The fashion industry is one of the most competitive industries in the world. The competition between fashion brands and retailers has never been so fierce, with many companies fighting to get their products seen by potential customers online. This means that it’s essential for your eCommerce website to be optimized for search engines such as Google or Bing. In this article, you will find helpful information on how to twitch your eCommerce SEO strategy to put your eCommerce business above your competition. Follow along to learn more about SEO for fashion eCommerce websites.
Why Is SEO Crucial for Fashion eCommerce Websites?
Search engine optimization is the process of improving your website’s visibility in search engines. It involves a lot more than just adding keywords to your website, and it can be pretty complex if you don’t know how to do it. But with some basic knowledge about how Google works, as well as an understanding of how people use search engines, you’ll soon see results from this simple but effective technique.
SEO is crucial for fashion eCommerce sites because it will change the way you sell online. Implementing a rock-solid search engine optimization strategy can increase your conversion rate, boost search rankings, and increase organic visibility. The fashion sector should focus on this aspect as 44% of people start their online shopping journey with a Google search query. Furthermore, eCommerce online stores should be optimized for organic search as 23.6% of eCommerce orders are directly tied to organic traffic.
A compelling digital marketing strategy is highly effective in positioning fashion eCommerce stores. We highly recommend business owners focus on SEO and online marketing activities to reach their target audiences. In the fashion sector, numerous brands offer the same type of products and have the same target audience. Because of this aspect, it is hard to stand out from the crowd. Here is where search engine optimization and online marketing techniques come into play. In the following chapters, we will discuss these elements and actions to help you overcome your competition.
What Are the Elements of Positioning Your Fashion eCommerce Website and Increase Search Rankings?
The right positioning of your online fashion store is essential not only for search engines but for increasing your online sales.
- In today’s market, customers want to resonate with the brand’s ethics and principles. This is why you should have a clear and attractive value proposition where you underline the main characteristics of your brand and what you stand for.
- We strongly recommend creating a fashion blog for your online store to increase traffic. More than that, the blog content can support your product pages, and you can create articles based on search intent. High-quality content will improve your SEO rankings and enhance your website’s authority. Read more about the importance of eCommerce blog strategy in today’s market.
- Be active on social networks. Engaging with your customers on social platforms improves user experience, better position your brand, and increase customer’s trust in your company. Also, it would help if you considered paid social media advertising campaigns to reach wider audiences.
- Excellent and well-instructed customer service in your virtual store is a nice thing to have. You can implement a chatbot to facilitate communication with your customers.
- Other elements that contribute to increasing trust and create customer loyalty are loyalty programs, email marketing, newsletters, post-sale tracking and reviews. Keep in mind that the sale process is not over after a user places an order and receives the goods. It is important to engage with your buyers after receiving their packages, ask them for feedback, and leave product reviews.
7 SEO Tips for Fashion eCommerce Websites
If you want to create a fashion brand that stands out from the crowd, has an impact on your target customers and will increase your sales, we have 7 SEO tips for you that will help you reach your goals.
1. Make sure your website is user-friendly
A user-friendly eCommerce website is a must to keep visitors engaged and boost sales. When users spend more time on your website, Google receives positive signals and recognizes your site as relevant and helpful to visitors. The outcome of these signals is a better rank on the search results page that will drive more traffic to your pages. If you want people to stay on your site and browse through your fashion products, you should consider optimizing several SEO components such as:
- Page speed – is a significant ranking factor. Having a fast loading website will boost user engagement. A fast loading website will give the customer the advantage of browsing through thousands of products without any hiccups. We recommend using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool to check the current state of your website and get their suggestions on how to improve it.
- Easy to shop product pages – when your product pages are easy to shop and navigate, your target customers will spend more time on your website and are more likely to buy from you. As user experience is another major ranking factor, the happier your customers, the more chances you have for a higher position in the search results. We strongly recommend you add filters such as price range, colour, size, etc. This way, you will give your audience the chance to find exactly what they are looking for faster and easier.
- Make sure your call to action (CTA) buttons are clear and visible – they are a vital part of the user experience. When a customer wants to add a product to their cart, add it to their wishlist or even learn more about your fashion brand, it is crucial to find the CTA that matches their intentions and guides them to their next steps.
- Pay attention to your website’s fonts – we strongly advise you to make sure that your audience can easily read every piece of content you have on your website. If they cannot read the product description or specifications, they will not buy from you. A clear font is essential to a seamless user experience because it facilitates understanding your website’s information and will lead your customers closer to conversion.
- Optimize your shopping cart and checkout process – keep in mind that almost 20% of users will abandon their cart if the checkout process is too complicated. We recommend implementing one-page checkout and don’t ask for unnecessary information, as you will risk losing leads and increase your cart abandonment rates. Monitor your online clothing store checkout experience to make sure that you are offering a seamless process that encourages users to convert. You can use Google Analytics to do that.
2. Drive organic traffic by optimizing relevant keywords
The next step we recommend focusing on for your online clothing store is choosing relevant keywords and optimizing them. Keywords play a central role in deciding what product pages appear in the SERP (search engine results page). If you do not use the right keywords on your pages, you will lose valuable organic traffic for your online business. We advise you to conduct keyword research using online tools such as Ubbersuggest or Keywordsheeter. Take a look at the People Also Ask box and Related searches on Google’s SERP. By doing so, you will get more keyword ideas of what target keywords people are using when typing their queries. We also recommend focusing on long-tail keywords as they are more specific and define users’ commercial intent. When you find the relevant keywords, including a short-tail keyword, make sure you integrate them into your meta title and meta description. This information is the first thing your online audience sees when they discover your fashion eCommerce website. On-page SEO is crucial for a high keyword ranking.
3. Help visitors find your products with easy-to-use navigation
A meaningful component of your fashion eCommerce website is your website architecture and navigation. When your audience comes to your website, they should easily find your product categories and products. When the website navigation is complex, and your website architecture is disorganized, you risk losing customers. We strongly recommend you build an easy-to-use and straightforward navigation. Pairing your products into categories by gender, including promotions and new arrivals, will show users that you put effort into making their experience better. Your eCommerce category content should also be organized. This setup makes it easier for your visitors to find your products. We advise you to make your navigation visible and place it in a commonplace (towards the top of your page).
4. Set up a fashion blog
When we talk about a fashion eCommerce website, one of the most important assets is a blog. Creating a strategy for an eCommerce blog will help you drive relevant and valuable traffic to your page and boost your SEO ranking. Users are continuously in search of information about the latest fashion trends and fashion tips. By presenting this information to your target customers, you will keep them on your website longer, decrease your bounce rate and influence them to browse on your website. To put the base of a blog, you have to research topics and ideas you want to write about and are of interest to your target audience. We strongly encourage you to take advantage of content marketing and post regularly. Keep your blog content fresh, use internal links, promote your products, etc.
5. Keep your customers engaged by using high-quality visuals
A fashion eCommerce website must include eye-candy visuals to showcase the products. Images and videos are fundamental to online clothing stores because they keep customers engaged and put your products in an attractive light, encouraging direct sales. We do not encourage the use of stock photos! The photos you use should present the reality. Keep in mind that image file size can slow down your website. We recommend image optimization to keep your website at a fast loading speed. Use image compression tools such as TinyPNG that reduces the image file sizes while maintaining their quality.
6. Ensure that your website is mobile-friendly
Having a mobile-friendly website is a necessity nowadays. 76% of internet users shop on smartphones. More than that, Google has a mobile-first indexing policy, which makes having a mobile website a key factor for a high ranking in the SERP. We recommend using the Google Mobile-Friendly Test tool to check how your website looks on mobile devices. As a business owner, you have to make sure that your online store works properly on every device to avoid missing clients. If your website is not mobile-friendly yet, you can optimize it by implementing responsive design, dynamic serving or dedicated mobile sites.
7. Keep your website up to date
We have noticed that many business owners think that website maintenance is not necessary after their online business is live. We are afraid that’s not right, and maintenance is absolutely crucial to keep security data breaches away. An eCommerce website deals with sensitive client information, including credit card details. You should be aware of the most common website vulnerabilities and make sure you cover the security activities to avoid them. What we recommend is to schedule your eCommerce updates and maintenance work. Your product catalogue should vary, and you can also create new blog posts for your new collections with high-quality pictures. If you don’t keep your website up to date, Google can classify it as abandoned and stop ranking it.
Our Advice – What You Should Avoid?
Fashion eCommerce websites are more intricate than simple blogs or a seven pages presentation company website. It would be best if you understood that having lots of product pages constantly on and off the site will raise a series of SEO issues, making website optimization more difficult. We have made a list of the most common SEO errors of a fashion eCommerce online store that you should avoid:
- The absence of product descriptions is a common error in online fashion stores. Thinking that the pictures are enough and the text description of a product does not matter will take away the chance of your product page being in the top 10 of a search engine query. Search engines cannot see the images. This is why having a product description is necessary. The more unique your content is, the better for your SEO efforts. We recommend you to write quality descriptive content that encourages your customers to buy; Keep your copy original and do not take content from other websites because search engines will penalize you for it.
- Using the same product description from your manufacturers is a guarantee that your website will be banned from search engines. Keep in mind that these descriptions are distributed to a large number of online stores and many of them keep the original text. This leads to a high number of website pages with duplicate content or scraped content. More than that, the original text might not even be written in a correct way or a way that encourages customers to buy.
- Not having product reviews option. You should know that 70% of customers are looking for reviews before making a purchase. If your website does not have any reviews, you might lose a high percentage of target customers. Another thing we want to point out here is that review pages can reach the first positions in the SERP easier than selling pages.
- Not optimizing your product pages based on user demand will lead to missing out on appearing in the top positions of the search results pages. We strongly advise you to take into consideration the user demand. Search for the keywords that your audience is typing into the search queries and include them in your headlines, title tags, page title and product description. Use brand names in your title tags and H1 headings, make sure you add the right details on your image alt tag field, do not abuse keywords and avoid keyword stuffing.
- To reuse titles tags and meta descriptions. You might sell multiple items from the same brand, putting you in a position to repeat the same keywords. Search engines can identify this occurrence. Therefore, we recommend creating keyword phrases for each product and keep your meta descriptions and title tags as unique as possible.
- Using random URLs. Avoid using product IDs on your URLs and try creating keyword-friendly URLs because it is easier for users to understand where they are on your website. You can include a relevant keyword for the product page in the URL.
