Cracking Myntra's SEO approach

Read time: 4.5 minutes

Myntra started as B2B brand.

It may come to your as a surprise but Myntra started as a gifting website for corporates offering personalized t-shirts, mugs, mouse pads, etc in 2007.

It was in 2011 when Myntra moved away from personalised B2B gifting to fashion & lifestyle products.

By 2012, Myntra was selling 350 Indian and international brands.

Myntra was acquired by Flipkart for 2,000 crores in 2014.

On May 10, 2015, Myntra announced that it will shut down its website and move to an 'app-only' model.

Myntra justified the move by stating that 95% of their traffic comes from mobile devices and 70% of their purchases happen through smartphones.

The move received a mixed reception.

But talking about numbers- The same year Myntra reported a revenue decline of 10%.

In Feb 2016, Myntra move away from the 'app-only' model and revived its website.

And the rest is as they say- History!

The below graph shows the growth in traffic from 2016 onwards on Myntra's website.

Fast forward to today.

Myntra gets 90.5M organic traffic every month.

But this number is the result.

What went behind this growth is what I am going to cover in this newsletter.

With SEO there is nothing secretive.

A website aims to follow the best practices laid down by Google and keeps doing it consistently. There is not enough room to experiment with SEO.

Hence, Myntra was not doing things that were unheard of in the SEO community. They just executed at an unprecedented pace.

Having said this, they moved fast on 2 most important aspects of SEO. Those were:

• Scalable content approach

• Ease of discoverability

Myntra is the top fashion e-commerce player in India from a traffic perspective.

Here is a competitive landscape for you:

Myntra is way ahead of the competition.

Myntra ranks for almost 6 lac keywords on Google, while Ajio and Tata Cliq rank for 3 lac keywords respectively.

Let's break down the 2 pillars of Myntra's SEO strategy:

1. Scalable content approach

An SEO-focussed website breaks down its SEO content approach into 2 parts:

• Content on PLPs (Product listing pages) - to drive transactions

• Intent based pages - to drive informational traffic

Talking about content that drives transaction:

If you go to any product listing page or category page of Myntra you will find 150-300 word content after all the products.

Here is an example from the formal shirts category page of Myntra:

Why is the content on the category page important?

Because this content is text-based. And for Google, this page solved the problem of users who are looking for formal shirts with the help of content + product.

If you look at the top 3 results of websites ranking for formal shirts on google, you will find such content on their category page (just above the footer).

Myntra did an extremely good job to capture the transactional intent of users with this approach which helped them get purchases.

The other thing they did well was targeting about 4 keywords with every category page.

If you closely look at the above image, you will find Myntra is using different keyword combinations in order to rank the same page for different keywords.

In the above image; you will find keywords like:

• men's formal shirt

• branded formal shirts

• formal shirts for men

• buy formal shirts

You make any of the above searches on Google, and you will see the same formal shirts page of Myntra ranking on the top spot.

Keyword mix- such an important tactic.

A hack you can follow while finding the ideal keyword mix for your brand is this:

Hence, choose 4-5 keywords with every page of your website.

2 Keywords can be high-volume keywords and 3 could be mid to low-volume keywords.

High-volume keywords typically take more time for your web page to rank. But for mid or low-volume keywords you will rank faster, giving you initial traction.

But Myntra did not stop there.

Doing SEO for transactional intent searches only is not scalable beyond a point.

There are only so many searches happening where people want to buy a fashion or lifestyle product.

Here comes their second content approach.

Targeting informational keywords.

Shoes with a salwar suit is an informational search- where the user is still researching the right shoes to wear with a salwar suit.

And you will find Myntra ranking in 1st position for this search as well.

They have done their research on what people look for along with Salwar suits, and have made a page accordingly.

Myntra has followed this strategy in many categories. Giving them additional traffic, over and above transactional intent searches.

In fact, they have a balance of 40% SEO traffic coming on their website from Informational searches and around 60% traffic from transactional searches.

A very healthy mix!

2. Ease of discoverability.

Myntra did methodological use of Structured data.

What is structured data?

Understand this about google, if users see a webpage like this:

Google sees a webpage like this:

Hence, for a user it is easy to skim through a page and focus on the sections that are important to her.

But Google has to go through these lines of code over and over.

How about you tell Google the sections that are important on your page & google prioritizes crawling those sections first & shows those sections with prominence on the google search result page?

This data that you highlight for priority-based crawling on your page is known as structured data.

On Google these structured data results look like this:

These results almost occupy the entire phone screen before the first scroll.

Now that structured data is deep, there are various sections that you can define on a webpage depending on the product or service you sell.

Let's leave the dissection of structured data for some other day & let's understand what Myntra did with structured data.

Myntra made use of 4 structured data on all of their category pages.

Those 4 structured data were:

1. Organization — Using this data type, you can communicate important information about your organization with Google. Information like the name, social ids, address, description, etc.

2. BreadcrumbList — This type showcases the location of your page on the hierarchy of your website.

3. Items List — The Items lists will basically include a list of elements or products on your page. You don't have to include all the products.

4. How-to — Here you answer the how-to query, in short, using a couple of points.

For example;

With the help of Items-List structured data, Myntra started showing image-based results on the Google search result page. Like this:

By doing this at scale, Myntra was able to occupy more real estate on Google search result pages. Giving them more clicks and hence better ranking eventually.

Myntra operates on a massive scale with 2.5M pages.

Keeping constant SEO checks, correcting issues, and maintaining dominance is no cakewalk.

If I apply some assumptions based on my experience of running fashion e-commerce businesses; this is what 90M monthly traffic would translate into:

This is considering a normal month for Myntra.

During their EORS (End of reason sale) this number would shoot up by 2-3x.

And they do EORS twice a year now.

Myntra's SEO approach was not unique, though they thought of a bigger picture with their keywords approach and move at a pace that no fashion & lifestyle e-commerce brand at that time could.

Nowadays, there are a few websites following a similar approach, but because of the vintage and links that Myntra has already built, it is hard for competition to challenge Myntra at scale.

Credit also goes to their SEO agency- Infidigit.

In 2023, SEO is more complex and a website needs to take care of more factors in order to rank their website on top.

If you want to excel at SEO and get your website at the top; here is your chance.

That's it for today, folks!

Wish you all a very happy Republic day! Hope you have taken a day off on Friday and have rejuvenating long weekend.

My plan is to finish a book called $100 Startup by Chris Guillebeau this weekend & spend some time with my 1-year-old daughter- Arvika.

Next newsletter- 12 SEO KPIs for 2023! hitting your inbox soon.

Cheers,

Apurv