Honeymoonshop: Becoming a market leader in the wedding industry

In a nutshell

Weddings and Honeymoon Shop have grown significantly within the organic search results over the past year and together are now the top two players in the online market for wedding dresses and wedding suits. With optimising content and putting the technical tweaks right, Honeymoon Shop has overtaken the competition over the past year and joined Weddings at the top of the market.

The start of the partnership: 2022

Honeymoonshop.nl and Weddings.nl have been clients of Aspen Digital since 2014. After a break due to the impact of the corona pandemic, we restarted in 2022 to further grow Honeymoonshop.nl and Weddings.nl organically. Weddings and Honeymoon Shop are top players when it comes to wedding dresses. Customers can visit the two beautiful bridal shops in the centre of Rotterdam, where they can try on their favourite wedding dress and ultimately go home with a special, custom-made dress.

But the search for the perfect wedding dress starts online, of course, where the ‘bride to be’ finds initial inspiration. Being visible online in this orientation phase of the buying process is therefore essential within the industry.

Whereas Weddings was already at the top of the online wedding industry, Honeymoon Shop was still lagging behind. Despite the stable top 3 position on the keyword ‘wedding dresses’, many long-tail search terms – accounting for an average monthly search volume of 65,000 – still lagged behind. Here, internal competition played up or ranked the main category far outside the top 10.

Strategy

At the beginning of the project, we started with a technical check of the domain. This quickly revealed that the filters within Honeymoonshop.co.uk’s wedding dress category were not indexable. Based on this finding, we set to work on an extensive keyword research for the ‘dressfinder’ filter pages. This revealed many opportunities: the domain did not rank for search terms targeting specific types of wedding dresses.

The next step we took was to make the filters indexable within the ‘wedding dresses’ category. Then, based on search volume, we started populating the filter pages with relevant content and clear on-page signals. Writing content for these pages also brought opportunities to improve the internal link structure, which now distributes link value better within the domain.

Optimising the content and internal linking soon resulted in the filter pages positioning themselves in the top 20:

Chart 1: The position evolution of the domain Honeymoonshop on the keyword ‘wedding dress classic’. It can be seen that until August 2022, the website consistently ranked with a different page in the search results. Since a new page has been created that perfectly matches the keyword, Honeymoonshop consistently ranks first place for this keyword.

After, the focus was on external optimisation for an extra ‘boost’ to the top. Our extensive publisher network (300,000+ publishing opportunities) allowed us to focus on relevant platforms, increasing the impact of placements.

The combination of good content, optimised internal links and relevant external links proved to be the formula for success. Honeymoon Shop has grown 104% in online visibility over the past year:

Chart 2: Percentage change in number of keywords in the top-20 between August 2022 and December 2022. The Y-axis is the change in the overall percentage of keywords for which the domain ranks in the top-20, and the X-axis is the change in positions within the top-20. It can be seen that Honeymoonshop has made significant growth in both.

And now?

By now, Honeymoon Shop can count itself as one of the market leaders in the wedding dress industry, along with Weddings. The entire wedding dresses category has been optimised and we started looking further into the next step.

Besides wedding dresses, Honeymoon Shop’s range also includes wedding suits. Within this category, we also saw many opportunities for further organic growth.

Chart 3: A Share of Voice is a visualisation of market share based on a set of keywords. This Share of Voice shows the difference between competitors in how well they rank for keywords related to wedding suits in the top-20, measured on 11 May 2023. The Y-axis is the overall percentage of keywords for which the domain ranks in the top-20, and the X-axis is the average position within the top-20. It can be seen that Honeymoonshop was somewhat behind some competitors.

Our work included making the colour-pages indexable within the wedding suits category. We also optimised these pages in terms of technology, content and internal linking. And with good result: this resulted in a 506% growth in visibility and a 50% growth in average position.

Chart 4: A Share of Voice 10 months later, showing that Honeymoonshop is getting a lot closer to the market leaders for the same wedding suit-related keywords.

With the commercial terms scoring well, we are now shifting our focus to informative search terms. Using a keyword research focused on informational search intent, we have spotted further opportunities for both Weddings and Honeymoon Shop to continue to grow organically. Partly for this reason, Honeymoon Shop regularly posts blogs. This is good for website authority; it shows you are an expert in your own field. Google increasingly values this more and more. Long story short, enough potential for more growth!