New analysis of 100 leading fashion e-commerce sites throughout lockdown has found that those with an active blog capitalized on the competition and made the most of the pandemic’s online shopping boom.

The research, conducted by digital marketing agency Impression, analyzed the top 100 leading fashion e-commerce websites, based on 26 factors including their domain rating (DR), number of top 10 organic Google rankings, average monthly traffic, and estimated traffic value to find the specific elements contributing to a fashion brand’s online presence.

Topping the study’s rankings was online US shoe retailer Zappos.com, closely followed by Gap.com and Nike.com, all performing well in the key areas.

The study found multiple factors that were pivotal to the success of Zappos.com in Google’s search rankings, including the amount of authoritative websites linking to the domain, the speed of the site and its accessibility for all visitors.

But, the factor to have the biggest impact on the success of all the top sites was an active blog or press page. An analysis of these 100 sites and 2,600 data points show that blogs had the biggest positive correlation with the amount of organic traffic to a site, which in turn means more potential customers. Those with an active blog page saw 277 per cent more traffic on average than those with an outdated blog page.