“Working with an SEO agency can be very expensive for any fashion start-up” said Augusta Hajalie. Hopefully this blog will help you understand the importance of this tool but lots of fashion brands achieve this without spending excessive amount of money.
For a long time, website owners just had to stuff plenty of relevant keywords into their web pages, come up with good titles, and optimise meta tags to get a high ranking on the first page of Google. For those who knew how to play around with it, it was a simple formula and made the SEO strategy a whole lot easier for companies. For your brand you will need to goal set. Some fashion brands it’s to become the top seller over it’s competitors. If you are posting all over your socials and you are leading potential customers to look at your website, it does look more professional if your website is ranked in the top three.
Charts showing an overview of a website and how well it is doing. Photo sourced from pexels
Keyword Stuffing is Obsolete
Google was quick to catch on to this formula-based approach and changed their search algorithms to defeat the purpose of practices like keyword stuffing. The global search giant wanted to encourage a more holistic approach towards SEO strategies. The focus became more about user experience than anything else. In fact, user experience and SEO now depend heavily on each other to give website owners higher conversion rates and better organic ranking on Google.
User Experience and SEO Strategy
We’re going to tell you why user experience is vital for your SEO strategy. The first thing you need to understand is that Google is constantly changing its search algorithm. Google continuously strives to provide its users better results. This is why focusing only on “SEO best practices” will not be enough for website owners.
A lot of people might wonder that if they post a lot of quality content, use the right keywords and use plenty of backlinks, their SEO strategy is solid. For them, a good user experience is nothing more than an added bonus. That is the wrong way to look at the importance of user experience in relation to SEO strategies. Although you might think why does a fashion brand need to understand this, any successful brand will know why. If your competitors are higher than you when your consumers search for your website or just type in a certain outfit they are looking for, example ‘tops’ then this could lead to you loosing a sale to your competitor. Being above your competitors allows consumers to think you’re the best thats why you’re at the top and also that you are a trustworthy site for them to shop on, if they haven’t already used you before.
SEO Practices Are Not The Only Thing
You see, good SEO practices will definitely help get a lot more traffic to your website. Nut if your website doesn’t focus on providing the best possible user experience, the effectiveness of your website goes to waste.
In simpler words: It is more important to get through to your customer once they reach your website rather than trying to outsmart Google’s algorithm. 100,000 visits to your website in a month means nothing if they fail to deliver solid leads. Therefore, you want to beat the algorithm but if you are showing creative content across socials then you also need this to deliver on your website. Most times people will click straight off the website if it looks like a sales pitch or making consumers feel pressured into a quick buy.
Lots of codes, showing how the algorithm may look. Photo sourced from pexels
The Future of SEO Strategies And User Experience
Google is getting better and better at imitating human behaviour. In other words, user experience will become more relevant in search engine rankings. With artificial technology and machine learning improving, the importance of user experience will only increase. Referring back to why we believe technology to be so magical, it will never stop getting better and better.
User engagement data can possibly affect the effectiveness of your SEO strategy. Google won’t just check the bounce rate from the website, but look at the users behaviour once they are on the website. If they engage with the content in a meaningful manner, it means that the user experience on that website is definitely worth ranking higher.
Final Thoughts
The simplest way to look at the relationship between user experience and SEO is actually quite simple:
The SEO strategy your website has will target the search engines. The user experience on your website, on the other hand, will target the visitors on your website. Both your SEO strategy and user experience share the common target of getting your visitors a good experience of engaging with your website. If you fulfil that, it will be great for the success of your website in the future. It is as simple as that. Therefore, getting at much traffic to your website is great but it’s what consumers do when they get to your website is what really matters.
Image of cars in traffic. Purposely used as we talk about traffic to the website in this blog a lot. Image sourced from pexels.
