Our work · New Look · Fashion
The largest non‑brand SEO <gain> in UK fashion, with no developer support
Our partnership with New Look began in the 2020 lockdown, when consumer behaviour changed overnight and monthly data was too slow for a brand of this scale. We did not just change the strategy. We built the tools, and Metis is now part of how New Look works.
Potential unlocked
Double it, then double it again
After doubling New Look's visibility from 3% to 7% in a year, the next brief was to double it again and overtake their largest competitor.
The constraints were a perfect storm. A site-wide development freeze meant no developer support for SEO at all. The internal team was half the size it had been. And the cost of living crisis had softened the fashion market. Winning meant going around the usual retail bottlenecks rather than waiting on them.
From agency to engine
A weekly read of the market
We moved New Look from monthly reporting to a weekly cadence in Metis. Demand data, cross-referenced with stock levels, told us which high-margin opportunities to take first. New Look was first to market on rising trends weeks ahead of the competition, and SEO became a revenue driver rather than a reporting line.
Category pages without a ticket
To target long-tail searches with no developer support, we built Metis Accelerate: a single-click category builder that creates and hosts the category pages demand is asking for, curates the content and cross-links them so that the parent category, maxi dresses say, gains authority too. We built 5,218 categories this way. They delivered a 107% increase in revenue year on year.
Product copy at scale
With a depleted copy team and launches at risk, we built Product Maestro. It reads product images, picks out the silhouette, texture and colour, and combines them with live search demand to write unique, conversion-led product copy. Search data went into 15,000 product descriptions at the point of creation, thousands of manual hours were saved, and traffic to product pages rose 15% year on year.
One set of data for every team
Digital PR made products famous as demand peaked. Buying and merchandising aligned stock with search velocity. The same Metis data ran through every team, which is how New Look secured the largest non-brand gain in the UK fashion market and is set up as a cited source for the next generation of AI-led search.
Where it started, 2021 to 2023
The first phase of the partnership ran with no technical changes possible on the site. Even so, by March 2023 non-brand visibility had improved 66% across 11,000 phrases, top-three positions had risen 300% (from 268 phrases to 826), non-brand traffic was up 25% and non-brand revenue up 23%, at a 14x return on investment.
The tools built for that phase became the first version of Metis, and the weekly, demand-led way of working has stayed ever since.
The Metis tools behind it
“As our focus is on delivering long-term and sustainable growth, our choice of organic search partner is a key growth pillar. We are confident that they are the ideal partner to help drive online visibility and further growth for our brand.”
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