Fashion Week Special: Boohoo vs Missguided in the Embryo Index

The Embryo Index is Embryo’s list of Manchester companies, evaluating the marketing efforts of Manchester Industry, both online and in the ‘real world’, to show you how you shape up compared to competitors and industry leaders. We’ve looked at industry leaders across the recruitment, finance, legal and property industries, and this time around we’re putting the fashion industry under the microscope. Fashion has always been a massive part of the fabric of our city, and with Fashion Week upon us, as well as business booming in 2019, it only seems right to take a deep dive into the marketing efforts of two of Manchester’s biggest fashion houses – Boohoo and Missguided.

On four of the nine main Index metrics, Missguided and Boohoo were both incredibly successful and evenly matched, showing they are close and fierce competitors! These metrics were their Keyword Reach score, Web Traffic score, Inbound Links score, and of course, the Social Media score. Both companies scored 100 for all of these metrics, the highest score you can get! 

This shows that both sites are running highly successful SEO and link-building strategies, getting lots of website traffic, and are both experts in social media, which is unsurprising for an industry like fast fashion, where social media marketing really is their bread and butter.

Now we’ve seen where these two companies are the same, let’s take a look at what sets them apart.

The Press Score shows how well a company or organisation utilises the local press, including how often and how favourably they are mentioned by local news publications. 

As we can see, Boohoo are masters of the local press, maxing out our metrics with a score of 100. While 48 is generally a fairly good score, and puts Missguided above a lot of other companies in the index, it’s no competition to Boohoo’s dominant hold on the press.

The Customer Review score tells a different story, however. Our Customer review score aggregates reviews from a variety of online portals including Google Reviews, Feefo, Ekomi and Trustpilot to show how happy customers are with the service they’ve received. Both companies have fairly strong Customer Review scores, but Missguided takes the crown on this one, showing the customer experience is generally more positive for Missguided’s customers than Boohoo’s.

Moving onto the On The Street Score, which tells us about how active a company is when it comes to real world advertising, sponsorships, charity work, thought leadership and outreach, among other things to help make themselves known in the city. Here, we see Boohoo streak ahead with 40 points to Missguided’s zero. This is an area both companies can improve in, but especially Missguided, where a little outreach work would go a long way.

Finally we move into the techy bits, a favourite of our SEO team! 

The Web Authority Score tells us how authoritative a site is according to the search engines, taking into account things like site speed, the number and quality of links that point to the site, the amount of high-quality content is on each page and how good the on-page SEO is. These are all factors that go into how well a site ranks on Google and other search engines, so it would be remiss of us not to include them as a metric in our index!

Closely related to the Web Authority score is the Establishment Score. The establishment score tells us how many links from an ‘authority’ a site has, specifically from government and university sites (.gov, .sch, .ac and .edu domains all count). This metric exists because establishment links are generally more difficult to get due to high editorial standards on these sites, and so are considered to be of a much higher quality than most other links. As we can see, both sites have establishment scores that aren’t terrible, but Boohoo is the clear winner here. Partnerships with local government bodies and universities, including things like apprenticeships, graduate and mentorship programmes can all help to improve this score (and they’ll certainly give your On The Street score a real boost too).

It’s worth mentioning again that Boohoo and Missguided were tied with a top score of 100 for almost half of the index metrics: the Keyword Reach score, Web Traffic score, Inbound Links score, and Social Media score – showing that they are both fierce competitors and that overall, their SEO and digital marketing efforts are pretty fantastic.

However, like so many things, there can only be one winner, and in this battle of the fast and the fashionable, it’s Boohoo who comes out on top, with a total score of 1792.75, compared to 1074.75 for Missguided.

Despite this, both these scores are some of the best in the index, with Boohoo’s score putting them 6th out of 455 companies at the time of writing, and Missguided sitting at a very respectable 23rd out of 455.

To find out more about the Embryo Index, to see where your company matches up, or to get added to the index yourself, contact Embryo on 0161 327 1046 today.