SEO for the Retail Industry

Building an online presence

One of the biggest search engine optimisation opportunities is in the the retail space. With an ever expanding consumer base coming online and more and more purchases happening digitally instead of on the high street, having an online retail presence is a key business growth factor.

When choosing an SEO agency for your retail brand, it’s important to make sure they understand your technology stack, from your CRM to CMS as well as your customer lifecycle.

Understanding keyword intention

The keywords we choose to optimise for will be completely different depending on your market positioning. For example, if you sell high ticket designer items, we will likely want to build out a more content centric approach to drive people to our CRM so we can market to them on email and paid social channels instead of ranking for non-specific variations of products that your brand sells. For example, if you are selling hand sewn Italian leather sofas for £10,000, it unlikely that ranking for “sofas” is going to drive you many sales, however, ranking for multiple keywords around Italian designers, material types, building your dream home, etc. will likely drive you the exact type of buyer that would be interested in your products.

Considering site speed

When building out SEO campaigns for Fashion websites, the SEO consultant needs to be well aware of the fact that the site is likely very media rich, containing lots of images and videos. Because of this, it’s likely to be much slower than other retail websites.

As Google have actively said that site speed is a core part of the algorithm and Amazon themselves have published studies saying that increased speed increases conversion rate – speeding up your site is a no brainer , from an SEO point of view and a sales point of view.

In particular, Google have published information about Core Web Vitals. These are speed and UX metrics that are fundamental to the site speed experience and should be top of mind for SEO consultants optimising fashion websites.

The nuance of beauty and skincare

Many would be quick to believe that doing SEO for a beauty brand or skincare brand would be a straight forward process of building compelling content that attracts links from around the web. However, beauty and skincare brands are one of those SEO jobs that are a lot more challenging than they seem.

Why? The reason is that they often overlap with medical terms, especially in the skincare industry.

Most brands will have an “active ingredient” the proclaims to have a particular benefit to the end user. Because of these claims and the use of chemical names and health conditions, it’s likely that Beauty websites could also trip the YMYL part of Google’s Algorithm (Your Money or Your Life), because if the beauty site in question gives the wrong advice, it could be materially damaging to the end user

Let’s use the example of doing SEO for a Skincare brand. The skincare brand proclaims that their moisturiser helps people with dry skin and skin conditions like eczema. Immediately be introducing eczema based content to the site, you are scrutinised in a completely different way. Because if you started recommending that rubbing ethanol on your skin was a way to cure eczema then your result would be harmful to users.

Understanding EAT (expertise, authority and trust)

So when the SEO consultant is ranking a beauty, cosmetics or skincare site, they need to keep in mind that EAT (expertise, authority and trust) factors are more important that standard retail sites and develop an SEO strategy that splits out semi-medical terms for the core commercial content to ensure high rankings across the board.