How to Choose the Right Fashion Keywords for Your Ecommerce Brand

With the global fashion market volume expected to exceed $1.18 trillion by 2029, brands in the industry are doing everything they can to boost their website visibility, reach new audiences, and maximize conversions.

Including social media and other digital marketing efforts, SEO is as valuable today as it was when fashion brands began using it.

Keyword research is the core of any SEO strategy. Keywords are windows into how your target audience shops online and aid in crafting content to meet their needs.

The right SEO for fashion ecommerce improves your chances of climbing the ranks of Organic Search, increasing visibility on Google and other search engines, and capturing new revenue.

While often time-consuming, keyword research creates a foundation for crafting higher-quality content. The conclusions you draw from this vital process empower you to optimize your website for users and search engines, ultimately increasing your conversion rates up to four times.

This guide provides tips for researching and choosing the best SEO keywords for your fashion marketing campaign.

A lot of effort goes into effective fashion keyword research, but creating a list of questions and topics related to your business is the best place to start.

Put yourself in the shoes of one of your fashion customers. Now, ask yourself the following:

While these are just a few possible questions, their function remains the same: Understanding your target audience, their interests, and the questions they ask. Knowing your customers is the core of any digital marketing strategy and is vital to choosing keywords for a fashion SEO campaign.

A list of seed keywords can help you define your niche and identify your direct competitors.

To find seed fashion keywords for your brand, jot down the phrases that best describe your products and services. These phrases will help break your business down into general topics, letting you pick the most valuable and research-worthy keywords from each.

Once established, you can build entire research strategies around seed keywords and spin your results into variations and long-tail phrases.

Start by looking at your website’s navigation menus for fashion SEO keyword inspiration. These might include:

Throw a few modifiers into the mix, and your seed keywords become “Men’s Jackets,” “Women’s Footwear,” “Women’s Swimsuits,” and dozens of other options.

From here, explore some of your website’s subcategories, product filters, and company descriptions, finding even more variations for your list. While these seed keywords might initially seem generic, they’re the foundation for your entire fashion keyword strategy.

Google wants to provide users with the most helpful and relevant results to their queries. Ideally, the more relevant a particular page is to a search query, the higher it ranks in SERPs.

Suppose you want to rank at the top of SERPs for the keywords that matter most to your fashion brand. In that case, your revenue-driving pages must feature useful content that thoughtfully answers searchers’ questions, provides new information, or demonstrates expertise.

As part of your fashion keyword research, prioritize matching your keyword strategy to the intent of your target audience. Here are the four most common types of search intent:

Informational: This person is hunting for information, typically an answer to a simple question. Common fashion questions include: “What color should I wear with white shoes?”, “What’s the top print for spring?” or “What are the top fashion trends this year?”

Keywords with informational intent help to establish your brand as an industry authority, and authority is a key element of Google’s E-E-A-T Score.

Navigational: This person has a specific website in mind and enters queries to get there because they are already familiar with your brand. Optimize your webpages with your brand name in titles, headings, and throughout content to ensure your site appears in SERPs.

Commercial Investigation: This person is looking for a specific product but is on the fence about purchasing it. In other words, they’re probably looking for reviews or comparisons first. Keyword examples for fashion brands might include “best cocktail dress,” “Gucci vs. Prada,” or “best heels for date night.”

In general, keywords like these help you create content that convinces potential customers that you’re better than the competition.

Transactional: This person is clearly looking to make a purchase. They already know what they want to buy; they just need to decide they prefer your brand over your competitors’. Fashion SEO keywords for transactional intent could include “handbags for sale” or “buy floral dresses.”

These keywords mostly relate to your current product line. Use these to optimize your product pages and local SEO content.

Even if you’re mainly a fashion ecommerce brand, don’t focus only on transactional intent. Creating content for each type of intent develops a more complete sales funnel and increases your chances of reaching customers at every stage of the buyer journey.

Identifying the right keywords means identifying the right keyword research tool for your business. While there are many free and paid alternatives, we’ll focus on a few of the most popular choices below.

One of the most widely used keyword research tools, Google Ads Keyword Planner, is also one of the easiest to use. It helps you generate a sizable list of words and phrases based on your seed keywords.

Evaluate data using metrics like search volume, competition, and bid ranges, then remove any negative keywords you want to exclude from your campaign.

Ultimately, you should have a shortlist of keywords similar to your seed keywords.

Just keep in mind the data found in Google Ads is based on advertising forecasts.

For instance, suppose keyword A has 3,000 monthly queries and keyword B has 1,000. You can’t be too sure about the accuracy of those exact numbers, but you can reasonably assume that the first keyword will likely bring in more traffic than the second.

It’s mostly intended for advertising campaigns and is best used for transactional keywords likely to result in conversions. For informational or commercial investigation keywords, you’ll want to use supplementary research tools.

Google Search Console (GSC) tracks the keywords for which your pages already rank, providing insights into the keywords and phrases people use to find your website.

GSC helps you establish a baseline for keyword performance. From there, you can use the data you’ve gathered on your existing keywords and separate them into two categories: well-performing keywords and lower-performing keywords with potential.

While Google Search Console has several other ways to measure and optimize your fashion ecommerce site’s performance, its true strength is effective keyword research.

If you can leverage your budget for more powerful keyword research, plenty of popular paid tools are available online, including Semrush, Soovle, Ahrefs Keywords Explorer, and Jaaxy. These can complement both GSC and Google Ads.

However, especially if you’re new to SEO and keyword research, partnering with an experienced, ROI-focused digital marketing agency saves considerable bandwidth and provides a tailored keyword strategy.

Once you’ve compiled your list of seed keywords and pulled data from your chosen keyword research tools, examine each keyword’s search volume. This usually measures the number of average monthly searches.

Identify the keywords with the highest search volume since ranking highly for these terms means more potential traffic or conversions for your business. Essentially, the higher the search volume, the greater the number of potential customers in SERPs. If your brand is in the top five results for one of these keywords, it could result in substantial revenue.

Higher search volume fashion keywords do come with a caveat: They’re tougher to rank for, especially if you’re a smaller fashion brand going up against more established competitors. Because of their difficulty and the time and resources necessary, don’t start your fashion SEO campaign with these keywords.

Conversely, don’t choose keywords with very low search volume. You risk creating content that fails to convert anyway since no one is searching for it.

The key is to balance keyword volume and difficulty scores. Choose keywords that will bring in enough conversions to drive growth without fighting an uphill battle as you work on getting your revenue-driving pages to rank. Targeting the right keyword mix allows some fashion brands like VELOX client, Mizzen+Main, to potentially see average monthly revenue growth in the six-figure range or higher.

So, which keywords make the best ones for SEO for fashion ecommerce? Long-tail keywords.

What are long-tail keywords? They’re targeted keyword phrases that cater to specific search intent. Comprised of multiple words, they tend to have low search volume and low competition but carry higher clickthrough and conversion rates.

This is because they communicate a clear customer need you can solve. When you understand search intent, you can create content to address particular queries, which is key for any digital marketer wondering how to increase website visibility on Google.

These keywords also have a higher commercial intent, which better positions your brand to capture conversions and revenue from these queries.

For example, suppose a user is searching for dresses online. A query for “short sleeve dress for parties” indicates a clear intent to find a dress for an event. If you optimize your product pages with this query in mind, you could find your store at the top of SERPs for someone ready to buy a party dress.

On the other hand, someone searching “dresses” or “short sleeve dresses” is much less clear. They could simply be checking out what’s available or searching out of general interest.

Long-tail keywords establish some sort of intent, which is key to reaching users at the right phase of their buying journey. Whether you’re targeting someone passively shopping or someone ready to purchase, long-tail keywords are key to matching your product pages with their search intent.

Investigating the competition is crucial when researching fashion SEO keywords.

You’ll likely compile an extensive keyword list during the process, so it only makes sense to explore every avenue before prioritizing specific terms.

Your strategy might include targeting high-volume keywords your competitors aren’t currently ranking for, or you might focus solely on terms your competitors are ranking for—it all depends on your goals, resources, and overarching strategy.

The first strategy is ideal when you want to take advantage of your competitors’ missed opportunities. Meanwhile, the second is a more aggressive strategy that can potentially set you up to compete on SERPs where other fashion brands are already enjoying success.

Effective keyword research is key to boosting website visibility and capturing new revenue in the fashion industry. By developing a keen understanding of your core audience, you can set actionable SEO goals and build on them over time.

But for many fashion brands, finding the bandwidth to manage an Organic Search campaign in-house can be challenging.

That’s why businesses that need results trust VELOX, the ROI-focused fashion marketing agency.

Our New Revenue Model goes beyond basic keyword research to show you the revenue contributions you can expect from any given keyword and ranking. Our campaigns leverage PPC, SEO, and content creation to boost your fashion website’s visibility in SERPs and help you scale your business. Need more reason? Check out our work with Hat Club. By working with our experts, especially the content creation team, this fashion brand saw over $500K in new revenue in six months.

Contact VELOX today to learn how a targeted, ROI-focused campaign can elevate your brand, grow your market share, and drive revenue.