POLARIS’ Ecommerce SEO Campaign Named the Best in Europe for their Work with Ecommerce and Retail Giant Dune London
“Genuinely clever” and “an absolute stroke of brilliance” were just a few remarks judges used to describe the ecommerce SEO campaign POLARIS conducted with Dune London as it was chosen as the Best SEO Campaign at the 2025 European Search Awards.
Amongst a set of over 40 shortlisted campaigns, POLARIS’ was chosen not just for the incredibly impressive results it achieved, but also for the way it was conducted. We’ve always been confident in our emphasis on an integrated, educational approach to SEO campaigns with our partners, and it was this methodology that saw our ecommerce SEO services declared as the best in Europe.
Background: Our Engagement with Dune London
Our engagement with Dune commenced back in 2023, with a partnership focused on improving Dune’s share of search across their core women’s and men’s shoe categories, as well as accessories categories such as bags – evolving them into a search market leader in the sector to increase traffic and ultimately their organic revenue.
With a strong body of foundational work on the account leading up to this year, we worked with Dune to set ambitious goals for their organic performance. While the objectives we set were high, we were confident that, with the strength of our partnership and their buy-in into our approach across multiple teams in their organisation, we were well-placed to achieve it. We took this confidence into everything we did in the campaign, from strategy to deliverables, and we were rewarded for it.
The Strategy in Detail
We developed a multi-pronged strategy, covering all three pillars of SEO, that aimed to improve range positioning, better understand customer profiles, and eliminate gaps in our organic visibility. We then mapped this intelligence against the search landscape, product seasonality and customer intent.
We’re not shy about the fact we’re a small agency. We don’t command huge resource, so we knew that all of this was only achievable by building a trusted partner relationship with multiple fragmented teams within Dune and building SEO awareness and practices into their approaches and strategies. We put particular focus on building relationships with the teams closest to each of the SEO pillars.
Workshops with mid-level managers across their website and PR teams educated them on what a 360-degree SEO approach looks like, and how their cross-functional work could fuel SEO growth. We also conducted dedicated work with Dune’s C-suite to educate them on our strategy, with particular attention on opportunity gaps that could fuel business growth. When it came to technical work, we decided to take over the relationship with their technical agency and restructure the ways of working to better serve SEO.
This educational and relationship work was just the start, however. Our strategy also included:
- Optimising and rebalancing Dune’s brand messaging to better serve customer intent across key categories.
- Implementing a joint framework between POLARIS and Dune to outreach products that would specifically benefit our SEO.
- Reorganising the structure of colour ranges on the Dune website, taking control of content to expand our targeting of colour terms at scale.
- Creating a framework and templates for the Dune team to use in day-to-day operations that ensured SEO best-practices were applied when working across web pages, categories and products.
Overcoming Challenges
Implementing our strategy did not come without challenges.
Our desire to take control and steer technical development and integration was extremely innovative, and there was understandable pushback on this new strategy. Demonstrating our value of radical candour, we made our objectives cleat from the offset and how new ways of working were needed to achieve the success both parties wanted.
After this discussion, we were given control over the relationship and after several weeks of consistent management from POLARIS we were able to amend process and create a functional structure that benefitted SEO performance.
Editorial and PR teams similarly did not understand the work we wanted to conduct with both departments. Through considerable education we were able to reach understanding with both teams and alter workflows for a more collaborative approach – this resulted in data-led editorial pieces that started to be surfaced in SERPs, and a digital PR campaign that raised significant awareness around products and ranges that specifically benefitted SEO.
Results of the Best SEO Campaign in Europe
With 12 months of hard, intelligent work and a strategy aligned with organic and business growth we saw phenomenal results. In a snapshot, we delivered for Dune London:
- An over 100% increase in market share, from 3.5% up to 8%.
- Beating our traffic target of 2.8 million users with traffic of 2 million users.
- Beat the revenue target of £6.4 million with £6.8 million revenue.
- Achieved an incredible campaign ROI of 644%.
We didn’t just beat the targets we set for ourselves, we far exceeded them. While other pitching agencies focused on off-site SEO, our educational, multi-faceted strategy achieved incredible results and demonstrated that a small agency is just as capable as a large one in achieving amazing results. Dune were just as happy with us at these results. Sally Richie, Head of Performance Marketing at Dune, said,
“We were extremely impressed with POLARIS, from their attention to detail and focus on the Dune London business, to their knowledge and rigor in approaching technical elements. We are looking forward to partnering with POLARIS to deliver a best-in-class SEO strategy that supports our global business growth. ”
Award-Winning Ecommerce SEO
The judges at the European Search Awards were just as impressed, picking us from over 40 entries in the best campaign category. Of our ecommerce campaign they said:
“The educational approach clearly paid off, as evidenced by the impressive results. In a mature and challenging market, their strategy was genuinely clever, addressing the three essential SEO pillars while simultaneously educating stakeholders. The partnership with the dev tech agency was an absolute stroke of brilliance, forming a seamless, strategic alliance that drove success.”
We find it hard to disagree.
