Are you struggling to boost direct sales from your fashion e-commerce site? Can’t seem to increase organic web traffic?
It sounds like you need search engine optimization (SEO). SEO can boost direct sales from your e-commerce site, build brand awareness, and so much more.
Follow along to learn all about SEO for fashion e-commerce companies as we go through our beginner’s checklist.
What is search engine optimization? And why do you need it?
Fashion e-commerce companies around the world rely on direct sales to turn a profit. Sales from Amazon and other affiliates can be useful for growing revenue, but the profit margin is usually slim.
Of course, in order to increase direct sales, you have to get people to visit your website. And that means making it discoverable in search engines.
Why? Because 93% of all internet traffic comes from a search engine.
SEO works to increase a website’s visibility in search engines, which in turn improves organic web traffic and sales. Social media, email marketing, and other marketing strategies can also help increase web traffic, but the best option is SEO.
That’s because SEO focuses on improving organic search, which accounts for 53% of all site traffic.
So, if you want to increase your fashion e-commerce company’s sales, SEO is a must.
SEO Basics
SEO doesn’t work overnight. It takes time to develop quality content, build relevant backlinks, and outrank the competition. Still, if you can get a few SEO basics out of the way as soon as possible, you’ll start seeing results much quicker.
From technical SEO to keyword research, a lot goes into an SEO strategy, here are just a few first steps to get you started.
SEO Tools
When it comes to SEO, Google is your best friend. Not just because the company dominates search engine traffic, but also because they provide so many free SEO tools to help your fashion business shine.
Setting up a few free SEO tools from Google is a great place to start with search engine optimization. Tools like Google Analytics and Google Search Console can help you track relevant KPIs and maintain your site’s presence in Google search results.
Then there’s Google’s PageSpeed Insights, which, as the name suggests, helps improve page speed to keep shoppers on your site.
Google’s not the only company that offers free SEO tools, either. Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, also provides Bing Webmaster Tools that can be very helpful for SEO purposes.
When it comes to SEO for fashion e-commerce companies, like at any job, having all the right tools is critical.
Submitting a sitemap
A sitemap is where you provide information about the pages, videos, and files on your site to Google. It helps the search engine more readily crawl and index your site in results pages.
Building and submitting a sitemap to Google is critical for every fashion e-commerce company. Why? Because e-commerce companies have thousands of unique product pages with similar URLs. And, according to Google, web crawlers “might overlook crawling some of your new or recently updated pages.”
Submitting a sitemap ensures you and Google’s web crawlers are on the same page, which will lead to better rankings in search results, and eventually, more sales.
Keyword research
Keyword research is a critical first step in developing an SEO strategy to drive more direct sales.
It involves finding topics and keywords that prospective customers are entering into search engines. Then, creating quality content tailored toward those topics and keywords, which increases organic web traffic. And more organic traffic = more direct sales.
There are a few things every fashion company should know about keywords.
First, the best way to choose relevant fashion keywords for your business is to use SEO tools like Google Adwords, Google Search Console, Google Trends, and more.
These tools use a data-based approach to help you discover keywords with high search volume that the competition is ignoring. Plus, SEO tools identify customers with the right search intent.
Identifying search intent around fashion keywords
Search intent is the goal of a person using a search engine. Their intent is usually either: transactional, navigational, or informational.
For fashion e-commerce companies, it’s all about targeting prospective customers with transactional intent using long-tail keywords.
What are long-tail keywords? The usual fashion e-commerce keyword might be something like ‘high heels,’ which is searched 45,000 times every month in the US.
Ranking for a keyword like this could be very valuable for your business, but it’s also almost nearly impossible for smaller companies. Industry giants have marketing budgets to outspend and outrank the competition.
One solution to this is to focus on long-tail keywords that have high transactional intent. Although there may be fewer views overall, the conversion rate will be much higher.
For example, instead of trying to rank for ‘high heels’, you could rank for something like “blue high heels wedding shoes.” A long-tail keyword like this has high transactional intent. After all, if you’re searching for blue high heels for a wedding, you probably have a specific bridesmaid outfit to buy.
SEO can help you get more direct sales from keywords like these—if you do your research.
URLs
URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) are specific locations of websites, pages, or files on the internet. They’re often the first impression both search engines and customers have of your website. That’s why optimizing your URL is critical.
There are three main parts to a URL: the protocol, the domain name, and the path. For example:
For SEO purposes, you should focus on optimizing the path portion of your URL. There are a few simple ways to do that.
First, all URLs on your fashion site need to be unique if you want to avoid duplicate content issues.
Second, URLs should be based on keywords and accurately reflect the content they link to. Third, remember to avoid capitalization and numbers in URLs.
And finally, URLs should be as short as possible, as long as they are sufficiently descriptive. Data from Ahrefs shows websites in the top positions in Google’s SERPs usually have far fewer characters in their URLs.
Source: Ahrefs
Metadata: titles and descriptions
“Metadata” is used to give information about a webpage to search engines in HTML that isn’t on the page itself. Optimizing metadata can improve your site’s rankings in search engines for important keywords—and that means more sales.
That’s because metadata is used to rank sites and select snippets for search results. There are two main types of metatags: titles and descriptions.
Title tags are used to describe the title of your content in browsers, search engine results pages, and external sites such as Facebook or Twitter. They should always contain relevant keywords and be as accurate as possible. For example, your title might look something like this in HTML:
<head><title>Auto Repair Services</title></head>
Meta descriptions are short explanations of what is on a given page. It’s a chance to draw in customers with an engaging summary. Here’s an example auto repair meta description in HTML:
<head> <meta name=”description”
content=”Need quality auto repair services? From oil changes to tire repair we do it all and XYZ Auto Repair of Phoenix. And you can’t beat our prices!”></head>
Both of these forms of metadata are inputted into your site’s HTML using header tags like these: <head>, </head>. The result of inputting these tags is a title and description that can be viewed by both customers and search engines.
However, nowadays, most e-commerce platforms for clothing stores like Shopify will include a user-friendly way to input metadata so you can avoid HTML, but some don’t.
If you’re having trouble getting metadata right, check out our technical SEO services page for more information.
Product and category descriptions
When it comes to SEO for e-commerce companies writing unique product descriptions for each individual product is vital to success. That’s because e-commerce sites are often plagued by duplicate content issues that can hamper performance in search engines.
Because fashion e-commerce companies have so many product pages with similar information, Google can misread or even omit product pages it believes to be duplicate.
In order to prevent this, every product page and category description has to be unique and highlight key features of that particular product or category.
Schema markup
Schema Markup is a semantic vocabulary of microdata that you can put in your website’s HTML. It helps search engines better read and index your website.
Schema is the result of a collaboration between Google, Bing, Yandex, and Yahoo! that was intended to add more information to search engine results pages (SERPs).
For example, if you’re a fashion e-commerce company, you might want to add reviews to your listings to show prospective buyers the quality of your products.
With Schema Markup, you can do just that:
This is just one example of the power of Schema. Google has added a number of fascinating Schema use cases that allow your site to be featured in more prominent positions in search engines.
You can also do everything from adding your company’s logo in search results to adding price and availability information under your listings in SERPs.
To generate your own Schema Markup, you can use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper.
Even if you don’t have coding experience, schema markup is well worth the effort. Understanding how structured data works can be a challenge, but it can help your listings stand out in SERPs and increase sales.
Plus, Google provides a free course on how to create schema markup. And once you create your Schema Markup, you can use Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to make sure it looks exactly how you want.
Next steps to get more revenue from your fashion site
After you’ve covered the DIY SEO basics and started seeing results, it’s hard to stop there. Thankfully, there’s so much more SEO can do to boost organic web traffic and increase direct sales.
If you need help with getting your fashion e-commerce site up to par, feel free to contact us for more information.
Or, for a quick look at the current state of your fashion e-commerce website, get a free SEO audit report.
