Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is essential for any company that conducts business online, and with more and more companies turning to online channels it is getting harder and harder to outrank your competitors
Good SEO ensures that your site shows to people making searches that are relevant to your business. One of the best ways to improve SEO is backlinks. By linking to you a website is telling Google and other search engines that they trust you for this topic and that they should trust you too.
This is extremely present in fashion, with stores being forced to remain shut throughout the pandemic and e-commerce giants such as BooHoo showing the industry’s huge possibilities online.
With this in mind, we are going to list our best methods of increasing your amount of backlinks, specifically in the fashion industry.
- Directories
There are a large number of directories dotted across the internet for anything ranging from location based such as ‘SME’s in the United Kingdom’ to ‘Fashion shops in Manchester’ and everything in between.
This provides you with a number of ways to quickly receive a listing for your business with very minimal effort and a 100% success rate for your time. Although the majority of these links are ‘No Follow’ meaning they don’t pass on as much authority Google have said that they are starting to use Nofollow links to help with their ranking.
Not only can this help your online sales but it can also further boost your likelihood of appearing for terms like “Clothes shops near me”.
- Content
Whenever you search for anything related to SEO for fashion brands or getting more people to your site, blogs come up, but it isn’t as simple as writing the first thing that pops to your head and sticking it on a website.
Blogs are great but for them to be linked to they need to have a reason for someone to link to them, ensure each post is written with a goal in mind, such as providing them with information on the latest trends or giving the opinion of a well known expert.
By creating content that serves a purpose you are giving other blog writers a reason to share and source your article.
- Be a source
Whether you’re an industry expert or you know nothing about the niche there is always some level of information you can share to help others, and there are countless journalists looking for relevant people to use as a source in their articles.
One quick look at channels like #journorequest on twitter opens the doors to a ton of publications who would love to give you a link in return for your experience.
Fatima from Femmelyne said that: “Being a source for a range of pages from entrepreneur blogs to predicting summer fashion trends has helped boost my organic position meaning I no longer rely on paid ads for my traffic”
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Best of Lists
Best of lists are a huge hit across the blogosphere, just look at this article! The best way to get more backlinks for a fashion brand. And that’s because it is what people want to see, and when it comes to products, nothing is better than a real review.
With this method finding a blog couldn’t be easier, simply use Google’s search parameters such as “Top [number] best + “summer tops” and google will return tons of different blogs for you to choose from. Then simply reach out and offer an article, a product or ask if they have any upcoming articles that you can be in.
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Events
Events work both ways, you can either be part of an event or organise your own! Either way you are likely to receive links by people who are involved and if it isn’t your event then by the organiser too.
The more publicity the event gets the more successful it is and that means everyone involved is likely to try their hand at marketing it and as a result you get the benefit of them linking to your site.
For an even better result you can even then create press releases about the event and send it to local media outlets to try and get them to run a story on it as well.
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Guest Posting
Guest posting works similarly to best of lists and being a source however there are many ways to go about it.
The first step is to think of a great blog post and create a well written piece of content but instead of posting it to your blog this time you are going to find people within your niche and pitch it to them.
If it’s a good piece of content and matches their page a lot of bloggers will be happy to post your piece with a link to you at the bottom, you can further improve how you find places to pitch it to by using the search parameters like above but this time search things like fashion blog + “Guest Post”.
This way you know that the people you are pitching to accept guest posts and sometimes will even have an area on their site to submit your post to.
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Competitors
Competitors are another great way to source links, obviously they aren’t going to give you a link on their page but there are a number of tools that will let you know who is linking to them or what their most popular pages are.
Now all you have to do is reach out to the people linking them and find out if there is something that you can do to get them to link to your page or pick a piece of their more popular content and make it better or update it with recent changes then offer it to the pages that were linking to the old content as a way to make sure they’re providing their audience with the best sources.
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Broken/Lost Links
Finally broken, lost or missing links is a great way to pick up some links that you didn’t have previously, especially if your store has been around for a while but you have only just created an online site.
Use Google or other tools to search for people linking to or talking about your page (This can also be done for competitors) and let them know about your new page and request that they link to your site, you can even offer them incentives such as a discount code for their viewers which may even encourage them to write a new article with you in.
It’s nearly impossible finding good advice on generating backlinks, howeѵer this article was incredibly insightful!
Thanks.