Mini case study: Zalando (Berlin)

• Company description
• Executive Summary
• Google Trends (in Germany)
• Backlink Profile Overview
• Organic Traffic Analysis
• Site Performance for Mobile
• Fun Facts

Company Description

The company follows a platform approach, offering Fashion and Lifestyle products to customers in 17 European markets. Zalando with its now 3 co-CEOs, was founded by Rocket internet, it now makes over 5.3 billion in revenues. With over 15k employees, it is the giant of Berlin's start up success stories.

Founded: 2008

Executive Summary

Zalando gets a lot of traffic thanks to brands, to its own mostly ("Zalando" has a search volume of 4m - as a comparison "nike" has a search volume of less than half a million), and all the most famous fashion brands it has in its stock. Zalando ranks regularly in the top 5 for clothing brands.

Surprisingly its mobile performance is quite average with issues with Javascript with big payloads, and not very efficient cache policy. Although Zalando has a huge amount of backlinks pointing to its site, for strong backlinks, it relies mostly on its own sites.

Google Trends (in Germany)

Backlink Profile Overview

• 4.1m backlinks from 11.6K domains.
• 84% of backlinks are from pages with little Page Authority.
• 33% of the backlinks are from German websites.
• Most of the anchor text backlinks are brand (but also "brandandbutter.com" which now doesn't exist.)
• 7% of the links are nofollow and 5% are images.

Follow Backlinks with Page Authority of 40 and above (according to ahrefs)

• Open Route services (image)
• Zalon, a Zalando company (image)
• Digital Media Women (image)
• Zalando's Job subdomain
• Zalando's Corporate subdomain
• Babez
• Adidas Zx Flux
• Toool.de

Organic Traffic Analysis

Zalando ranks for over 1.1m Keywords for
1.1m monthly organic visits.

Keyword targeting and Traffic

Most of the traffic actually comes from searches for other brands such as Bershka and Adidas. The share of clothing-related keywords is actually quite small compared to brands.

Main Keywords generating traffic in Germany (excluding Zalando brand terms):

Other brands:

• Bershka (36k)
• Adidas (34k)
• Esprit (32k)
• Brikenstock(25k)
• Topshop(23k)
• Cecil(20k)
• Mango(19k)

Other terms:

• kleider (15k)
• Schuhe(14k)
• Herrenausstatter(9k)
• Brautschuhe(4.6k)
• Sommerkleider(4.5k)
• Taschen (3.8k)

Site Performance for Mobile: Javascript issues

Performance is not perfect for such a big site. The main issues reported by Lighthouse a regarding Javascript.

Fun Facts

Zalando is so big in Germany many mispellings of "Zalando" still have considerable search volume.

For instance:

• "zalandoo": 8400 SV
• "zalandi": 3900 SV
• "zalamdo": 3200 SV
• "zalande": 1200 SV