Course Outline
Context Is Everything
Assessing your lifestyle/fashion brand situation and how it should inform your decision making for SEO throughout the entire company. Why? Because the biggest SEO influencers in your company are not in SEO Team. That, and you can’t win a Formula 1 race on a Ford Fiesta budget, so you need to learn how to own what you have better than the next brand. Context is everything for coming up with a winning plan. At the very least, it’ll help you forecast. Remember, you are one slide in a CMO’s end of year report if you are lucky, so let’s make it a great one!
Evaluating Your Fashion SEO Tech Stack
How to amplify your team’s strengths and patch weaknesses until your next great SEO hire. Whether you’re a start-up, established brand or global behemoth, we cast a critical eye over the advantages and the many disadvantages of market leading tools. We’ll also discuss processes for research and automation. Did we mention that your approach to images is a show stopper?
Precision Focus On Product Dominance Build Your SEO Hero Category: Grow It, Protect It, Become Famous For It. AllSaints have the leather jacket, Lacoste has the polo. It’s in our nature to tag people and brands with something easy to remember. If you want to be known for everything, you may well end up being known for nothing. With product searches in the US, UK and Germany shifting from Google to Amazon, new brands are going to kill the old. Just ask Victoria’s Secret.
Merchandising and Internal Link Architecture
The bigger your inventory, the more things that can go wrong from an internal architecture standpoint. “Cruft” is one word for it. New collection merchandising and/or promotional decisions without SEO input breaks internal link architecture faster than most minor bugs. Supermarkets have a floorplan. They know their user journeys and why they put milk at the far corner of the store. They don’t neglect aisles, stock levels, or experience. User behaviour as a series of SEO signals needs your online shop to equally have a floorplan to maximise journeys by persona, as well as building the right signals without losing them carelessly. But you knew that, right? So let’s talk about your most profitable user journeys while making merchandising a lot more SEO-friendly.
Branding, Audiences, Editorial and International Copyheroes
If you don’t think like a publisher, you’re a catalogue site that lacks a voice, a cause, or any emotional connection. For revenue potential, we ask do you have an editorial and product plan for how to get brand visibility AT THE RIGHT TIME? In fashion, nobody wants to use the word itself fashion, or any keywords for that matter if the brand team can get away with it. With few brands except for the likes of Ted Baker following through on brand tone into even meta data copy, this is a great opportunity to say to brand marketers, “Hey! We want to make the internet less ugly. Let us help communicate your vision while still increasing our visibility, traffic and sales”. Or do we just let the multi-brand stores keyword stuff their way to victory? Of course not! The debate over search volume vs brand positioning is likely to lead to a simple conclusion – always be testing. There’s no point trying to sell £10K+ luxury watches if you are attracting bargain and value shoppers. We’ll show you how to find your audience and tackle informational vs transactional intent as Amazon eats Google’s marketshare for product searches.
Decoding Fashion Backlink Profiles
You don’t have to read too many SEO blogs to spot experts contradicting each other. So who can you trust? From global domain strategy pros and cons making link redirect assumptions (and there’s plenty to cover), to squeezing every bit of value out of your backlink profile, we take a closer look at the backlink as a SEO signal and ask – do you REALLY understand what link analysis tools such as Majestic or AHREFS is trying to tell you? Because forecasting KPI trends that tell agency sales people the truth are not for the faint of heart. If you have a forensic link geek on your team, your rankings could be fabulous. That is, if you can make a real authentic connection in your outreach…
You’re Doing Outreach Wrong. Oh So Wrong.
For this session, we'll discuss our approach to outreach. If your outreach email is going straight in the trash, we plenty of advice and wisdom to share. Most PR firms can’t measure beyond the made up metric that is Moz Domain Authority, so team size and budget isn’t everything. For brands and agencies we discuss the questions most pressing to you: are big agencies delivering links that are part of their own link farm that you don’t realise you are renting from? Are they buying links without you knowing? Does anyone on the PR team know how to do proper backlink analysis? Fashion SEO in terms of outreach is where real value can be hard to achieve. Your negotiation skills will thank you for this session. Your end of year targets even more so.