Le Chameau Case Study | Organic Revenue +58%

Le Chameau has been making Wellington boots for more than ninety years, by hand, at the premium end of a market most people think of as a commodity. The relationship predates this campaign: This campagin was nominated at the UK Search Awards for Best Use of Search, Fashion (Large).

Le Chameau called one of its boots a Chelsea rubber boot. Around 880 people a month search for that. Meanwhile 12,100 were searching for ankle wellies.

Fourteen times the demand, sitting behind the wrong word. And that gap ran through the whole catalogue, because the site was organised around how the brand describes its products rather than how customers look for them. There were pages for men’s and women’s boots, and almost nothing for the reasons people actually buy a boot: farming, sailing, gardening, fishing, a festival. Nothing for calf width, which is the single thing that decides whether a Wellington fits. Nothing for the collections customers already knew by name.

The commercial position made it urgent. Organic revenue had fallen almost 13% year on year, and the year before that had fallen too. A heritage brand going backwards for two years in a category filling up with cheaper competition.

Then, mid-decline, the site was rebuilt and replatformed. Migrations are where existing rankings quietly disappear, and this one landed weeks before the brand’s biggest trading months of the year.

Services: Content, SEO
Industry: Fashion, Ecommerce

A declining year became a growing one. Organic revenue rose 58% and sessions 62%, against a preceding year down almost 13%

That swing is close to seventy points. At Le Chameau’s own average order value it represents around 5,360 purchases that weren’t happening before, and it returned 11.8 times the campaign fee.

The migration didn’t cost a season, it made one. Three months after launch the brand recorded its single biggest organic revenue month in four years of data. Across the full peak, revenue rose 82% and sessions 55%.

Then it beat the client’s own revenue forecast, two months running. The first month came in 26% ahead of budget. The following month came in 84% ahead, on a number the client had set themselves.

The intent pages carried it. Women’s category revenue grew 722%, and the activity and collection pages built for how people actually shop for boots went from not existing to among the highest-traffic pages on the site. The demand had been there the whole time. It was just filed under a different name.