Owning the Brand Story Through SEO at Stitch Fix

 

Snapshot

Company: Stitch Fix
Stage: High-growth consumer startup
Role: Content & SEO (brand-focused initiative)

Goal:
Reverse a decline in organic traffic by reclaiming branded search results, and ensure Stitch Fix owned its own brand narrative in search.

The Problem

In its early years, Stitch Fix benefited from strong product-market fit and a steady stream of positive press. Organic growth came easily, and the company didn’t need to work hard to stay visible.

By 2016, that started to change.

Organic traffic declined by as much as 25% year over year, and Stitch Fix could no longer rely on “disruptor buzz” to carry the brand. New competitors like ThredUp, Wantable, and Trunk Club were entering the market, and search results were becoming more competitive.

An SEO audit revealed a deeper issue: Stitch Fix didn’t own its own brand story in search.

For several high-intent branded queries, third-party sites, including sites critical of Stitch Fix, were outranking us in Google results.

Because roughly 80% of clicks for branded searches go to the first result, this wasn’t just a perception problem. It represented a meaningful loss of traffic, trust, and potential customers.

Sites critical of StitchFix were outranking us for branded keywords.

Leadership took this seriously. If we wanted to recover organic traffic, we needed to reclaim branded search results and answer customers’ questions better than anyone else.

The Core Challenge

The challenge wasn’t simply to “rank better.” We needed to:

  • Identify which branded queries mattered most

  • Understand what potential customers were actually trying to learn

  • Create content that was genuinely helpful and optimized to outperform established third-party sites

In other words, we needed to own the brand narrative — using SEO as the lever.

Strategy

We focused on a single guiding principle: the best way to win branded search is to be the most useful result on the page.

The strategy had three parts.

  1. Identify high-impact branded queries

  2. Prioritize content that removed conversion barriers

  3. Build best-in-class landing pages

1. Identify high-impact branded queries

We conducted keyword research to identify branded topics where third-party sites were outranking Stitch Fix. Tools like Answer the Public helped surface the questions people were actively asking, while customer survey data highlighted the topics that created hesitation or friction for new users.

Common questions included:

  • “How much does Stitch Fix cost?”

  • “What brands does Stitch Fix carry?”

These queries weren’t just informational, they were decision-making moments.

2. Prioritize content that removed barriers to conversion

Rather than trying to rank for everything at once, we prioritized branded keywords that:

  • Drove traffic to third-party sites

  • Represented clear barriers to someone trying the service

  • Had strong intent tied to conversion

This allowed us to focus effort where it would have the biggest business impact.

3. Build best-in-class branded landing pages

Once topics were prioritized, we committed to creating content that fully answered each question clearly, honestly, and in Stitch Fix’s voice, while following SEO best practices closely enough to win competitive search results.

Execution

We created 13 branded landing pages, each designed to answer a specific customer question and outperform third-party results.

For every page, we focused on six core SEO ranking factors:

  • High-quality, user-first content. Each page was designed to be engaging and easy to read, with clear structure, scannable formatting, and helpful visuals. Article templates were redesigned to support hierarchical headings, lists, images, and video where possible.

  • Mobile responsiveness since 65% of our site traffic came from mobile

  • Target keywords incorporated into metadata

  • Internal linking to relevant pages across the site

  • Sufficient depth and word count to fully answer the query

  • Clear prioritization via sitemap inclusion

While these are standard SEO principles, the emphasis was on execution quality, ensuring Stitch Fix’s pages were genuinely more helpful than anything else on the results page.

Screenshots of four different landing pages.

Results

The strategy worked.

  • Stitch Fix regained the top ranking for all targeted branded keywords

  • Year-over-year organic traffic grew by 33%, exceeding the 25% goal and fully reversing the previous year’s decline

Beyond traffic, the pages drove meaningful business results:

  • Organic customer conversions increased by 55% year over year (vs. a 25% forecast)

  • Each branded landing page converted over 10% of visitors on average, outperforming the site’s baseline conversion rate

  • The pages became a core part of new customer acquisition, not just an SEO fix

By owning branded search results, Stitch Fix was able to control its narrative, remove friction for potential customers, and turn SEO into a reliable acquisition channel.