As your shop window to the world, your website has incredible potential to build your brand and introduce your products to a huge number of shoppers. But with increasing competition in the online fashion scene, the need to take advantage of every opportunity to direct shoppers to your site has never been greater. In this guest post, The Fashion Network asked the experts at Manchester based online marketing agency I-COM for some tips.
The first two topics covered will be SEO, Keywords and Back-Links. We’ll run through Title tags, Page descriptions, Product descriptions, Images, Videos, Blogs and Social Media in further posts!
SEO, or, Search Engine Optimisation, Keywords and Back-links: By Matt Davies
There are a number of fundamentals to SEO that apply to any industry, but the fashion sector offers its own challenges, as well as opportunities. The following advice should start you on your way to improving the number of visitors to your site from natural search natural search being the non-paid search results.
Keywords must always be at the forefront of your SEO activity. That’s not to say that you should focus your efforts around a select few terms, but that keywords should be carefully selected for each page. Take a list of the pages on your site and select relevant keywords for each (you can begin this research at https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal). If you find keywords that you feel your site should appear for, but has no matching page, note them down and build these pages later!
Search engines like Google give more credit to websites that have a large number of quality backlinks (links from other sites).
When search engines calculate the relevance of your site to a particular keyword, for example ‘men’s leather jackets’, they not only consider the number of backlinks, but also their quality.
If backlinks are found on sites with unrelated content they are considered less relevant, whereas those found on sites with related content are more relevant. You should therefore encourage backlinks from other fashion sites – there are multitudes of fashion bloggers out there, along with news sites and other fashion stores – you just have to create content they’ll want to link to!
Try adding competitions, advice, news, opinions or unique products, and consider contacting the owners of your favourite fashion sites to see if they’d be interested in reviewing your site or products, or to refer them to content they may be interested in linking to.
Next time we’ll find out more about Title tags, descriptions and Images.
If you would like to ask the experts in person, RSVP to ‘The Truth About SEO’ TFN Event on August 30th in London here
