How to Build An Organic SEO Strategy for Your Fashion Brand in 2022
Developing an organic online presence for your fashion brand can be a challenge. With so many approaches and strategies available, it’s really easy to get confused and overwhelmed.
In reality, ranking your website on search engines shouldn’t be that hard to do.
Organic content ranks because you are providing interesting and helpful material to people who are in search of a solution to a problem they are facing.
The starting point of this journey is understanding the answer to the following question: what is it that your fashion brand or product is helping your customers to do?
In order to understand how your fashion brand connects to your customer’s problems, we’re going to go through a simple 4-step strategy that will allow us to get started in ranking your website or blog on top of search engines.
With no further ado, let’s get started.
#1 Build a List of Keywords
As we get started, we want to think about keywords. As you think about your brand try to write down a list of keywords or terms that you would associate with your brand.
How would you describe your brand, what terms and adjectives would you use?
But more importantly:
How would your customers try and look you up on search engines?
Is there anything distinctive that comes to mind?
It’s important to understand what keywords are unique to your brand and could be used by your potential customers to find you.
It’s important to take into account that customers, as they look you up, could incur in a variety of issues that prevent them from finding you:
- Maybe they can misspell your name
- Maybe they can look for an iconic product
- Maybe they’ll describe what the logo looks like
- Maybe they’ll search for information connected to your store
As you build your web presence, it’s important to create content on your website (on the about page, or elsewhere) where you’re able to tell search engines that when customers look for those unique keywords, it’s you they’re looking for.
You do this, by simply using those keywords on your page, in order to signal to Google that those keywords are associated with your brand.
Obviously, there are many factors interplaying in allowing you to come up in search results, so it’s important to focus on unique keywords that could not describe any other brand.
If you’re targeting the keyword “luxury fashion brand”, chances are you will never rank.
But if you target: “crimson logo shoemaker Florence” changes increase.
We need to take into account that in this first step, our goal is just to make it easy for those who know you to be able to find you.
To this extent, you can use a variety of tools including social media pages or Google Maps locations, which are both recommended approaches to make yourself more visible and get noticed above the crowd.
If you don’t know where to start with listing keywords, you could take inspiration by looking at your competitors to see what keywords they are ranking for.
To do that we recommend using Ubersuggest.
Great! Now that we’ve done this we can move on and tackle another challenge. How can we present our products and services to those who instead don’t know us already?
We’ll address this next challenge in the next section of our post.
#2 Understand the “Job to Be Done”
In this next step, we need to remember one thing.
Nobody cares about our products.
Customers only care about the solutions we have to offer them to help them solve their problems.
As we mentioned in the introduction, in order to understand how we want to show up on search engines, we need to first understand what kind of problems or challenges our customers are facing, that is making them search online for possible solutions.
Customers never look for a product, they look for benefits, or better yet for value.
Value is what they gain as a result of spending their money.
So what’s the value of a fashion product?
Well, it’s either functional, social, or emotional. If you want to explore these three different value dimensions, in the post, we’re addressing this topic in more depth.
We do recommend checking out our article to help you clearly understand what value is it that you are selling.
Once you have identified that value, then we are able to imagine our customers dealing with a series of problems that our product could potentially be perfectly capable of solving.
But wait! We are not going to simply sell them the product, we are going to help them understand the problem first and then, offer our solution.
- Is our customer struggling with tying their tie in a fashionable knot?
Well here’s a helpful guide on how to tie a double Windsor knot. As we’re at it, also please take a look at our selection of velvet ties. They’re perfect for weddings.
- Is our customer looking to dress more sustainably?
Well here are 5 things to look for when choosing a sustainable brand to make sure they’re not just greenwashing. As we’re at it, we actually have a collection of 100% recyclable clothing, please take a look, and here’s a 10% discount on your first purchase.
As we’ve seen in the examples, once you identify a keyword you need to connect it to a question capable of attracting the customer you want by building a search query.
A very popular tool to understand what kinds of questions people ask online is AnswerThePublic.
This way, we’re presenting our products as solutions, and we’re actually connecting with someone who is seeing our brand as relevant and useful.
The approach we’re following is actually backed by academic research. If you’d like to read more about this marketing framework, researched by Clayton Christensen, here’s an article where we expand on it.
So is it just that simple? Well in part it is, in part, it isn’t.
We do need to refine our keywords and search queries by looking at a couple of metrics to increase our odds of success.
We’ll address this topic in the next section of our post.
#3 Run A Few Metrics and Develop Content
In order to understand the chances of ranking we need to look at 2 key metrics: Keyword Difficulty and Search Volume.
Keyword Difficulty
Certain keywords are just harder to rank for because they express a high degree of purchase intent. The higher the purchase intent the more sought after they become. If you rank for a high purchase intent keyword, you are likely to bring to your website a high number of customers who are looking for a place to purchase a product.
As your website becomes more established and more authoritative you can aim for more competitive keywords, but ideally, you want to start with easier targets or the “low hanging fruit”. That usually corresponds to a KW difficulty of 20 or less.
The important thing is to make sure that you are also taking into account search volume.
There is no point in ranking first to searches that no one is Googling. This is why the second metric we’re looking at is connected to this second quantitative dimension of search.
Search Volume
This metric helps us make sure that we’re actually “answering a question” that someone is actually asking.
Just like for keyword difficulty, in search volume, we need to be quite reasonable in terms of what volume we’re targeting.
A good search volume for a new website is approximately 250 to 500 searches per month. However, it does also make sense to target lower volumes than that as well.
By looking at KW difficulty and search volume we’re able to identify a series of content pieces – for instance, blog posts – that we could write. We need to decide how many we can create, but 30 pieces of content is a good place to start.
Ideally, if you can get to 60 that would be perfect to launch a new platform.
Of course, nothing prevents us from creating something more elaborate than a blog post as a Youtube video. The analysis is identical as Youtube is a search engine just like Google.
The general principle to follow is that we want to create the content typology which is best equipped to answer the problem.
If the information is technical and detailed, putting it in writing helps. If you’re trying to show “how to do” something then a video may be better.
To look at these metrics (keyword difficulty vs. search volume) there are a lot of online tools that can be used.
Our personal favorite is the Free Keyword Generator by Ahrefs which we recommend using.
Once we’ve got our list of content to create, we just need to develop it and publish it.
It’s unlikely that we can be successful with every single piece, but by doing a little bit of keyword search our chances will increase greatly, and publishing more content means having higher chances of ranking.
Whether we like this or not, content marketing is becoming one of the most relevant forms of marketing in fashion, so it’s a good idea to get good at it and become experts for the sake of our company.
If you’d like to see how content marketing is paving the way to a new era of fashion communications, in this post we’re discussing the topic in greater depth.
#4 Assess and Repeat
Once all of this work has been done, it’s time to play the waiting game.
The biggest issue with SEO and maybe one of the only drawbacks is the fact that search engines take a very long time to rank new websites.
It can take up to 6 months to get your content fully ranked, and that can be a long time to wait.
At the same time, it’s important to remember that ranked content has just the opposite benefit.
Once it’s up there it tends to stay up there for a long time, as opposed to other forms of advertising which only work as long as you pay for them.
According to our strategy then, what we need to do is wait.
We’ll have to wait for 6 to 9 months and then by looking at the rankings we’ve got we’ll collect a lot more information on what is actually working and what isn’t.
Based on the results we get we can develop a new round of content creation, with a lot more information in terms of identifying topics, queries, and keywords that are getting us profitable traffic.
How much content should you then keep posting?
Well, it depends, but research shows that about 12 to 20 posts per month are the average. It may look like a lot but in actual facts, if you look at the money it can make you, it can be a really good investment.
Great! Now that we’ve covered all 4 steps let’s move to draw a few conclusive remarks.
Conclusions
There you have it! In this post, we’ve looked at a simple and effective 4-step strategy to build a successful SEO strategy for your fashion brand.
We need to remember that an SEO strategy is an important component of your brand’s online strategy but it’s not the only thing driving profitable customer interactions.
In order to fully benefit from the inbound strategy discussed in this post, we need to take into account how customers move through different stages in their customer journey and for each stage (awareness, consideration, and purchase) different types of content need to be developed.
If you’d like to read bout this further, here’s an article on the topic.
Also, don’t forget to explore our blog for more content on fashion marketing and digital entrepreneurship. Enjoy!
Developing an organic online presence for your fashion brand can be a challenge. With so many approaches and strategies available, it’s really easy to get confused and overwhelmed.
In reality, ranking your website on search engines shouldn’t be that hard to do.
Organic content ranks because you are providing interesting and helpful material to people who are in search of a solution to a problem they are facing.
The starting point of this journey is understanding the answer to the following question: what is it that your fashion brand or product is helping your customers to do?
In order to understand how your fashion brand connects to your customer’s problems, we’re going to go through a simple 4-step strategy that will allow us to get started in ranking your website or blog on top of search engines.
With no further ado, let’s get started.
#1 Build a List of Keywords
As we get started, we want to think about keywords. As you think about your brand try to write down a list of keywords or terms that you would associate with your brand.
How would you describe your brand, what terms and adjectives would you use?
But more importantly:
How would your customers try and look you up on search engines?
Is there anything distinctive that comes to mind?
It’s important to understand what keywords are unique to your brand and could be used by your potential customers to find you.
It’s important to take into account that customers, as they look you up, could incur in a variety of issues that prevent them from finding you:
- Maybe they can misspell your name
- Maybe they can look for an iconic product
- Maybe they’ll describe what the logo looks like
- Maybe they’ll search for information connected to your store
As you build your web presence, it’s important to create content on your website (on the about page, or elsewhere) where you’re able to tell search engines that when customers look for those unique keywords, it’s you they’re looking for.
You do this, by simply using those keywords on your page, in order to signal to Google that those keywords are associated with your brand.
Obviously, there are many factors interplaying in allowing you to come up in search results, so it’s important to focus on unique keywords that could not describe any other brand.
If you’re targeting the keyword “luxury fashion brand”, chances are you will never rank.
But if you target: “crimson logo shoemaker Florence” changes increase.
We need to take into account that in this first step, our goal is just to make it easy for those who know you to be able to find you.
To this extent, you can use a variety of tools including social media pages or Google Maps locations, which are both recommended approaches to make yourself more visible and get noticed above the crowd.
If you don’t know where to start with listing keywords, you could take inspiration by looking at your competitors to see what keywords they are ranking for.
To do that we recommend using Ubersuggest.
Great! Now that we’ve done this we can move on and tackle another challenge. How can we present our products and services to those who instead don’t know us already?
We’ll address this next challenge in the next section of our post.
#2 Understand the “Job to Be Done”
In this next step, we need to remember one thing.
Nobody cares about our products.
Customers only care about the solutions we have to offer them to help them solve their problems.
As we mentioned in the introduction, in order to understand how we want to show up on search engines, we need to first understand what kind of problems or challenges our customers are facing, that is making them search online for possible solutions.
Customers never look for a product, they look for benefits, or better yet for value.
Value is what they gain as a result of spending their money.
So what’s the value of a fashion product?
Well, it’s either functional, social, or emotional. If you want to explore these three different value dimensions, in the post, we’re addressing this topic in more depth.
We do recommend checking out our article to help you clearly understand what value is it that you are selling.
Once you have identified that value, then we are able to imagine our customers dealing with a series of problems that our product could potentially be perfectly capable of solving.
But wait! We are not going to simply sell them the product, we are going to help them understand the problem first and then, offer our solution.
- Is our customer struggling with tying their tie in a fashionable knot?
Well here’s a helpful guide on how to tie a double Windsor knot. As we’re at it, also please take a look at our selection of velvet ties. They’re perfect for weddings.
- Is our customer looking to dress more sustainably?
Well here are 5 things to look for when choosing a sustainable brand to make sure they’re not just greenwashing. As we’re at it, we actually have a collection of 100% recyclable clothing, please take a look, and here’s a 10% discount on your first purchase.
As we’ve seen in the examples, once you identify a keyword you need to connect it to a question capable of attracting the customer you want by building a search query.
A very popular tool to understand what kinds of questions people ask online is AnswerThePublic.
This way, we’re presenting our products as solutions, and we’re actually connecting with someone who is seeing our brand as relevant and useful.
The approach we’re following is actually backed by academic research. If you’d like to read more about this marketing framework, researched by Clayton Christensen, here’s an article where we expand on it.
So is it just that simple? Well in part it is, in part, it isn’t.
We do need to refine our keywords and search queries by looking at a couple of metrics to increase our odds of success.
We’ll address this topic in the next section of our post.
#3 Run A Few Metrics and Develop Content
In order to understand the chances of ranking we need to look at 2 key metrics: Keyword Difficulty and Search Volume.
Keyword Difficulty
Certain keywords are just harder to rank for because they express a high degree of purchase intent. The higher the purchase intent the more sought after they become. If you rank for a high purchase intent keyword, you are likely to bring to your website a high number of customers who are looking for a place to purchase a product.
As your website becomes more established and more authoritative you can aim for more competitive keywords, but ideally, you want to start with easier targets or the “low hanging fruit”. That usually corresponds to a KW difficulty of 20 or less.
The important thing is to make sure that you are also taking into account search volume.
There is no point in ranking first to searches that no one is Googling. This is why the second metric we’re looking at is connected to this second quantitative dimension of search.
Search Volume
This metric helps us make sure that we’re actually “answering a question” that someone is actually asking.
Just like for keyword difficulty, in search volume, we need to be quite reasonable in terms of what volume we’re targeting.
A good search volume for a new website is approximately 250 to 500 searches per month. However, it does also make sense to target lower volumes than that as well.
By looking at KW difficulty and search volume we’re able to identify a series of content pieces – for instance, blog posts – that we could write. We need to decide how many we can create, but 30 pieces of content is a good place to start.
Ideally, if you can get to 60 that would be perfect to launch a new platform.
Of course, nothing prevents us from creating something more elaborate than a blog post as a Youtube video. The analysis is identical as Youtube is a search engine just like Google.
The general principle to follow is that we want to create the content typology which is best equipped to answer the problem.
If the information is technical and detailed, putting it in writing helps. If you’re trying to show “how to do” something then a video may be better.
To look at these metrics (keyword difficulty vs. search volume) there are a lot of online tools that can be used.
Our personal favorite is the Free Keyword Generator by Ahrefs which we recommend using.
Once we’ve got our list of content to create, we just need to develop it and publish it.
It’s unlikely that we can be successful with every single piece, but by doing a little bit of keyword search our chances will increase greatly, and publishing more content means having higher chances of ranking.
Whether we like this or not, content marketing is becoming one of the most relevant forms of marketing in fashion, so it’s a good idea to get good at it and become experts for the sake of our company.
If you’d like to see how content marketing is paving the way to a new era of fashion communications, in this post we’re discussing the topic in greater depth.
#4 Assess and Repeat
Once all of this work has been done, it’s time to play the waiting game.
The biggest issue with SEO and maybe one of the only drawbacks is the fact that search engines take a very long time to rank new websites.
It can take up to 6 months to get your content fully ranked, and that can be a long time to wait.
At the same time, it’s important to remember that ranked content has just the opposite benefit.
Once it’s up there it tends to stay up there for a long time, as opposed to other forms of advertising which only work as long as you pay for them.
According to our strategy then, what we need to do is wait.
We’ll have to wait for 6 to 9 months and then by looking at the rankings we’ve got we’ll collect a lot more information on what is actually working and what isn’t.
Based on the results we get we can develop a new round of content creation, with a lot more information in terms of identifying topics, queries, and keywords that are getting us profitable traffic.
How much content should you then keep posting?
Well, it depends, but research shows that about 12 to 20 posts per month are the average. It may look like a lot but in actual facts, if you look at the money it can make you, it can be a really good investment.
Great! Now that we’ve covered all 4 steps let’s move to draw a few conclusive remarks.
Conclusions
There you have it! In this post, we’ve looked at a simple and effective 4-step strategy to build a successful SEO strategy for your fashion brand.
We need to remember that an SEO strategy is an important component of your brand’s online strategy but it’s not the only thing driving profitable customer interactions.
In order to fully benefit from the inbound strategy discussed in this post, we need to take into account how customers move through different stages in their customer journey and for each stage (awareness, consideration, and purchase) different types of content need to be developed.
If you’d like to read bout this further, here’s an article on the topic.
Also, don’t forget to explore our blog for more content on fashion marketing and digital entrepreneurship.
If you’re interested in learning more about Content Marketing, don’t hesitate to take a look at our course “Content Marketing for Creative Rockstars“. Our short and to-the-point, online class covers a wide range of topics spanning from developing blog posts capable of driving profitable traffic to strategies for getting strong conversion rates on your landing pages. Here’s a link to the course, if you use the discount code BLOG20 you can access a 20% discount. Enjoy!
