Want to grow your apparel brand in the next 6 months to multifold?
If your answer to the question is yes, SEO for fashion ecommerce stores will change the course of your ecommerce business. Not merely that, but it will help you automate your business.
Before moving ahead, I suggest you to do the below:
It’s suggested to create bullet points/key takeaways. So you can execute them or assign them to your ecommerce SEO agency. This way, you can make optimal use of time.
Ready for the surge?
Let’s get started!
Why is SEO Important for Fashion Ecommerce?
For any website, it is important to optimize the website from a search engine standpoint.
Why?
Let’s talk numbers and have a bigger picture in front of us.
99,000 searches happen every second.
3.8 million searches every minute.
and 8.5 billion searches every day.
According to Think with Google 49% of shoppers say they use google to discover or find a new product.
43% of total sales for ecommerce stores come from organic search.
Other mediums like social media, paid search email and more are good as well. But it’s going to ask you for money upfront.
But when it comes to fashion SEO.
Before moving ahead, my personal thought is why your fashion brand should leverage SEO. Is that if there is something that trendy and your store is selling it, you have a good chance to rank for those terms considering your website SEO score.
⚠️🤿Diving deep🤿⚠️
Best Practice to Follow for Fashion Ecommerce SEO
- Keyword Research
- Informational
- Commercial
- Commercial
- Navigational
- Market segmented keywords
- Customer-defining keywords
- Product defined keywords
- Product keywords
- Competitor keywords
- Short-tail, mid-tail, and long-tail keywords
- Intent targeting keywords
- Latent Semantic Indexing keywords
- Phrase match keywords
- Exact match keywords
- Negative keywords
- Related vertical keywords
- Long-term evergreen keywords
- On-Page Best Practices for Fashion SEO (Basics)
- Meta Title & Description
- Include 1-2 keywords in the title and 2-3 keywords in the description.
- Keep the length in check, use this tool by Yoast.
- Heading Tags
- Image Optimization
- Product Description
- URL Structure
- Keep the URL under 4 clicks from the home page.
- Add a keyword in the slug.
- Use hyphens not underscore.
- Avoid using capital characters.
- Avoid stopping words such as ‘and’, ‘or’ etc.
- Technical SEO – Best Practice for Fashion SEO
- Fashion Website Architecture Best Practices
- Secure Website
- Page Speed Insight Optimization
- Minify CSS & JS
- Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml check
- Make sure you have added the sitemap.xml URL in Robots.txt.
- Add Robotots.txt to the search console and webmaster tools.
- Make sure your sitemap has given different priorities to all the pages ranging from 0.1 to 1.0.
- Make sure pages in robots.txt are the only ones that need to be excluded from crawling.
- Internal Linking
- Check and Eliminate Redirect Chain & Loop
- Check and Fix Thin Page
- Appropriate Schema Tags for Respective Pages
- Product Schema
- Product Schema
- Review Schema
- FAQs Page Schema
- Breadcrumb List Schema
- Website Schema
- Local Business Schema (if you also have an offline store)
- Content Marketing
- Publishing Blogs and Assets
- Getting Published on Guest Posts
- Influencer Marketing
Keywords are the heart of any SEO strategy.
Any SEO strategy starts with keyword research to understand the size of the market and its competition.
There are multiple types of keywords for fashion ecommerce SEO.
Understanding the basics, there are four types of intents when someone is searching on the web.
Further fashion SEO keywords are distributed into various types, such as:
Note: We have an in-depth guide for fashion ecommerce keyword research.
Once you have performed keyword research and analysis for your fashion e-commerce store.
Now it’s time to move 1 step ahead with on-page optimization.
Before doing anything you have to make sure your core is strong.
It starts with optimizing individual page content and optimizing keywords.
A few of the best places to start are:
Metas are one of the go-to places to showcase what is the page all about. You can give an overview to the user visiting your page.
There are only three things to keep in mind while writing meta
Heading tags are one of my favorites. I personally see them as a game changer.
Reason? Google has started considering heading tags in meta.
So optimizing your heading is equally important as meta.
Optimizing images is crucially important from both user and search engine standpoints.
For user: It will help you convert smoothly, lets user understand the product from all the different angles, and gives them an experience of the product even before buying it.
For Search Engines: It helps them understand what the image is all about, helps your website in Image SEO, and gives your website extra traffic from images.
As Google is considering heading tags for meta titles, it is also considering content for meta descriptions.
An engaging description can help you drive 30% to 300% more traffic to your site. Which will ultimately result in better CTR and conversion rates.
URL structures are game changers for e-commerce stores. It gives you an extra edge in competition if you have them well optimized.
Well, plan your website architecture and then create a meta description.
Best practices of URL structures for fashion e-commerce stores:
For any fashion e-commerce store, completing these two steps will do 50% of your SEO work.
But there is more to come as you are just halfway there.
Let’s start with the most important and crucial part. Technical SEO, which I have seen as changing the game upside down for designer clothing SEO.
What matters to any website in SEO space after keywords, is a technicality.
No matter how good you have done your keyword research, on-page, and off-page. If you fail to optimize it from a technical standpoint.
Everything will drain and the biggest problem we have seen while doing SEO for fashion brands. There is a huge leak in terms of the crawl budget.
Ouch!! It’s hurting and taking away a lot of your money.
After keyword research and proper allocation. Website architecture plays a main role.
It gives search engines and users a clear idea of what is the parent and what is a subsidiary.
Keeping your website architecture smooth will help you create a smooth navigation menu.
For any individual out there, security is the key concern. The moment they realize that your website is not secured, they will bounce off.
For the ecommerce industry, it’s more crucial as they deal with personal data such as card details, phone numbers, email, etc.
So, if your fashion ecommerce brand doesn’t have an SSL certificate or any signs of security threat. You are on the edge of losing all the revenue that was about to come.
Since May 2021, google has made core web vitals compulsory.
Why is core web vitals important in SEO for clothing brand?
Well, google now believes experience is also important when it comes to SEO.
And so they have also added an extra E in the E-E-A-T algorithm.
And so, making sure your fashion brand’s core web vital score is more than 90 in page speed insights will help you be on top of the search. As it ensures that visitors will get a smooth experience.
Additional CSS and JS are really a pain for the website. Because it makes them carry that extra unwanted weight that is not required.
Quick tip on minifying CSS and JS, there are a lot of tools and plugins out their which can help you in minifying tasks.
Or on other hand, this is a technical task. Hire a developer, and seek their assistance.
Both Robots.txt and Sitemap.xml are based when it comes to crawling and indexing. If configured wrong, it can create issues for the website, and the crawl budget will be wasted.
Things to keep in mind:
I give huge importance to importance.
Why?
Because it can help you maximize your crawl budget.
Also linking similar products or pages will help you get internal redirected traffic. So, chances of cross-sell and upselling increase if you do it correctly.
For apparel or clothing brands, we have linked similar products in the pages. Which has done wonders for user retention and an increase in purchases has been seen.
From a user/buyer perspective, it gives them more options to explore.
Pro Tip: Link similar products on all the product pages. Create a separate section for the same. Amazon can be seen as the best example of this.
Internal redirects are good, but when you are doing too much to redirect. Sometimes you might end up in a vicious circle of redirect chains or loops.
Tools like Ahrefs and Screaming Frog can help you figure out the same.
Once you have some base URLs, you can analyze the same with the Link Redirect Trace chrome extension.
In simple words, thin pages are the ones with little to no content on the page that adds value to the user.
A quick fix to this type of error, add more content that will create engagement with users and help users understand the contents on the page more briefly.
Schemas are just the tip of the iceberg.
What do I mean by that?
Well, the schema was first introduced in 2011. The goal of schema was to understand the important elements of the page.
So, Instead of bot-crawling the whole website and deciding the core elements. With schema markup, they can decide which element is important and which is not.
Schema tags for fashion e-commerce brands SEO:
Content marketing if done right, can turn the image of the brand upside down. Also, it is widely seen in the market that content is a money generating money for a lot of fashion and apparel brands.
Let’s now explore some of the best practices and activities that have helped many brands and can help your brand as well.
Blogs can bring in a lot of traffic to your site.
The best thing I like about content and blogs is, it brings a lot of traffic and business.
The reason, blogs are the places people go to know more about the product before making that final decision.
Informational and navigational search queries are the ones that will get your first impression in front of the audience.
From my perspective, it’s like educating your audience and getting rewarded.
While doing SEO for the online clothing store at Titan Inbound we create assets and long forms of blogs. Which helps us in ranking on a bundle of keywords around the same subjective topic.
This also helps us build authority around the topic and make us an industry leader.
One of the best things about the guest post website is that they already have built authority, audience, and credibility around the niche.
The authority will give us a link juice.
The audience will give us business.
Credibility makes people buy from you as you are now recommended by the authority to the public at large.
The benefit of guest post sites is they already have a traffic audience and that gives us good conversion in a very short duration.
Ever seen your favorite influencers recommending you a product and praising about the same?
Have you ever bought something after they recommend it?
If the answer is yes. Now you know how powerful influencer marketing is.
But what if the answer is no? Well if you haven’t purchased, you at least have seen the brand. So let’s consider it as a brand impression.
In fact, if you have not bought the product. Others might have ended up buying it.
So I preach all three content marketing activities listed above. And that is how you can make SEO for clothing websites more strong by marketing to the right audience.
For clothing SEO, you must remember customers love new trends in fashion. And to retain them for the long term, you must keep them under retention at the center. And plan your fashion marketing accordingly.
Frequently Asked Questions – Fashion Ecommerce SEO
What are some common mistakes to avoid when implementing fashion ecommerce SEO?
While doing SEO for fashion ecommerce, your website must avoid:
What is fashion e-commerce?
Fashion ecommerce refers to buying and selling fashion products and accessories on an online platform. This can be on any platform, website, app, social media, or personal messaging app.
