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Fashion SEO: 5 Strategies for Ranking Higher and Captivating Customers

By Miva | October 30, 2021

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The fashion industry is unique in that it is in a constant state of change. Apparel retailers are subject to changing trends, shifting consumer needs, and fierce competition between fashion giants and up-and-coming brands.

For your fashion ecommerce business to stand out from the competition, you will need to improve your online visibility. A sound, user-focused SEO strategy is key to elevating your position on search engines and can enhance your fashion site’s user experience.

In this article, we discuss five things you need to do to improve your fashion SEO and user experience, from tightening up your technical SEO to leveraging proven tactics to reach and engage savvy shoppers.

 

Why is SEO Important for Fashion Ecommerce?

SEO is important for fashion ecommerce because it keeps customers on your site and browsing your fashion products. To elevate their SEO, online sellers should focus on making their on-site experience as search-friendly as possible. A good site experience, combined with technical SEO, helps you to rank higher, attract the right traffic, and convert visitors into customers.

A user-friendly website keeps shoppers engaged because it makes it easy for users to browse your site for fashion products and find what they need. If users spend more time on your site, it sends a positive signal to Google that your site is relevant to users. As a result, you’ll rank better in search results and continually drive more traffic to your business.Fashion website homepage

Fashion SEO Foundation

Make sure your on-page copy is descriptive, clear, and informative. Create more trust on your website by including social proof like testimonials, customer reviews, and user-generated content. Make sure customers can find exactly what they’re looking for with clear site navigation, logical page structure, and product search.

Creating excellent content should be a top focus when improving your site’s SEO. However, having a strong technical foundation can help solidify and boost your visibility. The foundation of your site should include:

  • Keyword research
  • Title tags and descriptions
  • Product descriptions
  • Image alt text
  • URL structure
  • Structured data or schema markup
  • Backlinks

Leverage SEO Tools

SEO tools can help make the process of research, optimization, and user tracking easier. Some SEO tools include: 

  • Google Analytics
  • Google Tag Manager (GMT)
  • Google Page Speed
  • Keyword research tools
  • Heat mapping tools
  • Google Trends

1. Stay On Trend With SEO Keywords for Fashion 

In ecommerce, the best practice for SEO is to prioritize long-tail keywords over short-tail keywords. However, to keep up with the pace of the fashion industry, fashion sellers need to take this a step further by aligning their keywords with market trends. 

By combining keywords with what’s currently trending, your site captures both clear search intent and in-the-moment buzz. Being agile with your site and providing fresh content to take advantage of these trends is key to improving your visibility and catching customer attention.

Use Google Trends to identify keywords that are currently trending or will be trending. Proper research will help determine keywords that will drive traffic to your site.

Trends

The fashion market moves fast, and so should you. The modern fashion shopper is searching for buzzing trends, quality items, and celebrity and influencer endorsements. To keep your site SEO in top shape, you’ll need to react quickly to emerging trends in fashion, including: 

  • Styles
  • Colors
  • Clothing Eras
  • Accessories

Keyword research process

Being found in the SERPs when searchers are looking for your exact articles of clothing is the key to fashion ecommerce success. That process, keyword research, starts with understanding which words and queries your target customers are typing when they need something you might be able to sell to them. Keyword research is critical to developing an SEO strategy to drive more direct sales and traffic to your site.

Keyword research involves searching for topics and keywords that your prospective customers might be typing into search engines. Then, it’s about creating quality content tailored toward those topics and keywords, which increases organic website traffic. You’ll want to consider things like:

  • Search intent
  • Competitive research
  • Long tail keywords

2. Pay Attention To Your Product Categories

As a fashion merchant, you may be selling multiple variations of certain apparel and accessory items. If your site supports dedicated pages for each and every product variation, you could be inadvertently competing against yourself for keyword rankings. 

Avoid cannibalizing your SEO by grouping your fashion items into distinct, searchable categories. Build your product categories into your website navigation, link the pages to each other, and implement unique product descriptions, copy, and keyword data.  

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3. Put Quality Content Front and Center

Fashion is all about making an impression. Ecommerce takes this a step further, striving to turn impressions into conversions. Having top billing in the search results isn’t worth much if your site doesn’t convince visitors to take the next step towards making a purchase. This is where your site content comes into play.

Content types

High-quality, relevant content is one of the best ways to keep prospective customers invested and moving forward. Fortunately, the fashion industry offers limitless avenues for engaging content.  

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Imagery and videos

As a fashion ecommerce company, you must use visuals to help you showcase your products to your audience. Images and compelling videos go a long way toward building trust and impressing customers. 

Blogging

Useful blogs and trend reports can all help boost your brand authority. 

Great content also makes your site more likely to receive valuable links from industry blogs and other fashion-related sites. This, combined with an improved user experience from high-quality content, directly impacts your ranking on search engines.

4. Invest in Social Media 

Social media is a valuable channel for fashion businesses to interact with their prospective and current customers, create viral content, and build an active online community. A social media presence allows you to establish your brand voice and to map out your messaging in a consistent plan. Over time, your ideal customers develop interest not only in your products or services but also in you as a business. A social media presence aids SEO by boosting engagement and bringing new readers and traffic to your website.

Platforms

The fashion industry is focused on visuals. You can use social networks to curate content that supports your brand image, encouraging awareness, and communicating your fashion business’ unique value and style. Some of the most popular social platforms for fashion include:

  • Instagram  
  • Snapchat  
  • TikTok  
  • YouTub052022_BLOG_High-Bounce-Blog-Refresh_Instagram Ecommerce How to Drive Sales and Boost Your Business@2x

User-generated content (UGC) 

Prospective fashion customers want to see reviews from their peers, detailed testimonials, case 

studies, and other forms of social proof before committing to a purchase. If you have user-generated content, put it to use on your site. Consider reaching out to your customers and offering incentives for their reviews, feedback, and social media interactions.

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5. Stay on the Lookout for Ways to Improve Your Fashion SEO 

SEO is not a set-it-and-forget-it deal. It’s important to regularly use your analytics and website tools to track how users are interacting with your website and discover things that need improvement. Consider using tools like Google Analytics’ UTM trackers to monitor where users are coming from and heat map generators to see how shoppers interact with your website.

Making regular, data-driven enhancements to your user experience helps boost conversion rates and increases the time visitors spend on your page. This increase in time on page (and decrease in bounce rate) signals to search engines that your site should rank well. In addition, the modern shopper is accustomed to seeing exactly what they’re looking for within seconds of landing on a page. If you want to keep visitors around, your site needs to be accessible, highly navigable, and user-friendly.

An increasing amount of online purchases are made via mobile devices, and Google has been ranking based on responsiveness for years. If you want to rank competitively and stay relevant, you will need an ecommerce platform and site design that can adapt to use on mobile devices.

Gaining Visibility for Your Online Brand

While your online fashion site may already be carrying the latest trends, a solid SEO strategy and user experience will help keep your business in style.

To gain traction and visibility, you will need trend-driven keywords, intuitive site navigation, distinct product categories, and high-quality content to showcase your brand and improve the user experience. These will influence your website’s ranking, generating traffic to your brand and helping you to keep up with the blazing speed of the industry.

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This blog was originally published on February 6, 2020 and updated on October 29, 2021.

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