August 09, 2022
6 Minutes
The fashion industry’s shift from visiting physical stores to shopping online has been a long time coming, with brands such as ASOS, Boohoo and Next spearheading the direction. When the pandemic hit in 2020, it was apparent that fashion brands must spend more time focusing on their online presence to engage shoppers and keep sales.
This has made search engine optimisation (SEO) for fashion websites as important as ever. Around 25% of people shop only online for clothes, and over 50% shop both online and in-store, making search engines a popular place for shoppers to discover and purchase clothing.
Google sees a staggering number of fashion-related search queries every month, from item-related searches such as “black dress” to inspiration-related questions such as “how to style mom jeans”.
| Keyword | Monthly Search Volume |
| Black dress | 101,000 |
| Mens t shirt | 14,000 |
| How to style mom jeans | 1,100 |
Targeting these high volume search queries is tricky in such a crowded market, especially one that’s been thriving in the last two years. To cut through the noise, brands must be strategic, combining optimisation tactics with quality content and flawless user experience.
In content SEO we optimise for keywords. In fashion content SEO, it’s time to get specific. There are around thousands of fashion-related keywords and each one is even more specific than the previous. With people around the world searching different variations of the same type of queries, getting specific with your keywords will help target more people across the globe.
For example, someone in the UK might be searching for a cashmere jumper, but in the US they’re searching for a cashmere sweater. Similarly, men may search ‘cashmere roll neck’ only to come across results for women’s clothing. They’ll then alter their search to include ‘men’. Each page on your website should be as tailored as possible to your audience’s searches.
If your site spans across multiple nations, then make sure your content is suitable for that region and that your keyword research is based around that region too.
When conducting keyword research, you may find that each search query has an intent. These intents can be mapped out across a customer’s journey, whether they’re at the awareness stage, research stage or buying stage.
Some examples of each stage in the fashion industry include:
Just like targeting specific keywords is important, you should narrow down your categories by making new pages to help rank for these keywords and provide relevant and suitable pages for consumers.
Your top level categories can be your starting point, once you’ve pulled these together, work your way down and see how granular you can get with subcategories. There are so many different types of shoes, or sandals, or trainers (the list goes on), so you can really narrow down your subcategories so that consumers have perfectly tailored pages for their search query.
Let’s use ASOS as an example, their website is ranking in the top three for almost 150,000 keywords, because they have relevant subcategories to target as many keywords as they can for the products they sell. They found that a lot of people were shopping their site for wedding guest dresses, so made a subcategory with relevant products and now rank position two for “wedding guest dresses”. This one subcategory is bringing 180,000 monthly visitors because of the suitable content and products that ASOS is providing for people searching for that term.
The fashion industry is perfect for trends and seasonality, as the wise Miranda Priestly once said, “Florals? For Spring? Groundbreaking”. But it’s true, the trends and seasonality that we see in the fashion industry, and every fashion week, has translated onto Google search.
Make subcategory pages that show a round up of products that perfectly encapsulate a recent trend. Pretty Little Thing created a page for “Jeans and a Nice Top”, the style trend that young women were wearing, to help people find exactly what they were looking for.
Maybe florals are back this spring. Why not make a blog, or a subcategory page for all of your floral-print products? The blog will help people style or explore the trend, and the subcategory will help people shop it.
Seasonality in the fashion industry plays a huge role in annual revenue. For the majority of brands, Christmas is one of the biggest times of year, alongside the Black Friday sales. So, create gift guides, Christmas-themed subcategories, prepare your website for sale-related search terms, and more. This can be translated to any seasonal events that happen in your calendar year.
In research conducted by The Drum, 75% of online traffic and sales in the fashion e-commerce industry comes from mobile, this is higher than any other industry in the research. With most of your audience landing on your website via mobile, it’s crucial that your site is accommodating.
SEO for fashion websites must consider:
Google is now more likely to index mobile versions of sites over desktop. So, if your page isn’t mobile friendly, it’s likely that it won’t rank very well.
You may be pushing sales to your website through SEO tactics, but there’s no doubt you still want to see footfall in your brick and mortar stores. Local SEO is great for fashion brands who occupy any form of physical property. Highstreets are still contributing to overall retail sales, so it’s important to appreciate both, using local SEO to introduce consumers to your stores.
The best way to optimise your site for location-based queries is to use Google My Business (GMB), so your store can be displayed like so:
This can help your website target ‘near me’ searches. This is particularly useful in cities where people may be looking to find shops near them after work, whether they need an outfit for Friday night, or want to do a bit of shopping on their days in the office.
Let’s say a local customer is looking for a shoe shop so that they can try on a pair of trainers, so they search for ‘shoe shops near me’ (15k average monthly searches). If their location was near your store, your GMB display would appear in their search results.
Implementing your location into keywords can also locally optimise your webpage for ‘near me’ searches. For example, terms such as ‘clothing stores in Newcastle’ can appear in ‘clothing stores near me’ searches, so long as that user is located in, or near, Newcastle.
Considering these tips in your SEO strategy along with other key ranking factors like original quality content, user intent and site hygiene can have a huge impact on your website’s performance. To find out more about fashion SEO, browse our SEO services or chat to us today.
