SEO Strategies for Fashion E-Commerce: Rank Higher and Drive Organic Traffic
By Andra Veness - CHARLENE & CO. EDITORIAL TEAM
To understand SEO, fashion e-commerce brands must first understand what drives it. Search engines are 10 times more effective than social media at driving organic traffic to shopping sites. Effective SEO strategy helps your brand gain visibility with target audiences. By optimizing for search engines, your brand will be presented to those most likely to buy.
So before dedicating funds to other marketing avenues, optimize your fashion e-commerce site with SEO-driven internal content. This can be achieved with a little research into your intended audience, competition, and the keywords your site can use to rank higher in search results. Before any SEO optimization can occur, you must first understand SEO’s effect on fashion e-commerce sites.
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Understanding SEO for Fashion E-Commerce
SEO stands for search engine optimization, which is the process of optimizing the features of a website to improve and increase natural website traffic and engagement. Everything from product descriptions to URLs can be optimized for SEO. When fashion e-commerce sites optimize their websites for traffic, they gain visibility and potential customers. This traffic is crucial to a successful fashion e-commerce business.
Fashion e-commerce sites face a challenge: digitally-based businesses rely on digital marketing and search engines to find customers and grow. Millions of fashion e-commerce sites face the same situation and must use SEO strategies to gain traction. With high competition and the constant shifts of seasonal trends, traffic can easily be swept up by a more on-trend business or a well-known competitor. With these challenges, it is important to use SEO strategically. Find where you can compete within your niche!
Keyword Research
Fashion e-commerce brands must stand out amongst their competition. Keywords are a great place to start. Try choosing relevant, high-volume, and low-competition keywords to incorporate into your content. A good spread of keywords will highlight important features of your brand that a customer would specifically search for. Next, find the keywords that aren’t being overused.
Long-tail keywords are highly specific keywords that haven’t been overused by competitors. The term “long-tail” refers to the search demand curve in which long-tail keywords are searched less than head terms while still being searched by people looking to make a specific purchase.
How do you find these competitive keywords? Google Keyword Planner is a great free tool to start your keyword research journey. Ahrefs’ Keyword Explorer is another tool within their SEO toolset, but it is only available for a fee. SEMrush also has many SEO-optimized tools with six tools dedicated to keyword research among many others available for a fee.
On-Page SEO Optimization
On-page SEO optimization tailors your website’s content and metadata to what search engine crawlers are looking for. If crawlers think your website has what someone is searching for, your site will rank higher!
Title tags and meta descriptions are HTML elements of a brand’s website that specify the title and the purpose of your site. Title tags show up in the search bar and on the search engine results page (SERP). Meta descriptions also show up on the SERP; they are the short blurb under a link that describes what your site has to offer.
The best practice for title tags, meta descriptions, and site content is to make it unique and valuable. Once you have your targeted keywords, incorporate them naturally into valuable information that informs and appeals to your audience’s needs. But remember to keep title tags around 60 characters so they display in their entirety in search results. Meta descriptions are the same way and should be kept around 155 characters.
Words aren’t the only thing that can be optimized; images are part of the SEO strategy. This starts with a high-quality image that has been compressed to preserve quality but minimize file size (that way load times are cut down!). An image’s alt text and file names should also contain valuable, SEO-driven descriptions that offer more information about the image. Be as descriptive as possible while sticking to around 125 characters.
When planning your site’s forward-facing content, remember to develop a solid user experience strategy. Incorporating internal linking will help customers see all your e-commerce site has to offer. And as site visitors explore your site, user experience (UX) is vital. Cultivate a positive site experience by choosing the right words to feature on your site design, polish wording for readability, and assist customers with intuitive navigation.
Technical SEO
Technical SEO helps boost organic traffic by improving backend elements on your website. You might need a tech-savvy web developer to implement effective technical SEO, but it is worth it. Dedicating resources to mobile optimization and fast loading times will ensure shoppers have a stress-free experience no matter which device they use to access your site.
Searchers often expect a fast-loading site nowadays, so technical SEO focuses on shortening loading times for users. To improve site speed, compress your images so they remain high quality but load faster and avoid redirects to newer content if possible.
But technical SEO caters to customers and crawlers alike. URLs help communicate with search engine crawlers and your average searcher. A clean, descriptive URL will help communicate the address of the resource and the purpose of the site.
Another way to please the crawlers responsible for categorizing the content of your site is schema markup. Schema markup is the vocabulary used by these search engines to understand information on a site, so catering to that language will help your site perform better. By becoming more understandable, the site will perform better in searches.
Off-Page SEO Strategies
Off-page SEO strategies begin to involve external partnerships and reputation building. Backlinks are the personal recommendations of the digital world. This can include influencer collaborations and guest blogging that refers back to your site. When other sites backlink to you, it serves as a vote of credibility.
Similarly, a social media presence communicates a level of trust to consumers. Social media signals are a page’s collective likes, shares, posts, comments, and general social media visibility. Search engines can perceive that activity and visibility and attribute credibility to it. By building a consistent social media strategy, your e-commerce site will signal reliability to search engine crawlers and potential customers.
Search engines will also consider social media signals and backlinking with relevance to a certain area. If your fashion e-commerce site is an extension of an in-person shop — or is somehow tied to a geographical location — local SEO is for you. You can take advantage of your locale with Google My Business. Create a detailed, up-to-date Google business profile to improve your business’s local ranking.
Measuring SEO Success
To measure the success of your brand’s SEO strategies, track organic traffic, bounce rate, and conversion rate metrics. By understanding your site’s performance, you can make necessary adjustments for improvement. Remember, SEO is a long-haul game that requires precise planning, not instant perfection. Making adjustments based on performance data is the key to success!
Some tools to monitor these metrics include Google Analytics and Google Search Console. Both provide detailed metric analysis services that are worth investing in. There is nothing better than tools created by the biggest search engines themselves.
Conclusion
Fashion e-commerce sites that rely on search results and site traffic to be successful must have a well-developed SEO strategy. There are so many ways to optimize for SEO, from backend content to influencer collaborations. But don’t be daunted; planning for constant improvement with an SEO optimization routine can help your site perform better in the long run. Consider your ideal website experience and use SEO to help make it a reality for your visitor. This won’t only help your organic traffic grow, but it will also help it rank higher on search engines and convert that traffic to sales.
Additional Resources
Further Reading:
If you are interested in learning more, here are helpful blogs and help pages that outline steps you can take as a beginner getting into SEO.
Speed Optimization for Websites:
https://blog.hubspot.com/website/how-to-optimize-website-speed
Business Profiles and Local Search Info:
https://support.google.com/business/answer/2721884?sjid=5688657445980332256-NC
SEO For Beginners:
https://www.semrush.com/blog/ecommerce-seo/
Tools and Templates:
There are many things to consider when optimizing for SEO. To assist you with your SEO strategy, here are some planners and templates that will give you the structure you might need.
Content Planners for Social Media & Website Planning:
https://www.charleneandco.com/shop
Free SEO Template:
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