How a Connected Search Strategy Doubled Joe Browns’ Organic Visibility

SEO

Joe Browns is a British fashion and lifestyle retailer

Joe Browns is known for their colourful, unique clothing across womenswear, menswear and homeware.

Founded in 1998, they have since opened their flagship store in Meadowhall in 2017 and their first outlet store in York. Their mission is to make people feel good, putting individual styles into people’s wardrobes with stand-out garments.

The Search Opportunity

Flaunt’s organic search programme focused on growing revenue by strengthening technical search foundations and growing organic and AI visibility, whilst reducing reliance on branded search and paid ads. This meant resolving significant technical issues, increasing visibility for high-volume non-brand commercial searches and building stronger topical authority around key product categories.

The work combined technical SEO, commercial product and collection page optimisation, new landing pages, supporting editorial content, and seasonal/trend-led content, ensuring we clustered content around key products to build semantic relevance and authority.

As search behaviour evolved, the strategy also expanded beyond traditional search to consider AI Overviews and LLM visibility, with content structured around clearer intent, questions, expertise and category authority.

The Barriers to Broader Visibility

Joe Browns already had strong brand recognition and a distinctive product proposition, but there was a significant opportunity to make more of that range through non-branded search.

Building Authority Around the Product Range

Large fashion categories such as dresses, tops, jackets, plus-size clothing and menswear are exceptionally competitive, meaning Joe Browns needed to compete against much larger high-street brands for broad commercial terms.

Working With Site Build Limitations

The existing site had limitations regarding page templates, site speed, and the implementation of technical recommendations. Changes needed to be coordinated and tested across internal and external development teams, with tight turnaround times. We needed to provide clear technical guidance and identify improvements achievable within the existing infrastructure.

Controlling an Oversized Site Map

At the start of our working relationship with Joe Browns, approximately 1.5 million pages were indexed by Google, which didn’t reflect the website’s actual size. Many of these were non-SEO-friendly filtered pages, confusing search engines, harming rankings, and creating a significant technical challenge.

Anticipating Seasonal Demand

Seasonality is particularly important in fashion. Content needed to be planned and refreshed ahead of demand, rather than optimised once a trend or season had already peaked.

Keeping Pace with Changing Search Behaviour

LLM analysis showed that brands such as Seasalt, White Stuff and Boden were prioritised for boho fashion recommendations, highlighting an additional authority and content gap that Joe Browns needed to close.

Connecting Technical SEO, Content and Authority

To build Joe Browns’ visibility beyond branded search, we created a connected organic strategy that brought technical SEO, Content, Digital PR and wider brand activity together around the categories most important to the brand.

Strengthening the Technical Foundations

Regular technical SEO audits formed a key part of our strategy. This included addressing indexation, auditing site speed, and providing conversion-focused recommendations, development testing, and ongoing technical support.

Page-template limitations meant we couldn’t take the traditional approach of adding noindex tags to filtered pages. Instead, nofollow attributes were added to every internal link pointing towards those pages.

Site speed was also a major focus, with continued audits and recommendations to improve performance within the existing platform.

We also provided technical support during the Hyvä migration, which was completed by Joe Browns’ development team, whilst Flaunt’s internal development team provided Magento training.

Building Topical Authority

Rather than targeting isolated keywords, such as ‘dresses’, ‘tops’, we developed cluster content around their important categories, using new commercial pages and supporting editorial content, together answering customer questions to target semantically relevant keywords and drive authority around the product group.

Instead of creating generic fashion SEO content, topics were tied to areas where the brand had genuine products and expertise: boho fashion, dresses, plus-size clothing, occasionwear, jackets, seasonal styling and distinctive fashion.

Strengthening Existing Content and Filling Search Gaps

It’s easy to think ‘we need to make new content straight away.’ But instead, we looked at existing pages that were of high value to Joe Browns and strengthened them where they already had authority and commercial relevance. We used our optimisation tool Goose to make sure that the sentiment, tone and topic clarity fully reflected the brand and that the content was optimised for organic search.

We also produced evergreen, high-intent subcategories that could capture more specific searches and feed authority back into broader parent categories. This meant creating new collection pages where search demand wasn’t being adequately served.

We continuously reviewed rankings and search performance rather than treating publication as the end of the process. Strong existing product groups could therefore be refreshed and expanded as opportunities emerged.

Supporting Commercial Discovery and Seasonality

Informational content, such as styling guides, trend pieces and practical fashion advice, allowed Joe Browns to capture consumers earlier in their journey before directing them towards relevant product categories.

Quarterly planning allowed content to be created or refreshed before key search periods.

For example, the April–June plan included optimisation of the core women’s dresses, boho dresses, tops, trousers, and summer dresses collections, as well as new commercial pages, including Capri pants, women’s work dresses, and weekend/city-break outfits.

Supporting these were informational pieces, including a summer trousers guide and a day dresses guide, plus optimisation of established content covering summer dresses, dress types, boho dresses, jackets, and dress lengths.

Adapting for AI-led Search

Content increasingly focused on directly answering practical customer questions, demonstrating expertise around fit and styling and strengthening the brand-topic associations needed across Google, AI overviews and LLMs.

Additional analysis using LLMLens, our bespoke AI search visibility tool, helped us understand how Joe Browns and its competitors appeared in AI-generated recommendations.

Connecting Content with Wider Brand Activity

Content planning was also increasingly connected with Digital PR and wider brand activity. The aim was for onsite content, social media, and PR to reinforce the same topics across multiple platforms, strengthening authority rather than operating as separate channels.

One example was our ‘Sudoku Packing’ campaign, which turned a trending packing method into useful onsite content, national coverage and customer engagement across multiple channels.

Commercial Results

Organic search delivered a clear commercial impact, with organic revenue increasing by 21% year on year, demonstrating that growth in visibility and rankings translated into meaningful commercial value, not just increased traffic.

Technical SEO Impact

Within months, our technical SEO work was starting to see payoff, with the number of indexed pages becoming much more reflective of the website size, improving crawl efficiency and concentrating the website’s authority to the pages that matter.

Over three years, Time to Interactive improved by more than 10 seconds, and the Lighthouse performance scores increased. Although there were limitations within the Magento build, there was a clear improvement in performance.

99%

approximate reduction in indexed pages

10+ seconds

improvement in Time to Interactive

35 points

approximate increase to Lighthouse performance scores

Further 2026 Results

Through our connected strategy, focusing on viable keywords and cluster-led content, organic visibility reached its highest level in the 2025/26 period. Visibility approximately doubled over the period, rising from around 8% in March 2025 to 16% on mobile, and 17.2% on desktop by 31st March 2026.

This approach also delivered some valuable keyword gains for Joe Browns, improving rankings across priority topics.

Organic performance strengthened in the first half of 2026, and most importantly, it wasn’t limited to people already searching for Joe Browns. Non-brand clicks increased by 45% year on year in February, followed by further consecutive growth in March and April.

33%

year-on-year organic session growth in June 2026

45%

year-on-year growth in non-brand clicks in February 2026

May 2026

highest organic sessions

Building a Strong Foundation for Growth

Joe Browns’ results show the value of treating search as a connected, ongoing strategy rather than a series of isolated technical fixes or content tasks. By addressing substantial technical issues and aligning commercial pages, editorial content, seasonal demand, PR and emerging search behaviour, we created stronger foundations for organic growth beyond branded search.