Editorial Articles

Hot off the heels of London Fashion Week, Nora Nanayakkara, Business Development Director at Sedo explains how owning the right domain name can help to establish a brand as an authority in its space online.

The fashion world has been a busy place both on - and offline over the past weeks. With many gripped by the new trends coming out of catwalk shows in New York, London, Paris and Milan, eyes will have not only been focused on the catwalk but also following the online buzz generated by the events.

All the fashion brands involved seek to capitalise on this online activity by capturing as much traffic as they can to generate brand awareness, increase sales revenue and dominate their particular niche. Online activity like this plays a crucial role in driving sales over the next year both in the digital space and on the high street. The right domain portfolio is a key element of a strong online marketing strategy, including all the relevant extensions of a brand's name (e.g. .com, .uk, .biz) and its most relevant and utilised keywords as domains. For instance, if a brand frequently uses the keyword "diamond necklace" in its online marketing, it would be advisable to invest in domain names such as diamondnecklace.co.uk. In practice this means not only owning those domain names that are evidently relevant to a brand’s name, but also utilizing "keyword" domain names that relate to a particular industry or business. In the fashion industry this would include such names as socks.com, which is owned by sock manufacturer Bellview.

However, many UK brands have been slow off the mark to develop their online presence in this way and may therefore be missing out on large amounts of traffic and revenue.

We recently conducted research into ten of the leading fashion brands participating in London Fashion Week to assess which had been most proactive in owning the right domains. The findings found that 42 per cent of the major extensions were not owned by the relevant companies surveyed. This included domain names such as www.houseofholland.com, www.luella.co.uk, www.mulberry.net and www.viviennewestwood.biz, with sites like www.burberry.net looking for user login and passwords. However, some brands performed well, with the research finding that brands such as Julien MacDonald and Twenty8twelve owned all of the most relevant commercial extensions.

While certain British brands have not been focused on acquiring the right domains, other global fashion houses own web addresses relevant to their brand as well as those featuring relevant keywords for their industry. Sedo’s research found that Calvin Klein, for example, owns www.bras.com and www.underwear.com, while www.jeans.net is owned by denim brand Brams Paris, putting both brands at the heart of their industries online.

Popular high street brands such as H&M, Gap and Zara have recently entered the digital market with full transactional sites, somewhat later than many of their competitors. This move by traditional bricks and mortar brands to online retailing underlines that selling to consumers via an online outlet has become a prerequisite in the hypercompetitive fashion industry. It is vital to ensure that brands own the right domain names to ensure an effective, valuable and complete online portfolio. Ensuring a brand owns all relevant extensions and also owns some highly relevant, generic, keyword domain names returns huge rewards. Benefits for the brand include targeted, highly relevant traffic to their website, improved search engine rankings, lower SE optimisation costs, increased visitor to purchaser conversion and the opportunity to become a destination address for online consumers. 

Nora Nanayakkara
Business Development Director, Sedo