SEO basics for a new online fashion brand

If you’re thinking about entering the competitive world of online fashion, you’d better be prepared for the SEO battle you’ll have on your hands. Fortunately, there are a few SEO services for business growth that can help you out. Here are four SEO tactics you can try if you’re just starting out as an eCom fashion brand.

Target Less Competitive Keywords

Google searches related to clothing and fashion are some of the most competitive search queries on the web. If you’re a new brand starting from scratch, you’ll find it virtually impossible to rank for short-tail keywords such as T-shirts, men’s trainers or women’s dresses. Try searching some of those keywords for yourself and you’ll see a long list of recognisable brands that have built up both reputation and SEO pedigree.

Instead, target lesser-searched long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are search terms that contain more words, usually three to five words would see a search term classed as a long-tail keyword. 

For example, instead of targeting ‘men’s hoodies’, try ranking for ‘men’s hoodie sale’. Or instead of targeting baseball caps, tailor your website to target ‘Union Jack baseball caps’. These searches will be less competitive and as a result, your chances of ranking for them will increase.

Consider Product Names And Colours

In fashion, it’s becoming increasingly common to think of quirky names for products, styles or colours to play on the emotional side of consumers. While this might make your products appear more unique or original, consider the implications for SEO.

Users will often search for a product by style or colour. For example, men’s navy blue raincoat or women’s black puffer coat. If your product, collection or colour has been given a different name, you’re decreasing its chances of ranking for these types of search terms. 

Instead, think about how emotive language can be worked into the surrounding copy such as product descriptions and FAQs while naming products in line with relevant high-volume keywords. This way, you get the best of both worlds. 

Content Marketing

Optimising product pages isn’t the only way to rank on Google SERPs. Content marketing has long been used to try and target keywords that are more difficult to target. This is particularly useful for new brands as they can get creative with their content to try and target topics that others haven’t yet thought of.

Sports apparel brand Gymshark is particularly good when it comes to content marketing. A few examples of their blogs are:

• What to wear to Pilates

• How to dress for hot weather runs

• How guys are styling oversized t-shirts this season

These types of blogs have two main benefits. Firstly, they’ll target queries such as, ‘What to wear to Pilates’, ‘What to wear for a run in hot weather’, and ‘How to style an oversized t-shirt in 2024’. Secondly, the articles will contain links to internal pages which is also good for SEO and may also increase sales by promoting their own product as a solution to the user’s problem.

User Experience

Finally, the user’s experience is becoming an increasingly important factor to consider when improving your SEO. Google introduced core web vitals in 2020 which measure a website’s performance in terms of factors such as speed and usability.

Fashion consumers will often compare products and sites too. So even if your website isn’t the top result, you may be able to compete based off the UX that your website offers. Therefore, when it comes to online fashion, it’s crucial to find the balance between SEO and usability.