As a fashion e-commerce online business owner, whether you are an entrepreneur, a B2C retailer, or a B2B fashion company, you need robust marketing strategies to increase online visibility, drive more organic traffic to your website, and ultimately boost sales. That is where Search Engine Optimisation or SEO for Fashion E-commerce comes into play.
The craze for buying products from top fashion brands on numerous shopping sites has undoubtedly increased over the years in this digital landscape. As per data sourced from Coherent Mi, the market size of global fashion e-commerce is expected to grow to $2,111 billion by 2032 at a CAGR of 10.5%. Also, the average ecommerce industry has witnessed 2% to 4% conversion rates, but the e-commerce platforms with targeted keywords, strategic marketing, and personalised offerings with a top-class user experience can witness the conversion rate of 11% as well through search rankings.
With effective SEO strategies, you can improve your fashion website’s search volumes, attract more potential customers, and stay ahead of the competition. Let’s read this article to know what SEO is for the fashion industry, its importance, challenges, benefits, and the best SEO strategies to enhance your online presence and drive sales.
What is SEO For Fashion E-commerce?
SEO is the process of optimizing your website to rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPS) based on the right keywords and phrases usage. For fashion e-commerce businesses, SEO is a specialized discipline that focuses on optimizing your online clothing stores, accessories, and more for better visibility, increased website traffic, and ultimately, higher conversions.
To make your fashion e-commerce website appear visually appealing to the maximum customers, it is important to implement the right strategy of SEO for fashion e-commerce. The successful SEO strategy involves thorough keyword research tailored to the latest fashion trends, optimizing product descriptions, and enhancing user experience through mobile-friendly designs and fast loading times.
Why is Fashion SEO important?
SEO for fashion e-commerce is not limited to boosting keyword ranking and page position, but it also offers numerous benefits. Prioritizing SEO activities can improve your fashion ecommerce business’s presence online, attract more customers, and drive revenue growth. Further, the necessity of search engine optimization is essential for fashion brands as follows:
- SEO for fashion e commerce helps attract relevant and targeted traffic to your website, reducing the need for paid advertising and increasing the potential for conversions.
- A well-optimized website with high-quality content can establish your brand as an authority in the fashion industry, building trust with potential customers.
- SEO best practices often overlap with user experience improvements, such as fast page loading speeds, mobile responsiveness, and clear navigation, which can lead to higher engagement and conversion rates.
- By attracting relevant traffic and providing a good user experience, SEO optimization can ultimately drive more conversions and sales for your fashion e-commerce business.
What Are The Challenges of a Fashion E-commerce Business?
Despite offering multiple benefits of SEO for fashion e-commerce, there exist many hurdles or challenges that make it difficult for fashion business owners to establish their brand and thought leadership. This can be like-
- High competition in the market
- Changing consumer behaviour
- Lack of inventory management
- Poor loading site speed
- Inappropriate shipping services
- A large number of returns and refunds
- Keeping up with the styling trends
- Standing out in a crowded marketplace
So, to overcome these challenges, you need to implement the right strategy of SEO for fashion e-commerce. Improved SEO performance will help you get in touch with more customers and retain them for a longer sales cycle.
What is the Benefit of SEO for a Fashion e-commerce Business?
If your website lacks e-commerce SEO, you are likely to get results and fail to take your fashion brand to the heights. After all, more than one-third of all e-commerce revenue comes from organic search. So, search engine optimization is a must-have tool for a fashion ecommerce business to drive sales and convert visitors to customers. Here are some short and long-term benefits of SEO for fashion e-commerce businesses.
- High-quality traffic: SEO attracts relevant and targeted traffic to your website, increasing the likelihood of converting visitors into buyers.
- Better user experience: SEO best practices often improve website usability, navigation, and content, enhancing the overall user experience and encouraging repeat visits.
- Expanded your reach: By implementing fashion e-commerce SEO, your business reaches a broader target audience, increasing brand visibility and potential customer base.
- Cost-efficient marketing: SEO is a cost-effective marketing strategy, as it targets users actively searching for products like yours, reducing waste and increasing ROI.
- Low maintenance: While initial SEO efforts require investment, ongoing maintenance and optimization can be relatively low-cost and sustainable, providing long-term benefits.
Top SEO Strategies to Grow Online Sales for Fashion E-commerce
It is good that you have established your fashion brands online, but if you do not continuously optimize your website for SEO, then it is likely to downgrade keyword positioning. This is because consumer behaviour and market trends are constantly changing and need refining strategies to get long-term benefits. Thus, here, we have covered the four most essential strategies in detailed steps:
- Technical SEO Setup – On-page SEO
- Optimize for UI/UX – On-page SEO
- Content Marketing and Optimization – Mix of On-page and Off-Page SEO
- Quality Backlinks Creation – Off-page SEO
Let’s crack the tips and strategies of mastering SEO for fashion e-commerce that help you grow sales on the internet.
- Focus On Technical Setup for Search Rankings
The cornerstone of the fashion industry relies heavily on technical SEO and setup to improve search engine rankings and give an edge over competitors. It involves ensuring your website is crawlable, indexable, and provides a good user experience. Let’s see what technical search engine optimization focuses on.
- Keep Sitemap & Robots.txt in Place
The first technical SEO requirement to ensure your website is accessible is setting up the sitemap and robots.txt files. This is a basic setup of SEO for fashion e-commerce that must include all your essential pages with accessibility to be read by internet bots and indexing crawlers.
- Set Up Product Schema Markup
Rich snippets make your products easily scannable with key features such as types, title, piece, images, and more. A well-set-up schema markup boosts your fashion products’ navigation and SEO efforts.
- Optimize URL Structure
2048 characters is the standard URL limit that may vary from browser to browser however, it is the key parameter of search engine algorithms to rank your fashion and styling products online. You must ensure that you optimise permalinks and complete URLs of each page on your website for easy readability. Keep it as short as possible to follow the best practices of SEO for fashion ecommerce marketing.
- Optimize Product Categories And Collection Pages
Category pages are the collection of your specific products that help users find the best items using filters and the options at their convenience. These are the pillar pages that you target to pull traffic through backlinks and other sources instead of targeting individual products. Thus, ensure all your categorised fashion product pages are easily scannable with high-quality and impressive banner images. Also, ensure offering best best-selling products at the top with speedy page loading.
- Build Strong Internal Linkings Around the Fashion Industry Websites
The key player of SEO for fashion e-commerce relies on strong internal link building. Thus, your online fashion store must be interlinked thoughtfully with likely products and pages. The strategic linking pages pass the authority to and from the product pages while increasing cross-selling chances, reducing bounce rate, and offering the best shopping experience to potential buyers while navigating through your online store.
- Offer Easy Product Filters for Best Search Results
Few buyers prioritize price, ratings, new launches, free delivery, and discounts, while others look for buying luxury with an effortless shopping experience. Thus, you need to offer them the best solutions with quick search and to filter the products according to their requirement. Optimizing these features will not only boost your efforts in SEO for fashion e-commerce but also maximize the add-to-cart chances in the lowest possible time.
- Ensure Fixing the 404 Error With A Custom Page
Nobody wants to reach barren land with no further navigation. It doesn’t hurt only the users’ buying journey, but also you miss the chance to sell your product. Thus, you must identify the broken page to fix asap. You can either redirect 404 URLs to the valuable pages or offer further information with the right navigation to help users complete their buying cycle.
- Keep An Account of the Product And Page Indexing Status
Publishing a number of products won’t attract any SEO traffic for the fashion industry until the webpages are indexed. To ensure your fashion and lifestyle products are eligible to appear on search engines, you need to check the indexing status on Google Search Console. You must identify the non-indexed pages of your fashion e-commerce businesses and update them following the crawling glitches report given alongside.
- Set Up And Optimize Google Merchant Feed
One of the most essential activities of SEO for fashion e-commerce that sets the process apart from other websites is making your catalogue appear for shopping searches. To do that, ensure you have an active Google Merchant account with the updated product catalogue. You can export the data on the merchant center, such as product image, description, in-stock items, out of stock items, MRP, discounts, and many more, directly through CRM or manually update through an Excel file.
- Take Help from an Experienced SEO Company for a Fashion Website
Starting from on-page fashion ecommerce website optimization, meta tags optimization, landing page setup, fixing technical issues, and creating high-quality backlinks, each SEO practice requires expertise and enough time to attract traffic and convert it into actual sales. Here, without having a dedicated, industry-experienced professional of SEO for fashion ecommerce in your team, you can’t go a long way. Thus, to win the race by beating your competitors, it is wise to contact the best SEO company for a fashion brand.
- Optimize for Best User Experience (UI/UX)
Just informing and showcasing your best photographed products to customers will not let the buyers come again and again to buy from your fashion e-commerce websites. You need to optimise your website for a better user experience that is speedy to load, easy to navigate, and effortlessly place orders from any device. Let’s see what fashion website SEO optimizing for the best user experience focuses on.
- Optimize for a Mobile-Friendly Website
Smartphones are on-the-go Internet surfing devices and are users’ first preference for browsing information online. Global statistics reveal that nearly 60% of e-commerce sales come solely from smartphones. It shows the user’s preference to opt for mobile devices for shopping over other devices.
If your fashion ecommerce websites aren’t responsive fit automatically as per screen size, you are losing a huge selling opportunity. Thus, you must discuss with your web developer to make it responsive to meet the essential parameters of on-page SEO.
- Design a Clear Breadcrumb Navigation
Breadcrumb is the path of the current page URL where the user is active. It allows them to easily navigate through the back and forth of the website. Offering an optimised breadcrumb can supercharge your SEO efforts for fashion e-commerce while helping buyers with an easy website browsing experience.
- Build Trust Through HTTPS Secure Domain
HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) adds a shield of protection to your website from data breaches. In this internet era, people are also aware of visiting and buying from those site that gives them peace of mind while making transactions. Thus, being a fashion brand owner, you must ensure your website has a secure and active SSL and HTTPS certificate.
- Offer a Fast Page Loading Experience to Boost SEO Efforts
Whether you are marketing your clothing brand or doing SEO for fashion e-commerce website, past page loading time allows you to engage the users with your offerings in no time. It is also one of the key metrics of the SEO algorithm considered to improve keyword positioning on SERP.
You must optimize your fashion ecommerce store for every page with a target to keep it below 2.5 seconds of loading time. Here, tools such as Google Page Speed Test, GTmetrix, AHref, and more can help you spot the slow-loading pages to work on priorities.
- Show Social Trust With Reviews & UGC
We are known to be a social animal and thus trust the people’s opinion before making small to big decisions. In the same line, users prefer buying fashionable clothes, accessories, and luxury items after going through the reviews and feedback of past customers. Ensure getting enough user-generated content (UGC), ratings, reviews, and real-time pictures across the platforms, including your product pages, Google Business Profile, Mouthshut, and more.
- Ensure an Easy Checkout Process
If you have put all your hard efforts into SEO for fashion e-commerce store, but are not offering a simple, fast, and hassle-free checkout process, you are sure to lose conversions and ROI with a great margin. There are open marketplaces in the fashion industry and an abundance of options for buyers.
Thus, you need to highly optimize your checkout process, offering multiple payment options, flexible delivery schedules, move products from the wishlist to the cart, and significantly more to complete the end goals of your SEO efforts in this challenging landscape.
- Optimize Product And Blog Content
Another way to inform customers about your fashionable products, like smart watches, shoes, clothing, handbags, or similar products, is through consistent fashion blog posts and articles. But just writing a normal piece of content featuring your products will not let search engines rank your pages. You need to optimize with SEO and deliver only high-quality content to improve visibility and sales growth. Let’s see what optimizing product and blog content focus on-
- Identify Intent-Based Keywords
Everything in SEO optimization of a fashion ecommerce website starts with potential and relevant keywords. When you are using keyword research tools, you need to identify the intent behind users’ searches. You need to segregate informational and transactional queries to make a list of SEO keywords targeting and a robust content strategy.
Once you figure out the potential keywords to work on, prioritize using long-tail keywords (which often have lower search volume), along with short-tail keywords with high search volume.
- Optimize Product Titles And Descriptions
Product titles and descriptions give complete information about your offerings to the buyers. Most of the time, people read the main title only to initiate checkouts, which often covers quantity, color, size, etc., featured at the top of website pages. So, it is essential to pay keen attention to optimizing the product title with details when doing SEO for fashion e-commerce. It will help you increase the chances of ranking on search results, maintain transparency, and help users make quick decisions to complete the purchase.
- Optimize Image Alt Text
Image allows crawlers to understand the object, offerings, and more to feature your fashion website catalogues on image and shopping searches. The detailed and clear product pictures, infographics, and video titles supported by relevant keywords also boost your efforts of SEO for fashion e-commerce website. You can add alternative text (Alt Text) with the right title, description, caption, and other relevant content for optimum image optimization to boost the search rankings.
- Compress Image Size
As high-speed internet accessibility is available to almost everyone, people nowadays want to experience surfing only full HD visuals and videos. In that case, you can’t compromise on delivering high-quality images and photographs to better explain the features of your products. But high-resolution graphics lead you to compromise with drastically affected page loading time.
To overcome the challenges, you have multiple solutions to optimize images. You can convert the PNG and JPEG pictures into the internet standard WebP format, crop the unnecessarily larger width and height following the ratio, and bulk compress image file sizes using tools.
However, delivering images through CDN would be the best solution to maintain your fashion online outlet while offering a mobile-friendly website UX without compromising pixel-perfect photographs.
- Optimize Meta Titles and Meta Descriptions
Website’s meta tags are the key elements that give a quick idea to users what you are offering inside. Whether you are creating blog posts or publishing new product pages, the SEO optimized meta titles and meta descriptions increase the chances of CTR (click-through rate) on SERPs.
The ideal meta title limit is 50-60 characters, and the meta description limit is 150-160 characters. When optimizing metadata for your fashion website, ensure every page is aligned with the standard character limits to make it completely visible on mobiles, tablets, and desktops.
- Publishing Trend-Specific Articles on Fashion Blog
Fashion blog posts are a powerful element of SEO for fashion e-commerce store marketing. Consistent blog posting on your online fashion website increases the chances of search rankings, while improving keyword positioning and attracting indirect traffic to your product pages.
When you are planning your content marketing calendar, observe the current fashion trends and your competitors, glance at Google Trends data, and conduct keyword research to target high search volume queries. You should frequently publish blog posts related to fashion tips, accessory handling, glorifying appearance, and more to push your product marketing.
- Feature Occasions Specific Products on Home Page
Every calendar year, countless small and big celebrations happen around the globe. If you are doing local SEO targeting, you need to customize your fashion store marketing plan according to local festivals and celebrations. If you are targeting globally, you need to mark down the ceremonies and major festivals.
Having a list of special occasions in hand will help you feature the most demanding items on your key pages, following the current trends. This way, you not only offer the best user experience, aligning search engine algorithms, but also increase the chances of sales during the rush hours.
- Create High-Quality Backlinks On Fashion-related Websites
To increase your website’s authority and SEO ranking, valuable backlinks are another killer SEO for fashion e-commerce and fashion websites. It involves driving potential customers from other relevant websites to increase traffic and establish your brand as a trusted authority in the fashion industry. Let’s see what high-quality backlinks focus on to bring traffic to your fashion website.
- Submit Guest Posts with Fashion and Styling Tips
Content marketing is the pillar of SEO for fashion e-commerce brands. The more valuable, insightful, and authoritative content you share with the users on neighbourhood sites, the more traffic you can pull to your fashion store. Guest posts are one of the most reliable ways among several content publishing platforms that help you attract highly targeted users to your website. Maximizing the number of guest post articles published on a regular basis can significantly boost your search engine optimization efforts and ROI.
- Share Product Catalogues on Social Media Sites
Instagram, Pinterest, and Facebook are the hub of youngsters, parents, homemakers, professionals, and many more from a wide community. This makes it an ideal marketplace to endorse your fashion ecommerce business offerings to attract a highly targeted audience.
You can share your product catalogs there on a regular interval while circulating them in relevant groups to boost traffic. Further, forums such as Quora and Reddit can help you interact directly with potential buyers by helping them through expert answers to their queries.
- Get SEO Backlinks from High DA Websites
Link building is the backbone of SEO for fashion e-commerce websites. It passes authorities from multiple domains to upvote your website. So, when you are building backlinks, ensure to choose the website with at least 20 or 30 domain authority, less than two or zero per cent spam score, having higher existing traffic, and other essential parameters. Also, prioritize building backlinks for category pages first while maintaining the balance between do-follow and no-follow attributes.
What are the KPIs of SEO for Fashion e-commerce Business?
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) play a crucial role for fashion e-commerce business holders to measure revenue growth, identify the areas for improvement, optimize marketing efforts, and make data-driven decisions to drive growth and profitability. Here are some essential KPIs to measure the success of your SEO for fashion e-commerce brand.
- Keyword Positions: Improved keyword rankings show your SEO efforts are working in the right ways. However, you can always add the list of relevant keywords to your continuous SEO optimization.
- Website Traffic: Tracks the number of visitors coming to your website. An increased percentage of impressions and clicks in a particular duration reflects good signals of SEO success.
- Conversion Rate: The increased percentage of website visitors who completed a purchase, showing the effectiveness of your SEO marketing efforts for an online fashion store.
- Average Order Value (AOV): Tracks what is the average spending of customers per transaction, enabling you to look for ways of deriving more revenue through upselling and cross-selling.
- Sales Revenue: The increment in total revenue generated from organic traffic and sales, comparing past data, signifies your search rankings are working in favor of SEO success.
- Customer Retention Rate: The increasing percentage of customers who have been retained over time ultimately becomes an indicator of your SEO success for a fashion ecommerce business.
Best Practices for E-commerce Fashion SEO
Just like implementing the right SEO for fashion e-commerce is important for business, going with the best practices is crucial for significant search results and getting traffic on product pages. Let’s see some of the best practices for e-commerce fashion SEO to improve search engine ranking, increase organic traffic, enhance user experience, and ultimately increase conversions and sales.
- Invest in a reliable and fast web hosting server.
- Serve content through a CDN (Content Delivery Network).
- Prioritize WebP formats for product photographs.
- Prioritize AMP compatibility for your fashion webstore.
- Optimize meta titles, descriptions, and keywords.
- Regularly update and refresh product content.
- Use descriptive image alt tags and file names.
- Use descriptive titles, meta descriptions, and header tags
- Create engaging product descriptions, blog posts, and guides.
- Pay attention to purposeful internal links.
- Always create user-first content, aligning with Google’s EEAT grader.
- Consult fashion influencers on Instagram and YouTube to widen the brand’s reach.
- Always get backlinks from authoritative websites.
- Prioritize the user’s buying experience throughout your sales cycle.
- Perform a regular ranking audit to identify the gap in keyword difficulty.
- Conduct a full SEO audit monthly to identify technical and non-technical glitches.
- Fix page load timing, 404 error pages, and internal broken links as a priority.
- Keep analysing the SEO performance to upscale your fashion store marketing.
What Should You Expect From An Expert Fashion SEO Company?
SEO is the key factor for improving fashion website visibility and taking your business to the next level. By partnering with an expert and trusted SEO company, you are stress-free as they handle and deliver custom fashion ecommerce solutions along with local SEO targeting.
Let’s see below what things you can expect when you collaborate with a professional SEO fashion ecommerce company.
- Industry Experts: Have a deep understanding of the fashion industry and its unique challenges, along with knowledge of the latest trends and customer behaviour.
- Customized Strategies: Can delivers tailored approaches to meet your specific fashion marketing needs and goals.
- High-Quality Content Creation: Sound enough to develop high-quality, engaging, and SEO-friendly content on fashion tips and style.
- Better Search Engine Rankings: Can help to increase visibility and ranking on various search engine platforms to build trust and credibility.
- Enhanced & Optimal Organic Traffic: Can help to drive more relevant and high traffic to your fashion website.
- Effective Conversion Rate Optimization: Execute SEO strategies to improve user experience and increase conversions with better Return On Investment (ROI).
Verdict – Boost Your Fashion E-commerce Business With The Right SEO Strategies
Now, at the end, you come up with a detailed guide on SEO for fashion e-commerce. As you know, SEO is a very important component of any fashion e-commerce business’s online marketing strategy. So, by understanding the basics of SEO, conducting in-depth keyword research, and implementing effective on-page, off-page, and technical SEO strategies, you can improve your website’s visibility, drive more traffic, and boost sales.
However, as a business owner having an e-commerce website, you cannot do all the tasks by yourself. There is always a need to partner with an SEO expert who can handle everything for your fashion ecommerce sites and come up with effective results.
Don’t wait long, stay ahead of the competition, and achieve long-term success with effective SEO for your fashion e-commerce marketing today.
Additional Resources:
- What Is Influencer Marketing and What Does The Future Hold for It?
- eCommerce Marketing: Ultimate Guide for Maximizing Conversions
- SEO for eCommerce: How to Boost Your Store’s Online Visibility?
