Common Fashion Blogging Mistakes That Affect SEO

There are well over a billion active blogs on the internet at the moment, and if we look at commercially viable blogs, the largest concentration will sit under fashion, beauty, fitness and travel blogging. If you are a blogger in this space and check your analytics regularly, you'll know that this isn't the easiest space to play in and getting regular traffic can be tough to come by. 

Due to the various revenue opportunities avialable fashion blogging has become a wildly popular choice for many aspiring internet entrepreneurs. While I am by no means a fashion blogger myself, I've had to deal with my fair share of fashion blogging sites during my career. I have worked with retailers of all kinds in the past, and I've had to source fashion blogs for link building and collaborations.

While reviewing various fashion blogging sites, I've started to notice a few alarming trends and bad practices carried out by fashion bloggers. Practices I find strange because in a fiercely competitive sector of the market with so many bloggers trying to compete for traffic having an optimised website should be a priority.

If you are a fashion blogger you cannot continue to make these SEO faux pass thinking Google will eventually forgive you. In a bid to help out you aspiring or established fashionistas I've decided to list the top 10 fashion blogging sins and how to fix them.

1. You don't own your domain

Perhaps you started on BlogSpot or WordPress.com which are both excellent blogging platforms, but you are still piggybacking off their domain and not creating a name for yourself. If you want to take your blogging seriously you need to switch to your domain this can be done with a WordPress.org CMS, Wix, Ghost or even Squarespace all offer simple full turn key website hosting and content management systems that make blogging easier.

Depending on how long you're blogging and how much content you have you may want to consult an SEO before creating your site and migrating the content.

2. Your headlines aren't enticing

Creating titles that grab readers attention and encourage click-through doesn't come naturally to everyone. You need to make sure to attract the reader and use relevant keywords all within a character limit, which isn't easy.

If you need help writing your blog headlines check out these helpful articles:

• 8 Headline Formulas That Drive Most Viral Blog Posts
• Get Better CTR's With 8 Headline Optimisation Tips

When creating the title of your blog, you need to look at how it is perceived in both SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) as well as social media feeds. You also need to remember that readers will review your content on both desktop and mobile. Making sure your title is catching and translates to various platforms like search and social media will improve your click through rates dramatically. 

The smart idea is to create multiple headlines for various uses. You can use these three headline options per blog post to get the most out of your titles.

• Meta title - Try to keep it below 55 characters including your brand name 
• Open graph title - Try to keep this below 70 characters and no need to include a brand name
• On page title - This one can be a little more elaborate, and you have freedom of length

3. You're not using the right keywords

As I've mentioned earlier, you need to make sure you're targeting the right keywords that your readers are be using. Before you plan on writing content make sure you research the most popular words typed into search engines and ensure they are present in various areas of your post.

If you need help doing keyword research, then these posts may be of assistance

• How to structure keyword research

4. You're not answering the right questions

If you want to ramp up your SEO traffic you can't stick to one style of content; it can't just be product reviews, editorials or opinion pieces. You need to start offering up answers, show why you're an authority on a topic and why readers should value your expert advice. During your keyword research, you should find some questions people are asking, and you may have the answers. 

You can then create helpful posts that answer these questions and if your post is of high quality its almost a guarantee that this will be a consistent source of evergreen traffic to your blog.

5. You're not interlinking correctly 

Interlinking is one of the tasks bloggers tend to ignore that could be hugely beneficial to their site. When you've been blogging for some time, you often make points you've made before, and the ability to lean on previous posts by linking them contextually helps your site in some ways. Interlinking helps users find old content you've produced, it helps spread link equity that you have earned, and it helps improve time on site as users are encouraged to explore your other content.

If you need help with interlinking and need some guidance, then the following guides will interest you.

• Improve Interlinking With 12 Types of Anchor Text
• How To Link Contextually Like A Pro

Note: Look at how aggressive I have been with interlinking on this post providing you with various additional information.

6. Your images are holding you back

Look I get it you're a fashion blogger and images make the difference in your blog posts, your readers want to see high-quality visuals of the products and look you present and by all means, don't let me stop you. However, using too many images or high-res will slow down the load time of your page, creating a poor user experience, increase bounce rate and see your pages drop down the rankings.

Using images may be important, but you need to find a balance between visual appeal and performance. You can start by limiting the number of images you display in a post and ensure you compress them correctly. If you want to offer additional media, you can do so by hosting them as downloadable links as Jpegs or PDF's and not as a file hosted image file that needs to load within the page.

Now that you're images are optimised its time to do some SEO optimisation by making sure the following aspects of your pictures contain keyword rich text.

• Image file name
• Image alt text
• Image metadata
• Image caption (optional)

These keywords help Google assign search terms to your pictures and improve your rankings for both traditional search and image search.

If you need more help optimising your images check out the following posts:

• 4 FREE Tools to compress your images
• 6 Tools to Help You Compress, Combine and Split PDFs
• Google Images Will Index Image Meta Data

7. Your information architecture doesn't exist, or it is all over the place

Google loves sites that organise information in a way users can understand and that improves their experience and time on site. Making sure your blog has relevant overall categories is essential for content curation and helping users find what they're looking for with ease. Many fashion blogging sites do not bother to add categories or do not categorise their content effectively. To fix this decide on sub-categories, you create content for and start to categorise your posts into these sub-categories. 

Another lousy practice plenty of fashion bloggers make is confusing tags or see tags their website equivalent of hashtagging and tag spam their poor posts to death only for it to affect their SEO negatively. Tags are useful for structuring your content that falls into various sub facets that are not your main categories and by all means, use tags, but use them responsibly.

When you tag spam all you're doing is creating low-quality automated pages with one of two posts in them and that offer very little value to your user and to search engines. The more you bloat Google with poor-quality pages the more it perceives your site spam.

Speaking of hashtags, if you're looking for the top trending hashtags to give your post a boost we've got you covered:

• Popular hashtags for fashion posts
• Popular hashtags for beauty posts
• Popular hashtags for models

8. Your blog posts aren't optimised

A blog post may seem like a few images and some text, but it is so much more than that. Formatting your posts to allow readers to find information quickly and effectively is key to ensuring your posts come up tops in search results. I won't labour on this point for too long so if you need more advice on how to jazz up your posts check out some of these resources.

• Ensure your blog is The Cat's Pyjamas before you hit publish
• How to craft the perfect blog post
• 10 Tips That Will Set You Apart From Other Bloggers Online

9. You don't do outreach

If you want to show Google your site is a legitimate source of information, then you need to have other sites endorse you. To get these endorsement signals and send them to Google you will need to build links. Collaborating with brands and other bloggers is a great way to improve your link profile and show search engines that you are an authority in your space.

For more on how to build links to your site, check out these articles:

• How To Use The Forgotten Art of Dead Link Building To Boost SEO
• How To Build Local Links To Your Website
• 4 Types Of Links That Drive Real Referral Traffic

10. You don't look at the numbers

It's easy to get caught up in your daily tasks and ignoring the reality of the situation, but if you want to improve your fashion blogging efforts, you need to look at your current performance. Check out your Google Analytics, see where you're getting traffic from, which tops are popular, how long users stay on your site, what they are looking at and continue to create more of what they enjoy.

You'll find looking at your stats becomes a bit of an addiction as it helps gamify your efforts and you'll want to continue to improve your various metrics like traffic, new users, page time spent on site and more.

If you need help improving your previous content efforts then these articles are just what you need:

• 8 Ways To Evaluate Failed Content
• 10 Reasons Why Your Site Doesn't Rank For *Insert Keyword*

Be fashionable, but also functional

Fashion bloggers of the past used to have free reign on social media and relied on these platforms for consistent traffic but as these sites began to limit the reach of organic posts many fashion sites saw their traffic dry up along with it.

If you're serious about growing your fashion blog or fashion retail site, then it may be time to bring in an expert SEO. An SEO can help by reviewing your site, fix the current issues, advise you as to where you're going wrong and help you build a content strategy that works. Let them take care of the less glamorous tasks and while you focus on making sure your site is entertaining and provides value. 

Have any tips to share, questions or feedback on this guide then leave us a comment. We would love to hear from you.

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Recommended reading

If you found this post helpful and have a few more minutes to spare, then head deeper down the rabbit hole with the following articles:

• Top SEO Mistakes Travel Sites Make & How To Fix Them
• How eCommerce Sites Sabotage Their SEO
• How Your Business Website Can Benefit From a Blog
• How To Turn Your Blog Into A Business

Tags: blogging, content marketing, fashion