How to Approach SEO for Online Clothing Stores

The quick development of the clothing industry online and the rising number of clothing e-stores, it’s important to know how users search for products they have an interest for and how they get to the websites of particular brands selling online.

Accessing a website directly is usual to popular brands and large well-established online shops — the users simply enter the address of a given site in the search engine from their memory. For example, this will be the case with big online shops like ASOS or Zara.

Conversely, when it comes to smaller shops or newly launched ecommerce platforms, it’s no longer possible to rely only on brand recognition. You will need to generate traffic from other channels, including search engines.

Considering the rising number of online shops it becomes vital for any ecommerce store to stand out from the competition in order to get traffic and customers.

Seasonality

Besides the high competitiveness, the clothing industry is also driven by seasonality. This is one of the more important aspects that need to be analysed when creating your SEO strategy. Keep in mind that any promotional campaigns won’t have an immediate effect, so it’s essential to plan and prepare in advance. For example, if winter is coming you want winter jackets to be the main display category and need to plan for this accordingly.

Keep an Eye on Keywords

The aforementioned seasonality is also intertwined with you usage of keywords that will match subpages with categories or even individual products. The keywords should be regularly checked so that they remain up to date and match the current offer of your shop. For online shops it’s generally better to focus on a wider variety of keywords, reducing your risk of being impacted by changes that search engines introduce for their algorithms from time to time.

Optimize your Content

Specifically for online clothing shops, you need to make sure that category pages and product description contain relevant and informative content. When customers don’t find the necessary information, they will look for it in the description — similar to how customer would approach a salesman in a physical store. Missing or lacklustre descriptions will lead to users leaving the website rather than continue to search for information.

Internal Linking

When you create compelling descriptions for your website, you should also utilize internal linking. This is a great method, especially for online stores, to grab the customers’ attention to other products and cross-promote. This way, someone who visited your online store only to buy a shirt can leave it with a new pair of glasses and a pair of shoes. Linking can be done in the content of descriptions or separate sections such as “you might also like”, “bestsellers” or “similar products”.