In-depth SEO for Fashion eCommerce & Dropshipping Website

seo for fashion ecommerce
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In this guide, I will cover why SEO is important for business, how Google or other search engines actually work, SEO for fashion eCommerce and dropshipping, the most effective SEO tools, and go over some SEO ranking factors. You will learn the secrets of SEO focused online store.

What exactly is SEO?

Search engine optimization, or SEO. It is the process of improving your web pages’ search engine rankings so that they show up higher in search results which will increase traffic to your website.

So, as many of you probably know, this can relate to when you’re doing a search on Google.

For example, look at the top three results and click on the top three results; how many of you browse to the second page? Probably not many, right? Most people like to stay on page one, which is the top ten results of Google.

• In SEO, ranking refers to your content’s position on the search engine
results pages (SERPs).
• Appearing in the top three results is ideal because they receive about half of all clicks on any search results page.
• Ranking in the top ten results is particularly important because those positions receive about 90% of all clicks on any search results page.

Why Is SEO Important for clothing brands?

Because those rankings receive nearly half of all hits on any search results page, if you consider that 50 percent of clicks go to the top three results, appearing on the first page at all inside the top ten results is beneficial as 95 percent of users never make it past the first page.

Here’s an example of a Google search engine results page that would appear if you typed an organic cotton t-shirt into the search bar: the first two links are advertising, and the links below are organic results. There are some images as featured snippets.

How does impact SEO in fashion online?

In 2020 retail e-commerce revenues from apparel and accessories sales amounted to over 110
billion dollars and it’s projected to increase by 156, up to 53.6 billion USD in 2024. Here is a look at eCommerce stats.

• E-commerce will dramatically transform the entire retail economic paradigm, effectively ending wholesale.
• During the pandemic, digital adoption has skyrocketed.
• In 2021, 71% of fashion executives estimate their internet business to increase by 20% or more.
• Retail e-commerce revenues from apparel and accessories sales will total $110.6 billion USD in 2020.
• Expected to rise to $153.6 billion USD by 2024.

Why does website traffic matter for Fashion eCommerce?

There’s some pretty exciting research that was actually conducted by SEMRUSH based on the top traffic sources for fashion companies, and they discovered that in the United States.

Any conversion in an online business begins with a visit to the website.
•As in the United States, online fashion businesses received over half of their traffic (48.45 percent) through direct visits, indicating that visitors knew exactly what domain to enter into the search bar.
•Search traffic is the second most common source of traffic; this number includes both sponsored and non-branded inquiries.

This graph here shows you the top traffic sources for e-commerce if you can see it here just under 50 percent are coming from the direct right so people who are typing in the exact URL for the website URL as direct.

SEO for fashion ecommerce

Notable Trend

In 2018, mobile traffic is leading the pack! Mobile e-commerce is growing faster than general eCommerce and is responsible for the 7.8 million visitors fashion sites generate globally — more than twice the volume of desktop sources generated in 2018.

Fashion e-commerce websites are no exception to Google’s “Mobile First” principle. On average, 68.54% of fashion e-commerce websites’ yearly traffic came from mobile devices. So, when you start SEO for Fashion eCommerce, you have to concentrate on mobile optimization in your mind.

How Google actually works

Before you do any SEO you got to understand how Google actually works.

Google has automated software called search bots or spiders. These bots go and crawl the web, and then they gather a bunch of data.

Then they catalog it and index it from all the catalog of those trillions of web pages out there.

  • The bots crawl the web and index it and then put a catalog. When someone does a search and Google is able to show the most relevant results from that catalog.
  • When you do SEO for your clothing store you’re helping google’s spiders to crawl and understand your content. You’re also telling Google your content is relevant to certain queries.
  • Your web pages show up on the right search results.

Do you know that Google has over 200 ranking factors?

A lot of people don’t know this and are quite surprised to hear this when I tell them.

I created these three circles, there’s technical SEO on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

The process of optimizing your website for crawling and indexing is referred to as technical SEO. With technical SEO, you can make it easier for search engines to crawl, interpret, and index your website.

On-page SEO is the practice of optimizing individual web pages in order to rank higher on the SERPs and have more relevant traffic in search engines. On-page refers to both the content and HTML source code of a page that can be optimized as opposed to off-page SEO which refers to links and other external signals.

seo for clothing ecommerce

So off-page SEO refers to actions that are taken outside of your own website to impact rankings within search engine results pages.

Off-site ranking factors involve improving search engine user perception of a site’s popularity, relevance trustworthy and authority. You may have heard of something called link building or backlink. That’s an off-page SEO activity that you do to gain backlinks from other websites with higher domain authority back to your website.

That’s a pretty important SEO ranking factor for google because it’s a vote of popularity right relevance trustworthy and authoritativeness. Some agencies do some shady practices of purchasing links and it’s found upon a black hat practice. You could actually get penalized by Google for doing stuff like that. But it gets you a lot of backlinks.

But these spammy links are totally just useless. It gives you a boost in the short term. But Google is going to see that it’s penalized. you could get like blacklisted from it.

So don’t ever do that just stick to proper link-building strategies.

Let’s get into the SEO Checklist here:

SEO for fashion ecommerce seo checklist 1

SEO Checklist

1. A Crawlable Website
• Create a Robots.txt file
• Create Sitemap
• Move to HTTPS
• Use schema markup

3. Device Friendliness
• Responsive design
• Check the site with the mobile testing tool
• Accessible, tappable content

2. Page Speed
• Improve site load time

4. Domain Age, URL, and Authority

• Check domain and Page Authority
• Increase DA and E.A.T

5. Keyword Optimization
• Use keywords in Page Titles
• Optimize your meta description
• Use keywords in image alt tags
• Use the right Header Tags (h1, h2)

6. Optimized Content 

• Use LSI keywords
• Understand search intent
• Get the length right

• Helpful content
• Use multimedia

So these three things here are part of SEO. Number one is having a crawlable website and that means creating a robots.txt file and submitting your XML sitemap to the google search console.

Make sure your site is HTTPS you know secure have an SSL certificate on it and use schema markup this is to tell google like okay in order for your site to be crawlable you need to have these things right because there’s no point in.

Perform any SEO If your site isn’t even searchable by Google, you need to make sure you have all of these technical things done on your site alright, and that includes optimizing your site load time right how quickly your website loads, and ideally you’d like it to load in under three seconds.

Because the longer it takes for your site to load, the bigger the bounce rate of consumers simply leaving your site.

Mobile Friendliness

You may recall that I discussed Google’s mobile-first strategy.

So make sure you know your site has a responsive design. You know that it can work across different devices. You can also check if your site is mobile-friendly with the there’s actual google mobile testing tool and you just Google mobile testing tool.

Then you put in your website and it’ll tell you green if your site is mobile-friendly, if not it shows you red or yellow.

Another consideration is the age, URL, and authority of your website’s domain. You know domain age does have an effect on your site’s ability to rank if all things are equal two sites one site just has been around longer for 10 years as opposed to a brand new site that has just started you know the older site that’s been around for 10 years will have better domain authority.

Domain Authority

It’s usually a way the site’s ability to rank. It’s a scale of one to one hundred. Higher the number the higher the authority score.

Example sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Youtube obviously would probably have domain authority in the high 90s. Perhaps if your site is brand new you’d be probably starting at one okay and so a good thing to look at is you know.

You need to identify brands like perhaps an independent fashion house. See what their domain authority is right to find who your competitors are that’s similar right that’s possible, you know the smaller brand independent. See what their domain authority is, and then use that as a standard to compare yourself to while conducting competitive analysis.

Keyword Optimization

Then we’re going to get onto on-page SEO and so some of the things uh on-page SEO
there’s keyword optimization.

You know one of the most important activities, when you’re starting to do SEO, is keyword research. That’s just to find keywords that are relevant to your customers or your niche. What’s relevant to your industry?

So you’re looking at the search volume of the keywords.

You want to find keywords that have high search volume but low competition. You need to make a list of the keywords.

Once you have that list of keywords, then do the keyword optimization. You must use those keywords in your title tags and your meta descriptions. This is what I kept telling you earlier and on the SERPs page. When someone puts in a sort of search, they type in a keyword. It brings up some results on the Google search engine.

Then you’ll have the title tag which is the clickable link.

It’s really important where you want to put your title tag in there and preferably have the keyword
in the front of the word.

You should keep it all 70 characters long for your title tag. Your meta descriptions should be about 155–165 characters.

  • You have to insert your keywords in those two places and also in your headers. You need to have the keyword as well on your website in the main header.
  • You ought to focus on you know a primary keyword one keyword per page and optimize your page but don’t overdo it like this is a point where like some people.
  • In the old days like back when google was perhaps not as sophisticated, there was a keyword-stuffing practice.

You know if you just went to a page and just put in your keyword 100 times on that page, it didn’t matter if it made sense or not. But you know the keywords there 100 times, You could show up on page one or be number one on google just for doing that.

Since then you know google’s gotten a lot more sophisticated. You can’t use that practice because now google could penalize you for doing keyword stuffing like that.

The whole purpose of Google is that they want to be able to bring up the most relevant results for people’s searches right so they’re trying to find okay from what someone is typing into the search bar.

Optimized Content

First, I want to say use LSI keywords. LSI stands for latent semantic indexing. These are keywords that are conceptually related terms that search engines use to understand the content on a web page.

So LSI keywords are not synonyms instead they are terms that are closely tied to your target keyword. For example, take a word like jogging right well-running is just a synonym for jogging.

Now there’s nothing wrong with using that synonym in your article. That can help with your on-page SEO but it’s not an LSI keyword.

If you are talking about New York City, you could say “manhattan”, “yellow cabs,” “statue of liberty,” or “big apple.” That is the LSI keyword.

So that’s what you want to put into your content because that’s going to really signal google. You know the article is really relevant to what people are saying because they’re scanning those
are LSI keywords.

Article Length and Quality

Okay so again like I said you got to understand the search intent and what are the people looking for. You want to get the length right in your article and aim for about a thousand words.

I read that the sweet spot is 1800 words.

But aim for quality over quantity don’t try to just go all crazy. I’m just putting it in words for the sake of making the article really long.

You want to aim for quality. So that’s optimizing content, and the other thing that’s important with an SEO is a user experience, so like I mentioned before, you want to provide people with the right fantastic stuff that’s good quality, that builds your authority as an expert in what you do.

You should keep people reading your articles and scrolling on your website, clicking on them, and encouraging the addition of internal links. therefore connecting from various places throughout your content.

You should include some internal links that lead to other articles or pages on your site in order to keep people on your site for as long as possible, which is why the click-through rate and to dwell time are significant ranking factors. Dwell time is the length of time that people spend on your website.

Link Building Strategy

Off-page SEO is another important factor which is link building. I had talked about it a little bit earlier in terms of gaining inbound links over to your site.

Getting links from other high authority websites perhaps like you know blogs, influencers, publications media that sort of thing to perhaps feature. If you write an article you can ask for a review of your product or you know get yourself interviewed to put a link back to your website. That counts as an inbound link.

An outbound link is a link from your website to another website. For example, you could be blogging about the benefits of purchasing more sustainable clothing.

You can include a link to someone you know. You’ve probably heard of certification boards that certify organic fabrics. We could text or trade as you do. You can link to those organizations perhaps by referencing them and that would count as an outbound link.

Then internal links like I said put links from your website to another page within your website. So these are the types of links that you want to have on your website.

Social Signal

Then social signals in terms of social media really like you can’t really control the SEO part of like Instagram or Facebook. But what you can do is put your website on the profile pages of all these social media platforms.

It’s a good idea to at least create an account.

At least the big ones right Pinterest, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and youtube create that account, and then you know put a link to your website on there.

It’s also a signal to Google, so try to keep regular updates and post on those. Because they are interested in what is going on. If there has been recent activity, it shows that this brand is operating and in business, and bear in mind that you should aim to maintain your material shareable as well.

Local SEO Optimization

I’m just going to talk about that a little bit if you have a physical store. You have a shop, a boutique or a showroom, or a studio in your location.

People can go and visit during regular work hours then you can do something called local area SEO and it’s to help your business show up higher on the local search and the google maps page. So it’s called the local pack

If you optimize your site for local search then when everyone types in the keywords in their area that your page will come up in the results on the map there.

You need to set up a google my business account and make sure that includes your name, address, and phone number (NAP) listed there correctly. Then you need to have business listings or citations so that’s like getting your information listed on directories like yellow pages or yelp trip advisor.

You should list your company there and get listed in as many directories as possible. That’s what business listings are. You want to acquire customer reviews on your Google page, and doing so will help you optimize for local search as well as a post on the Google My Business page.

SEO Tools and Software

Now let me talk about some SEO tools. The tool to be able to test your website load speed it’s called gtmetrix.com. This is a page of a site speed load testing software and you just plug in your website.

It’ll scan your website and bring you up like a letter grade a b c d and how fast you. It’ll tell you how quickly your webpage loads and gives you recommendations on what you can do to fix it.

You should, like, compress some of your image files or whatever is taking. You know, loading something that’s loading is not quick enough.

If you have a brand new website or if you haven’t done this yet, make sure that you set up your google analytics account.

First, you will set up your google search console. If you have a local business google my business can help to reach your local customers.

So these are tools that are going to be able to track the performance of your site. Google Analytics is going to tell you where your traffic is coming from. You’re able to track all the
traffic sources.

Google search console tells you what keywords your site is ranking for and then there are a few tools out there.

It is used for keyword research. Ubersuggest is free, except that you are currently limited to how many searches you may conduct for free. Previously, all searches were free, but they are now beginning to charge for them.

I believe you can do up to three, after which you must create an account. You must pay on a regular basis, but you can use those tools up to a certain degree, just like Semrush.

Semrush is one of the most impressive SEO tools available to experts. Semrush is what I use. It’s something I’ve paid for. On theirs, I conduct all of my keyword research and competition analysis.

I can even like go and check out and see what backlinks other competitors have.

For example, if I’m working with a client and I’m doing link-building for them, I can actually go to SEMRUSH and type in the competitor’s website.

Then I can see what websites they’re getting backlinks from.

So this would be part of the whole outreach strategy that I do for my clients is that I research this and make a list of the places like perhaps media their magazines or you know different publications or blogs or whatever they’re getting.

It’s a time-consuming process. If you’re doing it correctly right it’s there’s no shortcut the way around this it’s like you have to research.

You have to find the places that are relevant to your market and your niche. You have
to make the list and need to find the contact.

You can use various tools for SEO like MOZ, and Ahrefs. Another interesting tool ‘SurferSEO’ can help you to build content or article. It will audit, edit, and fix your content.

There’s also a Mozbar extension which is a chrome extension plug-in that tells you a website’s
domain authority.

How long does it take to rank?

Here’s an interesting question and maybe you might be thinking this as well right now, like well, how long does it take to rank?

This is a million-dollar question.

I could answer that and give you a definite answer but with SEO it takes time and patience. The average time for SEO changes to take effect is four to six months. So it’s like planting seeds right SEO seeds take root in the entire internet.

You gotta plant them and then it grows you’ll see the seeds sprouting you know in time.

So really if you want to start out give yourself a minimum of three months.

I won’t work with anyone who can’t commit to a minimum of three months. Because really that’s just a waste of your time and money if you’re not going to be able to commit for three months. You don’t see many results from that you have to give it time. Because really like we’re at the mercy of Google’s algorithms as well which are always changing.

So what determines your site’s ability to rank?

It all depends on there are a lot of different factors.

How to Control Keyword Ranking Time

You might consider something like a long tail keyword that comprises three to four words as a sentence form rather than major keywords like sustainable fashion. It’s a challenging keyword to rank because it’s difficult and competitive.

If you kind of go something like more longer tail keyword I said earlier in the example. You could be fair trade organic cotton t-shirts right so that’s a long-tail keyword.

You have a higher chance of ranking for that if you focus on that. So that’s why low volume keywords you know you could see results in perhaps three to four months.

Medium volume could take 300 days high volume keywords could take up to a year or more to start ranking. Hopefully, you get the idea that SEO takes time and patience. But it’s opposed to
having paid ads. Whereas your traffic ends when you stop paying for ads, SEO is like the gift that keeps on giving if you put the time and effort into it.

Finally, you’ll see your rewards. Hopefully, you’ll be able to see more consistent traffic. As a result, more steady sales throughout the time.

I serve business consulting. I can do it one-on-one.

If you have a brand and want more hands-on and personalized help with your business, whether you’re in the early phases of starting or wanting to build your brand. I offer consulting services and mentoring service packages. I specialize in clothing, apparel brands, and all fashion-related products.

Herewith is the contact information.

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