The men’s underwear industry might seem niche. After all, it’s a subset of the fashion industry. However, figures suggest that the global men’s underwear market was worth 40.5 billion in 2024 and is set to grow to 66.6 billion by 2033. This growth is down to the rise of millennials and GenX, who value quality, comfort, and practicality in their underwear, which is increasingly important for the 25 to 45 age group.
With a steadily growing global market, the briefs for men sector is very unique and competitive, with established brand names dominating. This can make standing out in the SERPs (search engine results pages) challenging. With new brands coming to the market constantly, there is tough competition when capturing organic traffic that will convert into loyal, paying customers. This means that building a reputation of authority and demonstrating that a business meets Google’s E-E-A-T (experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness) criteria is even more important than ever to stand a chance of being the search result that potential shoppers click on.
With a thriving market out there, our client came to us for our eCommerce SEO services because they had noticed their organic traffic and sales had stalled. In addition, they’d noticed that the number of customers coming through paid social campaigns had dropped, leading to a decline in sales.
The ultimate goal was to increase the number of users and attract more customers through organic SEO. Our hard work paid off, and our client saw a huge 500% year-on-year growth in users. Want to find out how we did it? Our case study spills the beans and shines a spotlight on our fashion SEO services!
Case Study Overview
- Budget of $1,000 per month.
- An ongoing campaign that started at the end of 2023.
- Focus on on-page optimisation and link building.
- 500% increase in users YoY.
- 1597.9% increase in organic search traffic.
- 172.6% increase in referring domains.
Get To Know Our Client and Their SEO Problem
ALPHX is a size-inclusive and fit-focused men’s underwear brand. Their audience is primarily based in America, but they have some global reach, too. ALPHX noticed that the volume of traffic to their website had slowed down, and their sales were beginning to reflect this. Their paid social campaigns were no longer bringing results either. This meant that other brands were getting more visibility in the SERPs and would, therefore, be getting more sales.
Our client was also seeing lower returns on other non-SEO areas of its marketing spend, which meant they had a budget of around $1000 per month that needed to be carefully managed to ensure not even a cent was wasted. As an eCommerce SEO specialist, we understood the importance of getting budget distribution right.
What Goals Did Our Client Have?
Ultimately, our client wanted to increase website traffic and the number of users to convert into paying customers. They wanted to refresh their website content to attract more traffic and boost engagement. They aimed to capture the US market and appeal to those looking for size-inclusive underwear internationally.
What Was Our Solution?
Our solution focused predominantly on link acquisition through link building and technical on-page optimisation. However, the first step of any campaign we work on at Click Intelligence is to get to know our clients and their target audience inside out. We dug deep into the demographics and interests of ALPHX’s typical audience. Understanding all of this helps us craft campaigns that bring success.
In our research, we found that consumer behaviour was changing, and new trends were shaping the market. These were:
- More of a focus on comfort-driven fashion and comfortable clothes.
- Size-inclusive and fit-focused shopping was a priority.
- An increasing number of shoppers buy clothes online instead of in physical stores.
- Shoppers want multi-functional clothing that lasts.
- Increase focus on the fashion industry and sustainability.
We were able to use these insights to shape our campaign. They influenced the types of websites we targeted with our link building campaign and helped inform the style and tweaks we needed to make to the technical and content side of the client’s website.
A Closer Look At The Core Steps Of Our Campaign
Thanks to our extensive client and industry research, we had a strong foundation to build an SEO strategy that would bring the increased engagement our client wanted. The campaign began in late 2023 and is still ongoing. Here are the main elements that we focused on:
Keyword Research
We carried out in-depth keyword research. This helped us see what keywords had a high search demand that we should be targeting. In turn, this informed our on-page optimisation and led us to write website content for brand-new landing pages.
On-Page Content Optimisation
Before getting stuck in with any on-page optimisation, we conducted a site content audit to ensure the website content was fully optimised for the fashion-related keywords we wanted to target. We also enhanced the structure of title tags, meta descriptions, and headers to bring in keywords and boost the click-through rate (CTR).
We also concentrated on internal linking to make the website easier for search engines to crawl and guide users through high-converting pages.
Technical SEO Improvements
By looking at the technical SEO elements of the ALPHX site, we improved site speed and loading times to deliver a better user experience in line with Core Web Vitals. As Google takes a mobile-first approach to rankings, it was important that the site had a responsive design and worked well on mobile, so we made tweaks to ensure this. We also implemented schema markup to make it easier for search engines to understand the site and increase inclusion in rich snippets.
Learn more about our Technical SEO Services.
Authority Link Building
Our prior research into ALPHX’s audience helped us create a highly targeted link building campaign to boost our client’s domain rating and trust signals with search engines. We secured top-quality backlinks from relevant third-party sites that covered men’s fashion and lifestyle topics.
The Results
Thanks to our extensive SEO campaign planning and highly targeted execution, we’ve delivered some pretty impressive results, including a huge increase in YoY traffic, engagement, and those all-important conversions.
Comparing the 2024 figures with those from 2023, alongside additional referring domain and organic traffic data from early 2025, demonstrates how much we’ve achieved:
Overall Traffic Growth (All Channels)
- Sessions: 48,461 (2024) vs 8,566 (2023) → 466% increase
- Total Users: 39,824 (2024) vs 6,632 (2023) → 500% increase
- New Users: 37,661 (2024) vs 6,411 (2023) → 488% increase
- Page Views: 105,126 (2024) vs 21,046 (2023) → 399% increase
Engagement & User Behaviour Improvements
- Engaged Sessions: 25,031 (2024) vs 4,379 (2023) → 471% increase
- Event Count: 261,350 (2024) vs 60,300 (2023) → 333% increase
- Event Conversions: 285 (2024) vs 129 (2023) → 121% increase
- Engagement Rate: 52% (2024) vs 51% (2023) → Slight increase
Organic Search Performance
- Organic Search Sessions: 7,369 (2024) vs 1,791 (2023) → 311% increase
- Engaged Sessions from Organic Search: 4,226 (2024) vs 1,095 (2023) → 286% increase
- Total Event Count from Organic Search: 43,160 (2024) vs 16,844 (2023) → 156% increase
- Referring Domains: 51 (Oct 2023) vs 139 (Feb 2025) → 172.6% increase
- Organic Traffic: 48 (Oct 2023) vs 815 (Feb 2025) → 1597.9% increase
Most notably, we achieved a 500% increase in site traffic, a 1597.9% increase in organic search, and a 172.6% increase in referring domains, proving that our efforts paid off.
Takeaways
Due to our highly targeted approach, our client has seen a huge uplift in overall website traffic, engagement, and conversions – including significant growth in organic search traffic and referring domains. This has helped ALPHX grow its client base and position itself as an authority figure in the industry that people can trust and turn to.
If you would like to experience similar results for your business, we can help you. We specialise in digital marketing for a wide range of industries – not just SEO for fashion brands – so get in touch with us. We cover a range of services from website content writing and link building to fully managed SEO campaigns.