Beyond Keywords: How a Global Sportswear Retailer Captured European Search and Sales

Written by TOPPAN Digital Language

The Situation

In the fast-moving world of fashion, maintaining visibility and relevance is critical.

An iconic global athletic footwear and sportswear retailer that sells the world’s most coveted footwear brands, wanted to increase the visibility of its brand category page articles in European markets, particularly for its core brand lines.

The objectives were clear:

Increase European awareness of the retailer
Maintain its tone of voice
Increase traffic and sales
Compete with the name brands it sells on in-market search engine results

The Challenge

Our partnership began with multilingual keyword research, employing advanced tools to unearth terms that resonate locally.

As the retailer sells products from different brands, we also included branded keywords to strategically highlight each product line, ensuring they stand out against the brand’s native website.

Then, we included the appropriate localized terms to boost search volumes and visibility.

The Result

A bespoke glossary for 5 European languages, optimized for both organic and paid search.

The next step was localization.

Here, we used our in-house brand adaptation expertise and global network of marketing linguists skilled in brand content. After careful consideration, we opted for transcreation over a traditional localization solution.

With a thorough onboarding process to understand the brand’s tone of voice, we empowered our linguists to lean into what they do best: adapt content with the right level of creative flare that fits each cultural context while maintaining the brand’s voice and appeal.

The Home Stretch

Across Europe, the retailer witnessed a large spike in European traffic and conversions, signaling an impressive ROI from our partnership.

With transcreation initially a minor component of our partnership, this approach has proven so effective that 90% of the content we now create for them is adapted using transcreation in up to 12 languages.

This success has propelled us to scale our operations, while consistently employing the same team of skilled marketing linguists. This ensures continuity and deepening expertise in the retailer’s brand voice and style, in strategic alignment with their evolving global communication needs.

Get to Know The Author

Written by TOPPAN Digital Language

This article was co-written by our team of in-house experts, who bring deep industry knowledge and hands-on experience to every insight shared.