Universal Standard Embraces Inclusive Sizing—and Web Analytics and SEO

Header from the "mystery box" product page on Universal Standard.

What is up with the name “Universal Standard”?

The ecommerce site Universal Standard is a women’s fashion startup founded in 2015 by entrepreneurs Polina Veksler and Alexandra Waldman. It started with a mission of offering “modern essentials” first in sizes 10 to 28, then 6 to 32, and next—by 2019—in sizes 00 to 40. The cofounders wear different sizes, one plus-size and the other conventional, and they were upset that they could rarely shop for clothes at the same store. Thus, the store’s mission focuses on being size-inclusive with the philosophy, “we won’t stop until we bring fashion for all women up to a Universal Standard” (Universal Standard, n.d.a)—and scale their medium to a size 18, the midpoint of their range as well as the average U.S. woman’s size (see fig. 1). 

Figure 1: A graph of "the average size in America" corresponds to the brand's sizing conventions (Universal Standard, n.d.b).

That all makes sense from a branding perspective. Honestly, one of my issues with the brand name is that it doesn’t sound punchy—and the words “universal” and “standard” are so common that brand monitoring and SEO become hard to measure. The main organic competition comes from two categories. The first is clothing retailers with similar names, namely Universal Works in the UK and Universal Store in Australia. The second is a blogger who mentions Universal Standard often with affiliate links—more on her later. 

Semrush and SEOquake: Site audit, advertising research, and on-page SEO checker

An audit revealed a fairly healthy website with a score of 64%, which is under the industry standard for shopping sites of 77%. The most common errors and warnings have to do with images (464 broken images and 362 with no alt-text), slow page load speed (five pages), and an imbalanced text-to-HTML ratio (89 pages). 

The on-page SEO checker in Semrush came up with 211 suggestions for 38 pages, including 38 backlink ideas and 140 content ideas, mainly adding keywords to H1 tags and meta tags and making body copy more readable. Notably, there is only one strategy suggestion and none for technical SEO, indicating that there’s a good SEO foundation in place.  

I coupled this with advertising research. Universal Standard currently has 23 paid keywords, all of which contain their brand name. By checking the ad copies in Semrush, I can tell that brand awareness is still top of mind for them, as is promoting seasonal items and specials, such as its semi-annual “mystery box” special going on now. The brand also runs a program called Fit Liberty that allows customers to exchange any of their core pieces for a new size within a year, which is promoted in their PPC campaign (see fig. 2). 

Figure 2: Four example PPC ads from Semrush.

I also took a screenshot that shows the paid and organic Google Search results for “universal standard”—one of its PPC keywords—with SEOquake analytics included thanks to my Chrome plugin. I thought the pages/visit (or session, as Google Analytics would say) of 3.00 was a solid figure, as was the average visit time of 8 minutes 12 seconds (see fig. 3). This is likely something that the brand tracks related to a goal flow reports and segments (Reed, 2022)—which during a big promotion like the “mystery boxes,” would be very useful to see what mystery boxes the visitors consider, what they add and remove from their cart, and which of them come through the brand’s own social and which come through other sources, including its partners and influencers. 

Figure 3:Google results for "universal standard" during its mystery box campaign (2022).

Speaking of whom, meet Emily Ho. Her site, Authentically Emmie, was one of the top competitors named by Semrush for Universal Standard. Indeed, she knows her way around social media and SEO, and she’s clear about ethically disclosing her freebies and affiliate links. Her latest blog post, which she shared on all her social platforms (Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, and Facebook), offers an additional 10% discount on mystery boxes (Ho, 2022). The discount earns her a commission and, of course, provides valuable analytics and information to US.

Tools Universal Standard is using: Sprout Social, Layer0, and ApexDrop

A US has partnered with Sprout Social for several years, and its social marketing and branding strategies were both highlighted by Sprout last year (Mazouri, 2021; Gomez, 2021). Clearly the brand uses its product quality and value to promote itself, but it also puts its mission and values up front. The brand ties a social justice-flavored approach to fashion (and social causes, such as Black Lives Matter) to all of its marketing on social media, making sharing posts a different sort of action for its fans than your average fashionista discovery or discount code. 

Layer0 is a front-end website tool that Universal Standard has used to fix some of its technical issues, such as slow page load times, which can affect SEO and of course negatively affect visitors’ experience: US’s bounce rate dropped 40%, Layer0 claimed (Layer0, n.d.; AWS, 2021). The case study points out how the mobile conversion rate also went up 200% once the speed improvements kicked in. All of these numbers are possible by tracking web analytics, of course.

ApexDrop is a micro-influencer platform that helps brands develop user-generated content—this social media growth can result in a bonanza for off-page SEO, as the case study noted (ApexDrop, n.d.). The tool allowed the influencers to link each piece to the item’s sale page so their friends and fans can shop the entire outfit.

Suggestions for improvement for Universal Standard

  1. Use on-page copy, not images, on the homepage to improve SEO. The readability score for the homepage was 0 out of 100, and when I reviewed the content I could see that much of the text was embedded in images (see figure below).
  2. Add content about inclusive sizing and the story behind the brand more, to drive SEO and perhaps anchor a paid campaign. Social media posts may already be doing this work, but by adding a goal page on the ecommerce site that spotlights specific items, this can be more concretely tied to conversion rates.

Fun fact: Universal Standard is hiring a digital coordinator! Could it be one of us?

Figure 4: Three content sections below the main header are all text-heavy images (Universal Standard, n.d.c).


References

AWS (Amazon Web Services). (2021, Dec.). Layer0 helps Universal Standard increase revenue by 81% year over year. Retrieved from https://aws.amazon.com/partners/success/universal-standard-layer0/ 

Gomez, R. (2021, Oct. 14). How to tap into your brand purpose: Advice from Universal Standard’s Alexandra Waldman. Sprout Social. Retrieved from https://sproutsocial.com/insights/universal-standard-brand-purpose/ 

Ho, E. (2022, Feb. 16). Universal Standard mystery box 2022 + discount. Authentically Emmie. Retrieved Feb. 22, 2022 from https://authenticallyemmie.com/2022/02/universal-standard-mystery-box-2022-discount/ 

Layer0. (n.d.). Universal Standard deploys weekly and lifted conversions by 200% on Layer0. Retrieved from https://www.layer0.co/case-studies/universal-standard 

Mazouri, H. (2021, Feb. 23). Social Spotlight: How Universal Standard commands the fashion space with inclusive content. Sprout Social. Retrieved from https://sproutsocial.com/insights/social-spotlight-universal-standard/ 

Reed College of Media at West Virginia University. (2022). Week 3 lesson: Exploring Google Analytics View Settings and Advanced Features. IMC 642: Web Metrics and SEO. Retrieved from https://ecampus.wvu.edu/webapps/blackboard/execute/displayLearningUnit?course_id=_174310_1&content_id=_8900875_1&framesetWrapped=true 

Universal Standard. (n.d.). About us. Retrieved Feb. 20, 2022 from https://www.universalstandard.com/pages/about-us 

Universal Standard. (n.d.). Find my size. Retrieved Feb. 20, 2022 from https://www.universalstandard.com/pages/find-my-size 

Universal Standard. (n.d.). Home. Retrieved Feb. 21, 2022 from https://www.universalstandard.com/ 


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