As we all know, online fashion is a fiercely-competitive sector. Even more so since the pandemic, with more and more of us choosing to fill our wardrobes via the internet rather than the high street. There’s a lot of noise, a huge variety of options for the consumers and a constantly enormous to-do list for marketers working in this sector.
So how do you compete?
There are lots of activities involved in the optimisation of eCommerce fashion sites, but one of the most fundamental aspects is ensuring that the content is top-notch. Great content puts a site in a position to attract, engage and convert users who otherwise may not have known about you. You could be selling the best products for the most competitive prices but if the search engines aren’t able to find any relevant content or understand what each page is about, then you’ll never get ahead.
In this post we’ll focus on how to get the most out of your content, ensuring that it’s fully optimised and able to compete at the highest level. Before we do that, however, there’s one very important task that needs to be undertaken prior to any content changes taking place and that’s keyword research.
What is Keyword Research and why is it so Important for SEO?
Keyword research is the process of identifying and analysing popular words and phrases that users are entering into search engines. It’s a fundamental task in any SEO campaign and it’s vital because when you know what people are looking for you can focus content around those topics.
Keyword research is also about understanding how high the demand is for certain words and so how difficult it will be to compete. This helps to give direction so that particular areas can be prioritised above others.
Learning how to conduct effective keyword research is a whole other topic in itself and there are already a lot of good resources out there, so for the purposes of this post, we’ll instead focus on how to use the results of the keyword research to inform and optimise your content.
We have, however, provided a few tips specific to fashion:
- Research different styles, colours, accessories, materials, and other relevant attributes. You’re not likely to get a lot of insight from top-level terms such as dresses, or shirts, so utilise these attributes to narrow things down e.g. ‘women’s linen shirts’
- If you’re a luxury brand, include the term ‘luxury’ as well as related terms such as ‘high end’ into the keyword research. The same applies to budget brands.
- Include any other topics relevant to your products or brand. This might be things like sustainable or eco-friendly.
- Look at areas you might not currently cater for but want to know whether anyone is interested in e.g. gifting or personalisation.
If you’d like to know more about how to conduct keyword research here are some good step-by-step guides to get you started:
- https://yoast.com/keyword-research-ultimate-guide/
- https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/keyword-research
Example: The Travelwrap Company
Cameo Digital’s client, The Travelwrap Company, is a great example of how thorough keyword research can boost SEO performance.
When we first started working with Travelwrap, their website’s navigation split their products by the branded terms they used to define their product ranges, as well as suggestions for specific events:
Navigation before:
While this style of navigation is a great way to get to know a brand, it’s not necessarily the best format for search – users who don’t already know your brand and its products are very unlikely to be searching for your own brand language. Instead, they’ll be searching for brand-agnostic terms to describe what they’re looking for.
Our keyword research project identified a whole host of potential keyword modifiers that users were searching for. Instead of searching for products based on the brand terms Travelwrap used to describe their products, they were looking for specific colours, fabrics and weights, as well as products tailored for men or for children.
Implementing this research meant redesigning their navigation to ensure that the site had optimised landing pages for as many of these keyword modifiers as possible:
Navigation after:
It also meant optimising product pages for a range of terms that previously hadn’t been used on-site, but which the keyword research proved were in demand. For example, adding “rose gold” keyword variants to a dusky pink coloured travel wrap to ensure that users who would be interested in this product, but who were talking about it a slightly different way, were catered for:
The results
While these changes took quite some time to implement, the impact on SEO performance was profound. With a much wider range of keyword variants covered on-site, SEO traffic to product pages climbed steadily as the changes were implemented:
These results are a great example of how keyword research can be used to its best effect – not just as a set of “target keywords”, but as a template for how best to structure a website, and for the type of language to use site-wide to best resonate with users.
How To Use the Findings of the Keyword Research:
Optimising Site Structure for Users and SEO
A good site structure groups topics in a way which makes it easy for users to reach the page they want in as few clicks as possible. If users can’t find what they’re looking for then they’re likely to leave the site (a signal that Google picks up on), which is why it’s so important to have a great menu which includes links to all the right pages. This is where keyword research comes in handy, as it tells us what the most popular topics and sub-topics are so that they can be prioritised for inclusion.
Identifying the top-level categories is generally very straightforward and can usually be determined without insight from keyword research. Instead, all that’s required is a basic understanding of the product offering and a little bit of common sense.
In the case of most fashion sites, the typical top-level categories are Women, Men, and Kids, whereas for sites that offer products exclusively for women or men the top-level categories will usually be those that contain the greatest number of products, such as clothing, handbags and shoes etc. Given that most fashion sites are set up in this way means that it’s a structure the majority of users will be familiar with and so replicating this can only be a plus for usability.
This may all seem very simple so far (in fact, that’s my aim) and so apologies if you feel like I’m teaching you how to suck eggs, but you’d be surprised at how complicated some fashion sites can make the site structure, opting to list unique collection names in the main menu, which have very little relevance for the user or SEO, as opposed to grouping together popular top-level topics, which users will be familiar with.
Next comes the process of determining the sub-categories. This is where keyword research is much more useful as it helps to identify the competitive, high-volume topics for prioritisation. Understanding popularity helps in deciding which and in what order the sub-categories should be listed, with those that have the highest search volume being positioned towards the top.
If done thoroughly, the keyword research may have also identified the potential for additional sub-categories you hadn’t thought of previously. Before you start creating a whole set of new pages however make sure that you have sufficient products to justify it. If you only have one or two then the creation of a new category page isn’t going to be a worthwhile exercise, as other sites which have a lot more to offer in that area will outcompete you every time.
How To Name Your Category and Product Pages
Getting the naming of the various products and categories on the site right is essential not only for SEO but also for users. As mentioned previously, some fashion sites have collections or products with their own unique names, exclusive to the brand.
This is fairly common, especially with high-fashion sites, but if there’s no indication as to what the product or collection is comprised of then it won’t provide any relevancy and could even be a barrier to users clicking through to the page. To avoid this it’s essential that all category and product pages are relevant and contain the terms that users search for the most. E.g. it goes without saying, but if the product is a dress, then make sure to include the term ‘dress’ within the product name. Also include any other relevant descriptive features such as ‘Mini’, ‘Maxi’ and or ‘floral’ etc.
Users are much more likely to search for generic, category-like keywords with strong intent rather than very specific collections or product names.
All of this isn’t to say that unique collection names can’t be included, but they shouldn’t be the main or only type of navigation option available on the site. Many of the high-end fashion brands still list their collection pages in the main menu but they come second to the main sub-categories which detail the different product types such as Shirts, Coats, Trousers etc.
An example of this can be seen on the Stella McCartney site:
Writing Optimised Title Tags and Meta Descriptions
Title Tags
The Title Tag is the most important on-page SEO factor in helping search engines understand what your page is about. It appears both within the header of the internet browser and within the search engine results as the clickable headline so it’s often the first impression that users will get of your site. It can also be the factor which determines whether a user clicks through to your site or not.
Title tags should provide an accurate and concise description of a page’s content. This should be fairly straightforward when it comes to product pages as the primary keywords to be targeted will usually be the name of the product along with any other relevant descriptive features e.g. ‘One-Shoulder Double Satin Dress in Blue’.
The category and sub-category pages will be a little different as you’ll need to describe a range of products rather than just one, so refer to your keyword research to see which sub-topics are the most popular and include them, making sure to place the most popular ones towards the beginning e.g. The Title tag for a Maxi Dress sub-category page might look like this: ‘Women’s Maxi Dresses made from Sustainable Material | Brand Name’
Here are a few guidelines on the rules to follow when writing Title Tags:
- Make sure every Title is unique and relevant to the page
- Ensure the target keyword is included and that it appears towards the beginning
- Try to keep the length to a 60-character limit
- If you have a well-known brand add it to your Title Tags as it could help to boost click-through rates.
Meta Descriptions
The Meta Description appears within the search results, just under the Title Tag and provides a brief summary of the web page. Although it’s not part of the ranking algorithm, the Meta Description can be used to encourage users to click through to the page from the search results.
Search engines often bolden keywords used in the search query which can draw the attention of the user, so this is another opportunity to use keyword research to identify relevant, popular phrases for inclusion.
Here are some guidelines on how to write a Meta Description:
- Keep the length between 50 and 160 characters
- Make sure the description is unique, and relevant and includes the target keywords in a natural, non-spammy way.
- Write the Description in a way which compels users to click through to the page from the search engines. On the more prominent pages of the site, it can be useful to incorporate a unique selling point or a call to action.
Category and Product Descriptions
Many fashion sites prefer the focus of their pages to be on images of the products as opposed to text, particularly on category pages. While this is totally understandable it shouldn’t be done at the expense of excluding text content altogether.
The focus can and should remain on the areas of the page that users are interested in the most, a small amount of unique, keyword-informed descriptive content can go a long way towards providing relevancy for the search engines, helping the page to appear in the results for relevant search terms.
The description is also an opportunity to provide the user with additional information that couldn’t be included in the Meta Data and while relevant keywords should be incorporated it shouldn’t be stuffed with them as this will be off-putting to users and could be considered spammy by the search engines.
When incorporating a description, it should be positioned at the top of the page so that it gets noticed by search engines and users, providing more context for them both. This is especially important for new pages that search engines are crawling for the first time.
Images
Text isn’t the only content that can be optimised on the site. Behind every image, there’s a filename, ALT text, and an image Title. Very little thought is often given to these elements but this is another opportunity, particularly for fashion sites that use a lot of images, to provide relevancy for the search engines.
The filename is the one that is most often overlooked. This is because the default name generated by the camera the image was taken on or the software it was processed with is not changed before it’s uploaded to the site and so it ends up being an irrelevant series of numbers and letters.
In order to rectify this, all that’s required is to give each of these elements a relevant description which incorporates the target keywords.
Blog Posts
During the keyword research, some question style phrases may have popped up such as ‘what makes a dress sustainable?’ or ‘which jeans are best for Summer?’. Your blog could be the perfect place to answer some of these questions and provide the content users are looking for.
If you don’t have the time or the skills in-house to conduct this vital optimisation work then, get in touch and we’ll see where we can help.
