame now uses a standard 1,000-by-1,000 pixel size for all images. Ms. Hill does not yet know precise load times for the new pages. “But it feels much faster,” she said. The old site also lacked a zoom function for photos, a serious liability for a clothing retailer that has been addressed as well.
Other changes include a more prominent newsletter sign-up option, de-cluttered landing pages, and a more intelligent search tool for use within the site. The old site’s tool left room for human error when tagging items with their descriptions. As a result, searches could be either over- or under-inclusive, pulling up, for example, a dress mistakenly linked to the wrong designer or missing a dress that was improperly tagged. Now the search tool hunts the entire site to find what shoppers want. The new site also adds rotating front pages; user reviews; a PayPal payment option; and, for every outfit, a Facebook “like” — a tool that didn’t exist when the first site was designed.
While it’s too early to assess the new site’s impact on sales, traffic has increased sharply. From Oct. 1 to Nov. 1, Ms. Hill said, La Grande Dame averaged 300 unique visitors and 370 total visitors a day. In the first six days following the redesign, she reports a daily average of 626 unique visitors and 689 total visitors.
La Grande Dame continues to steer clear of Google AdWords text ads. However, Ms. Hill is experimenting with the search engine’s newly available Product Ads, which are paid product listings that appear in search results. Unlike AdWords, Product Ads list a company’s products individually with their images and details. Product Ads appear when the user’s query matches information provided in an e-commerce site’s product feed, the file that holds product list information. Ms. Wood will test the service on a cost-per-click basis, starting with a $10 daily budget.
Unaided by AdWords or Product Ads, La Grande Dame had its best month ever in September, with sales of $16,000. There was a slight dip in October, but Ms. Wood believes November and December sales will top $20,000.
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