LOOKING UNDER THE HOOD | PELTZ SHOES

Branding - Who are Peltz Shoes?

We found that the Peltz Shoes branding was limited, with the website relying heavily on the visual identity of the brands that the wholesaler stocked, rather than having a unique and distinguishable visual identity of their own.

In order to build direct trust between potential customers and the Peltz Shoes brand, we developed a ‘what if’ campaign artwork to be utilised across the website and within marketing. This presented the brand with a recognisable visual identity that could be utilised to build brand awareness and set them apart from competitors.

Search Engine Optimisation - Lost in the Shuffle

From an SEO perspective, only 5.2% of the 30,000 non-branded search terms that Peltz Shoes ranked for appeared on page one of Google, however, these non-branded search terms resulted in 27 times more searches than branded ones. 

A primary concern was a decrease in branded organic search impressions, however, we discovered that 82% of Peltz Shoes’ sessions were coming from paid, branded traffic. This prioritisation of branded search campaigns was impacting organic efforts and taking budget away from acquisition focused campaigns. 

We recommended adjustment to their branded search campaigns to allow for increased efficiency and suggested a trophy search term approach to their SEO strategy moving forward.

Reliance on third party apps - Too much baggage

Thirdly, the Peltz website made use of 31 third party apps.

Third party apps are extremely useful as they provide functionalities that ecommerce platforms, such as Shopify, don’t. However, they should be used sparingly. Not only were many of Peltz Shoes’ 31 apps redundant or interfering with one another, but site speed was taking a major hit. 

On mobile phones, the Peltz Shoes site was taking a whopping 12 seconds to load. This was both frustrating customers and impacting Peltz’ search results, as performance-related metrics are used in Google’s algorithm to determine how strongly a website ranks. Furthermore, when running a scan on Peltz’ core web vitals, we found that both the desktop and mobile stores failed the test overall, which only further impacts a site’s organic search ranking.

Implementing our findings

Upon the completion of the audit, which also accounted for Peltz’ website experience, performance in the major eCommerce metrics, and their marketing channels, we presented our findings to Peltz along with recommendations for improvement across all channels.

Key recommendations included, 

• A Peltz Shoes brand-specific campaign framework and a clear visual identity system to allow the brand to be at the forefront of their own marketing messaging. 
• Streamlining of website functionality to allow for a more concise user journey that does not overwhelm. 
• Refocus on acquisition-led SEO tactics and technical optimisations across the website, including page titles and meta descriptions. 
• A full funnel marketing strategy to take potential purchasers from awareness to conversion.